Opposing Scottish sides keep it upbeat as the day of reckoning finally arrives

Deji Soboyede, a Yes campaigner, stood outside the polling station at the Springburn Academy in Glasgow yesterday morning, confident of swaying one last voter.

“Oh, yes, I have been working on the councillor here,” he said with a booming laugh, as he clutched the arm of Labour councillor Gilbert Davidson. “I am confident that he will vote Yes, absolutely – though it might take until the very last minute to persuade him,” the Nigerian chuckled.

“Oh, no, you won’t,” replied Davidson, who had happily stood outside the gate with Soboyede and his fellow Yes campaigner, Paul Coyne, at the Springburn polling station.

The campaign in Springburn has “been civil, there’s been some great banter, [they] argued their point and then . . . [went] to the pub”, said the Labour councillor.

However, he was confident that Springburn – a traditional stronghold for Labour – would vote No: "60/40 would be my guess, this is a real Labour ward," he told The Irish Times.

Equally confident of a victory for Yes, Paul Coyne, an IT expert for the Clydesdale Bank, said the undecideds in Springburn had been drifting to Yes in droves in recent weeks.

A victory for the No campaign “would leave him with a sinking feeling”, since he was convinced promises of extra devolution would evaporate afterwards.

"Gordon Brown has made promises, but he can't deliver. A Yes victory would be scary: we will have to make our own choices and stop blaming Westminster for everything."

For Soboyede, the campaign has helped to better integrate Africans living into Scottish society: “Some didn’t know that they could vote; some didn’t know if they should.”

In Britain since 2010, he came to Scotland three years ago: "I quickly found out that it isn't like I had been told. I was told that it was subsidised and that nothing happened here."

Steady trickle

Polling at the Springburn polling station, which caters for about 2,500 people, was running at a steady trickle by mid-morning, “two, or times the average”, said Davidson.

Elsewhere, some people had even queued to be first in line when the 5,500 stations opened at 7am. They stayed open until 10pm last night.

Once the polls closed, ballot papers began to be counted in each of Scotland’s 32 local authority areas, though 789,024 postal votes have already been counted.

Illustrating the huge numbers of Scots eager to vote, Edinburgh City Council said 98 per cent of people entitled to postal votes in the city had cast ballots.

Helicopters and ferries were used to take ballot boxes from remote islands to count-centres on the mainland in places such as Argyll and Bute. Elections Scotland, which is running the referendum, said that recounts would happen locally if justifiable concerns were raised about the process, not the margin between the sides.

Following months of silence, Scotland's tennis star Andy Murray said he would be voting Yes because he had been "turned off" by the No campaign's negativity.

Predictably, it led to Twitter abuse, with one person saying they wished the Dunblane-born man had been killed in the town’s massacre.

Awkward scenes

Minor difficulties were reported in some places: a man was arrested for assault at one polling station; while graffiti declaring that No voters “will be shot” was hurriedly painted over at another.

In Coatbridge, little more than 18km (10 miles) away from Glasgow, three pensioners sat in St Patrick’s Hall, the community centre that serves Scotland’s largest Irish community.

Sporting a Yes badge, Hugh McPherson said: “I went up at 10 o’clock to the polling station in the Masonic Hall. Yes, the Masonic Hall. Fifteen or 20 people voted while I was there.”

However, his friend Jim Murray was confident that McPherson is in a minority among the Irish community in the Lanarkshire town to vote Yes.

The two men, along with John McGowan, vigorously debated the issues: Trident, the currency, even the future of Catholic schools in Scotland came and went in a flurry.

"We haven't had one straight answer out of Alex Salmond during all of this, not one. Where is his plan B if we can't use sterling?" asked McGowan.

McPherson said his 88-year-old sister had told him that she was not going to vote “because she was fed up listening to all of it and that she would leave it to the young.

“I had told her that I would take her to the polling station as long as she wasn’t voting No,” he said with a laugh, “but I was only joking. I’d take her whatever she was doing.”

Then, it emerged that Murray, who was on crutches, had not voted: “I got my hip replaced a couple of weeks ago and I am not going up that hill.”

McPherson was aghast, even though he is on the other side of the argument: “If you don’t vote there is one less vote for No. I’ll take you there myself, if I have to.”