The vote in the Scottish independence referendum went down 45:55 as expected.\u00a0But there was much of interest to come out of it: Alex Salmond, Scottish\u00a0First Minister and leader\u00a0of the independence campaign for many years,\u00a0managed to get the vote up from 30-35 percent, where it had languished for decades, to nearly 45 percent or 9 out of 20 voters so there is a lesson in that – persistence pays and there’s nothing like a vote to galvanise opinions on an issue. Voter turnout was high at\u00a085 percent\u00a0of enrolled voters even though voting is not compulsory. For the first time, 16 and 17 year olds were able to vote and they\u00a0chose 71 percent YES, the highest of any age category, an enthusiastic bloc of young, involved voters. The next test of sentiment and implementation of promises from Westminster will be at the UK general election\u00a0in May 2015 with moves afoot to promote English independence and\u00a0 also\u00a0devolve greater powers to Wales and Northern Ireland (shades of a federation).\u00a0There was criticism that the campaign was too presidential focussed on a very small number of leaders and spokespeople. Of greatest interest was that the gender\u00a0difference in the vote was\u00a0reduced from 10 percent to three percent in the last couple of months after concerted effort\u00a0–\u00a0both officially and voluntarily –\u00a0to increase it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The vote in the Scottish independence referendum went down 45:55 as expected.\u00a0But there was much of interest to come out of it: Alex Salmond, Scottish\u00a0First Minister and leader\u00a0of the independence campaign for many years,\u00a0managed to get the vote up from…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-18","wpcat-18-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1522"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1523,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1522\/revisions\/1523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}