Scottish independence referendum: Scotland votes no - as it happened

The postal vote turnout in Edinburgh is 89.6%, Sky reports.

Generally it has been assumed that a high turnout would benefit the yes camp. That was because yes support is disproportionately higher among lower social classes, and these are the people who in normal elections are less likely to turn out.

But the Scotsman’s Kenny Farquharson thinks the true picture could be more complicated. AS

All we really have to go on so far is the YouGov ‘exit poll’ (see earlier), which showed 54% for no, 46% for yes.

Severin Carrell has been talking about the poll to no campaigner and Labour MP Jim Murphy, who said he believed the Labour vote had remained solid, despite the polls before voting began repeatedly saying large numbers of Labour voters were switching to yes.

That’s great. I’ve spent my whole day from when the polls opened to polls closing in Barrhead, a traditionally Labour town in my constituency and what I feel is, I know enough people in that town and if there was a substantial enough problem with Labour voters, I would’ve known.

To the extent there was any momentum today, it was in our direction. There was a quiet edging of public opinion towards us.

In Dundee, SNP MSP Shona Robison (below) gave her reaction to the YouGov poll to Steven Morris:

The polls have been close all the way through. The poll that counts is the one that’s taken place today. People who haven’t voted before have today and they have voted Yes. We’re confident of a good result.

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At the Glasgow count, Natalie McGarry of Women for Independence told Libby Brooks:

I’m not sure how scientific it is to be polling on the day, when many won’t have cast their votes and made their final decision until later. I still believe there is all to play for, and this is still within the parameters of other recent polls. We’re here now at the count and this is the only poll that matters.

Guardian leader writer and polling expert Tom Clark is at the count in Edinburgh, and he’s going to be providing us with analysis of the results throughout the night.

In the video below he discusses the YouGov ‘exit poll’:

What does it mean? Well, it means there’s certainly not been any last-minute swing to the yes side, as some people on the yes side were hoping but I don’t think it proves absolutely yet that no has won, and that’s because the sample is the same one, the same base sample, that they’ve been using in all their opinion polls so far, so if that were to be biased ... then I guess that bias would still be in this YouGov poll.

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Ewen MacAskill, who is at the Edinburgh count in Ingliston, sends this on the mood in the Labour camp:

Lots of people are claiming to know the outcome of the Scottish referendum, based on all sorts of things, including the experiences of party members monitoring polling stations today or the YouGov poll.

But I just spoke to a senior Scottish Labour source who said no-one knows. “I don’t know,” he said, adding that it will not be possible to make any serious assessment until some actual votes start to come in from Labour areas such as North Lanarkshire and Ayrshire in the early hours of the morning.

Once a few results come in they will be in a better position to start making assessments and serious calculations. Labour’s early take is that Unionist-supporting Labour vote appears to be standing up well in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

But he cautioned: “We think the don’t knows will go mainly for the union. But we don’t know that. We can’t assume that the don’t knows are going to break for the union.”

After the declaration of the result around breakfast time, Labour is planning a press conference around 8pm in Edinburgh and the Scottish National Party about two hours later at the Dynamic Earth conference centre, also Edinburgh.

The job of Alistair Darling, leader of the Better Together no campaign, ended at 10pm. He will head up the press conference in Edinburgh and is then likely to take a low profile for much of the rest of the day, leaving the field to the party leaders.

He is unlikely to turn up at the count at Ingliston, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where the declaration of the total vote for Scotland is scheduled to be made around breakfast time. Lots of SNP supporters will be at the count and any attempt at a speech risks being drowned out.

Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary and a key figure in the anti-independence Better Together campaign, has just told the BBC that at this stage politicians should have “humility” (because they don’t know the result” but that he thought there were “huge numbers” voting no.

(Actually, he wasn’t really exuding humility. He looked like someone fairly confident of victory.)

Alexander also made a striking point about the way the campaign has engaged people.

Honestly, this happened to me in Glasgow yesterday. A taxi driver said, ‘If I stop the meter, will you explain the Barnett formula to me.’

The Barnett formula is a funding system that guarantees Scotland a certain level of funding. It has become a key issue in the campaign, but it’s hugely complicated. Even political journalists normally think twice before asking anyone to explain it.

Alexander went on:

In what other election could that possibly ever happen. Jim Murphy, my colleague, tell the story of being at a hen night in Glasgow recently - he was in a restaurant with his wife. In between particular shows, they were discussing the Barnett formula and the referendum. I’ve never experienced politics like this. People normally go to restaurants during an election contest to get away from politics.

Peter Kellner has moved the pound. Or, at least that’s what my colleague Graeme Wearden thinks. He’s sent me this.

Sterling hit a new two-week high against the US dollar in the global foreign exchange markets, after tonight’s YouGov polling data was released.

The pound jumped half a cent, from $1.640 to $1.645, before dropping back to $1.642. It had already hit a two-year high against the euro earlier today, as traders anticipated that Scotland would not break away from the United Kingdom.

But the pound is likely to remain volatile, at least until the final result is known.

This is from the BBC’s Peter Hunt.

I trust she’s reading the live blog. Welcome to the Guardian, Ma’am. AS

Only a handful of people showed up for a candlelit vigil in favour of the union organised by unlikely Conservative MP Rory Stewart at the “cairn of auld acquaintance”, a rather lovely dry stone wall-cum pile of stones which he and volunteers have been building since late July in a show of cross-border love and comradeship, reports Helen Pidd.

Asked if he had succeeded in persuading people that England cared about Scotland and being part of the United Kingdom, the MP for Penrith and the Borders just south of Scotland said bluntly: “No. I think there’s a lot of work to do. In an a way, I think the argument for Britain and Britishness is something we should have been fighting for the last 30 years. And if we are lucky enough to make it through a no vote now, we are going to have to spend decades rebuilding confidence in Britain. Rebuilding a sense that we are a country together, that we have common values, a common purpose, we have a common direction.”

People have come from all around to paint a stone and add it to the cairn – more than 100,000 have made it onto the heap - but Stewart admitted he had hoped it would be more like a million. He said it was sad that the arguments which seemed to chime most with “no” voters were the economic ones rather than the sense that, after more than 300 years, Scotland and the rest of the UK belong together.

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Here are some more lines from Twitter about turnout.

From Michael Settle, the Herald’s political editor.

From Alan Roden, political editor of the Scottish Daily Mail

From the Scotsman’s Martyn McLaughlin

James Ball writes from Guardian’s headquarters in London:

As we settle into the wait for the first concrete results from counts, we might as well share a few figures from the Guardian’s (very informal) sweepstake. Around 25 reporters, columnists and editors were each asked to predict what they thought the results of today’s vote would be. This is very much what staff predict will happen, not what they might want to happen.

We won’t embarrass anyone by publishing individual predictions, but the average of all Guardian guesses was a win for the no camp, with 53.1% of the vote against 46.9% for yes. This is around a six point gap, just a little narrower than the final YouGov poll.

The Guardian staffers reckon turnout will be about 86%.

We’ll know how well we all did by early tomorrow morning. We hope.