Scottish independence: polling day - as it happened

This interactive on Indy-Scot.com has looked at 4.7m tweets on the #IndyRef hashtag over the past six months, writes George Arnett.

As well as giving how many people were tweeting the words yes and no over time, it also gives a bit of information about which topics were mentioned the most during the debate.

Oil, the NHS and pensions were the key issues spotted by the analysis.

As this has been an argument about Scotland’s future, it also makes sense to look at whether people have hope or fear about what awaits them. The interactive has a visualisation showing whether hope or fear were dominating following key moments such as the two campaign debates and the release of Alex Salmond’s white paper on Scotland.

Katie Allen spent some of the morning at a small manufacturer of bullet-proof vests outside Glasgow, where workers were trickling in late after their boss gave them the first two hours off to go and vote.

Sarkar Defence founder Sam Sarkar is in celebratory mood as he takes a kebab lunch break with his staff. It is 20 years to the day since he stepped off a plane from India, a 17-year-old boy looking to study in Glasgow.

“This is my adopted home. I very much consider myself as Scottish and I have Indian values,” says the 37-year-old.

“Everything we have achieved as a business is down to being in Scotland. Scotland has been good to me as a business.”

Over lunch his staff continue the friendly exchange of referendum jibes they say has been going on for months.

Sarkar supports independence after what he describes as a year of research into the numbers. The clincher for him was the threat of the UK leaving the EU.

“For my business it is absolutely critical to be in Europe. I do not want an in or out referendum on that,” he says. “For me this is the safer route to staying in Europe and maintaining the status quo … It will take time but we will be in Europe. And the relationships will be different. The UK is not the flavour of the month in many countries.”

Scotland breaking away from the UK would not lead to extra cash going from the Treasury to Northern Ireland, Stormont health minister Edwin Poots has warned, Henry McDonald writes from Belfast.

Poots said there would no financial boost to Northern Ireland in the event of a yes vote, as his Democratic Unionist party held a series of low key events across Belfast urging Scots to stay in the union, with former Belfast deputy lord mayor Ruth Patterson holding up placards telling Scotland: ‘We don’t want you to go’. Another banner read ‘We still love you so’, signing off, ‘your friend, Northern Ireland’.

SDLP Derry assembly member Coum Eastwood suggested that a yes vote could lead to a similar poll on Northern Ireland’s future within the UK.

Eastwood said: “It’s important that Irish nationalism begins the job of learning from the Scottish example. Without firing one shot, the Scottish people have had a mature, rational and passionate debate about independence and their future.

“We now need to set about the work of persuading those who identify with the Ulster-Scots and British traditions that their interests would be best served in a re-imagined, progressive and inclusive united Ireland. And more than that, we have to ensure that any discussion about a united Ireland sets out how those who may not consider themselves as Irish nationalists will play a full role in that society.”

Here is a reminder of the expected declaration times for the results tonight.

Here are some of the key constituencies’ declaration times as a list, with the Guardian’s rough expectations of whether each one will vote yes or no in brackets:

• 2am - North Lanarkshire - 6.3% of the population (yes)
• 2am - Perth and Kinross - 4.2% (no)
• 2am - Western Isles - 0.5% (yes)
• 3am - Aberdeenshire - 4.8% (no)
• 4am - Fife - 7.1%
• 4am - Highlands - 4.4% (no)
• 5am - Glasgow - 11.5% (yes)
• 5am - Edinburgh - 8.8% (no)
• 5am - Borders - 2.2% (no)
• 6am - Aberdeen - 4.2% (no)

Artist Ellie Harrison has created an artwork for Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery consisting of cannons that will shoot confetti in the event of a yes vote.

If there is a no vote, they won’t shoot anything, mirroring the “huge sense of anticlimax” if independence is rejected, Harrison explains.

The Wall Street Journal posts this photo from Cuckoo’s Bakery in Edinburgh, which is showing the percentage of cakes sold representing yes, no and don’t know. Looks like the union is safe.

John Whittingdale, the Conservative chairman of the select committee, has joined the revolt against the deal for Scotland struck by the three party leaders in the last days of the election campaign (see earlier), reports political editor Patrick Wintour. Whittingdale said: “I for one would be very concerned at the idea that my electorate would continue to subsidise the Scots even after they have been given all these powers to raise even more money.”

The lead campaigners for independence are the SNP, with its charismatic leader Alex Salmond and his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, the most recognisable faces for many voters. The Scottish Green party, a smaller group that has two representatives in the Holyrood parliament, also backs yes. But the striking thing about the pro-independence campaign has been that so much of it has been taking place outside the normal political sphere.

As the Guardian’s Libby Brooks reported earlier this year:

This is a place full of individuals who are doing things that they have never done before: taking part in campaigning, attending public meetings, having conversations about the future that they want for themselves and their children with an urgency that they have never displayed before.

The civic energy unleashed by the yes movement – and it is a movement: cross-party, cross-generation, cross-class – is palpable. Certainly the SNP party machinery is heavily involved, certainly the official Yes Scotland campaign is funded largely by SNP supporters, but not even the weariest cynic could suggest that this is a purely SNP affair.

The main Westminster parties – supported by much of the press, in Scotland and the wider UK; only the Glasgow-based Sunday Herald has publicly backed a yes vote – are united in their opposition to independence. Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour have campaigned for a no vote under the umbrella of Better Together, but have been forced, in the face of a hefty rise in support for yes, to woo wavering voters with plans for increased devolution of powers to Scotland – so-called devo max.

Despite the galvanising effect of grassroots engagement, this hasn’t always been the cleanest of fights. Alistair Darling, the former UK chancellor of the exchequer who now heads up the Better Together campaign, accused Salmond of behaving like North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and said the campaign had been damaged by threats and intimidation. The no camp, too, has faced calls to change tack after its frequent attacks on SNP proposals for Scotland’s post-independence future were dubbed “Project Fear”.

There has been much criticism of the online actions of so-called cybernats – nationalists who targeted prominent figures, such as Olympic cyclist Sir Chris Hoy, who have spoken out against independence. Labour MP Jim Murphy suspended his pro-union speaking tour of Scotland because of what he labelled the “mob atmosphere” of Yes supporters, and this week Labour leader Ed Miliband was forced to give up on a walkabout in Edinburgh after he was harangued by pro-independence protesters, who called him a liar and “serial murderer”.

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And there have been reports of campaign signs being taken down or vandalised by rival supporters:

Yesterday the Scottish Police Federation issued a statement accusing the media and no campaigners of exaggerating the extent of aggression deployed during the Scottish referendum campaign. Brian Docherty, the chairman of the federation, said:

One of the many joys of this campaign has been how it has awakened political awareness across almost every single section of society. The success enjoyed by the many should not be sullied by the actions of the few.

Voters in Alex Salmond’s Aberdeenshire constituency were on the move just as early as Scotland’s first minister, who came to to a polling station in Strichen with two first time voters, writes Ben Quinn.

Among those from a later generation at the polling station in the village was retired lorry driver Hendry Whittaker (73), who said: “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time but what I’m doing today is for the next generation.”

After voting, Salmond began to slowly make his way southwards to Aberdeen, stopping off in the towns of Turriff and Ellon on the way.

He would have seen a number of no banners in the flat farming fields around the constituency – put up, it was said, by farmers who had traditionally voted SNP – but in the towns he got a warm welcome when he went to join activists knocking on doors and handing in leaflets on housing estates.

In Turriff, yes voters who were glad to see him included Bangladesh-born curry house owner, Mohammed Faruk, who said: “He’s a great man and what is happening today is because of him. I was happy to get my vote away today.”

On an estate, mother of two Helen Reid was as elated as a number of others coming out of of their houses to pose with him for selfies: “He’s magic, god, isn’t he?”

“I was up early to vote and I knew what I was going to do – freedom,” she added, prompting her Saltire-waving infant granddaughter to shout the same word.

Not everyone was quite so excited about what the election meant. A pensioner walking down a street as the first minister knocked on doors said: “It’s been one of the bitterest campaigns I can remember since I moved here form the north of England many decades ago. I think that what it’s really about is anti-Englishness, but you dare not say it.”