LIKE very many, I sat transfixed to a screen watching the settled will of the people of Scotland unfold as the referendum results were revealed in the early hours.
Most voters in Scotland must have shared with me a measure of relief regardless of the result because, as in a war, it is the waiting, the expectation and the uncertainty which drain you.
We had after all, been warned - or, for some, encouraged by the idea -that whatever the outcome, Scotland would never be the same again after the referendum.
However, as I started to scrutinise each of the local authority results an eerie familiarity began to emerge. Although we are rightly no longer subjected to annual league tables of school attainment by local authority, we are well used to the trend and patterns. Yet here we saw the two city authorities which voted for independence being the same ones, Glasgow and Dundee, which usually compete for bottom rung in educational attainment. Also, a very clear and decisive rejection of independence came from the local authorities which have schools which are often at or near the top, such as East Renfrewshire and East Dunbartonshire.
However, I am not suggesting the outcome had anything directly to do with the voting 16-year-olds or that you need five Highers to vote. However, I do feel it implies that the well-known and documented cross-correlation with such data and the placing of some of the high-percentage "Yes" local authorities on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) probably did have a bearing on the outcome.
Indeed, the strong Yes vote in certain areas seems to me to be worthy of deeper analysis on this causal issue, as it appears to suggest to me that it represents not a success but a failure on the part of the SNP Government.
What steps did it take with these voters living in areas high on the SIMD to effectively monitor actions for addressing deprivation which generated such feelings of non-inclusion in UK society? With more power promised how will they overcome this disaffection with the UK?
What will be done to assist them and abolish the obvious discontent with the design of opportunities created to pull them out of the cycle of dependency? Let us hope it is genuinely non-propagandist and not simply bread and circuses.
Bill Brown,
46 Breadie Drive,
Milngavie.
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