Better together

In the early hours of this morning, Scotland voted to stay part of the United Kingdom. 55.30% of us voted No and 44.70% voted Yes.

A whopping 3,623,344 people voted, with a 84.59% turnout rate. As I said yesterday, that’s a massive win for democracy. I’m very proud to be part of a Nation where so many turned out to vote for what they believed in.

I’m also very happy about the result. You know from my recent blips that I was firmly in the No camp. I will admit though that I was a little concerned for a while, and so got up at 5.45am this morning to watch the last local authority areas coming in. At 6.08am, No was officially declared the winner.

Of course though, almost 45% of people are disappointed with the result. I’ve seen a lot of negative and nasty comments on social media today. I hope they don’t actually mean it and it's just an immediate reaction. It's not helpful.

We all want what’s best for the country – we might have disagreed with how to achieve that, but as I said yesterday, now is the time to come together to make Scotland and the UK great. By early 2015, we’ll have a plan in place for more devolved powers and we all need to unite to successfully deliver these changes.

Anyway, I was out for dinner tonight with Debs and Nanisa. I am an English girl living in Scotland, Debs is a Scottish girl living in Brussels and Nanisa is a half Guyanese and half Scottish girl living in Scotland. I’m embracing the fact that we’re all together on this historic day.