I am voting YES on Thursday – no doubt about that anymore. It wasn’t always this way. The same time last year I hadn’t even thought about it, I had never voted SNP and I was never a big patriot. If someone had asked me the question last September I might have even said I was voting NO.

Perhaps this is a little unusual but I believe Scotland will struggle economically after a YES vote. I also think that there will be a backlash from Westminster and the rUK which will be quite nasty for a while. I don’t trust the SNP to get rid of the deficit without tax hikes or some cuts to public services. In fact I have been ripe this whole time for persuasion towards a NO vote.

So what went wrong? I read as much pro-NO literature as I could. I tried to stay balanced in what I read and to check up on sources for everything but still everything I read or heard pushed me further towards a YES.

What could the NO campaign have done differently to have changed my mind?

Tell the truth

The desire to persuade has always taken priority over the desire to inform and the result has been hugely counterproductive for both sides.

Whilst I have often been told the SNP’s sums do not add up. That information was never placed in context with the projections of the UK. We ARE going to be worse off after the YES vote but we are also going to be worse off with a NO. We know both main Westminster parties will stick to a renewed austerity agenda after 2015. Life is not going to be great whichever way we vote but at least with a YES we will have some say in how we go about fixing the deficit.

This is the major problem with the NO campaign. I feel manipulated and because of this I feel a strong desire to rebel against it and also to question EVERYTHING they say.

For example. A common trick used again and again by the NO campaign. Was to quote only the spend-per-head in Scotland. We all know now that Scots receive £1200 per head more in spending than the UK average. The insinuation is that we are subsidised. We are too poor to survive. Most people now know this is a trick. The whole UK receives more per head in spending. We are borrowing to make up the difference and we contribute more in revenues.

I think that each time this mistruth is discovered, the NO campaign loose another voter. Still they refuse to let it go, I heard Jim Murphy use it in his debate last week.

Stop insulting half the nation.

According to much of what I have been told by the NO campaign. I am voting from the heart. I am blindly following Alex Salmond. I have not looked into the details and I am making a decision based of some sort of narrow minded nationalism.

These points are insults. Nothing more.

Other examples, include lazily associating Scottish nationalism with nazi germany. Calling Alex Salmond a dictator or believing the whole referendum is about him.

I believe a lot of NO supporters have been complacent. They believed they were going to win this thing and so have made no attempt to engage people who were considering voting YES. You don’t engage anyone by insulting them.

Discard the Labels.

Like I say – I have always tried my best to look into both sides of the debate. So I try and read as much opinion as I can from NO supporters but this can be disheartening to say the least.

Take for example this nugget,

“Nationalist’s think that independence will be a land of milk and honey“. [source]

Wait…hold on a minute. First of all I am NOT a nationalist I am voting YES for a whole set of other reasons so please don’t call me that. You see you have lost me already and what is that next word – “think” – how do you know what I bloody think. Two words in and you have just got me angry, never mind that what you go on to say next is NOT what I think and that I fucking hate that old cliche “Land of milk and honey“. May it be banished to hell along with “You can take the lad out of someplace but you can’t take someplace out the lad“. It’s bollocks. Your lack of imagination makes me hate you and I despise your whole fucking sentence. God damn I am so voting YES!

End the tribalism

I hate all this talk of YES sides and NO sides, I dislike the idea of camps. This is not a battle but a conversation. We are a whole nation with a spectrum of different views, the more entrenched views on each end and the undecideds at the top. We are ALL making our arguments. There is no gangs and it is perfectly acceptable to change your mind with such a difficult decision. Every time you talk about sides or camps you are making this more difficult.

People are voting YES and NO for a multitude of different reasons. Yet there has been far too much assumption and not enough listening from the NO campaign.

If we could have just ‘talked’ about this. Without all this gunk and all this nastiness. Perhaps I could have heard a good case for a NO. Instead all I have heard is insults and trash talk.

Now you could ask. If I was considering voting NO, why have I let the ‘campaign’ put me off. After all shouldn’t I be voting on what I believe is best for the future of my country. My answer is this. Westminster is rotten, at every stage it has tried to manipulate me. From taking Devo-Max off the ballot to not making a formal legal request to the EU regarding our status to then PRETENDING to put Devo-Max back on the agenda at the last moment. I am voting YES because I do not want any part of a government and an establishment which treats me with such contempt.