Don't listen to the bookies, Brian. The battle comparisons are all wide of the mark for this is an all Scotland affair. It looks like a possible 80% poll and the tide of YES is rising steadily especially in the cities and the Central Belt. This is going to happen. If you can get ITV player or STV on satellite the first big debate - Salmond v. Darling is on tonight and that's going to do 'No' no favours. In literary terms Darling's friend J K Rowling may be bank rolling 'No' - but YES have Edwin Morgan's legacy and the best of contemporary Scottish novelists, including the peerless James Robertson. There are more than 340 separate grass-roots YES groups, all local and self-started all over the country - and on the other side there is 'astroturf'. There are also around 50 sectional YES groups from Academics for YES to Women for Independence, from Fishing for YES to Poles for YES and many others you couldn't even imagine - and funny ones too, my favourite being Dugs for YES. All the registered YES campaign organisations are based here; 88% of the 'No' campaign ones are based outside Scotland. We are awash with volunteers; they, it seems, have been paying helpers, some even shipped in from constituency Labour parties from the south. And in literary terms (and of all levels of talent, including great to very little) - the writers, playwrights, poets, actors etc are overwhelmingly lined up with YES. The Festival is threaded through with referendum plays and revues and they, like the thousands of public meetings have been, will be thronged. Though the press, apart from the Sunday Herald, is entirely 'No', like the BBC (which has become the focus of mass protests outside its Glasgow studios) the best journalistic writers MacWhirter, Bell and Ascherson have all come out for YES - as has Judy Steel. It is a movement worthy of the scale of the issue. So - just think a reversal of the nobs versus the mobs of Edinburgh in 1707 - and this time even the dowager Duchess of Hamilton is on the side of Scotland's independence.
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