Digby Warde-Aldam

Paul McCartney telling me to vote No makes me want to vote Yes

‘Scotland, stay with us!’ David Bowie declared back in February. And what Bowie says (or doesn’t, quite – attentive readers will remember that he got Kate Moss to say it for him) others parrot. A few days ago, Sir Paul ‘Macca’ McCartney added his name to an open letter urging the people of Scotland to join the Bowie bandwagon. He was late to the party – the other signatories make up a bizarre (and almost entirely English) cross-section of the British entertainment establishment, from Simon Cowell to David Starkey to Cliff Richard.

An impressive love-in, then. But it begs the question: will it actually swing any votes?

As a young-ish Anglo-Scot living in London, I am completely unqualified to tell you. But if I’d stayed in Scotland and was just that little bit more stupid – enough, say, to care about what a bunch of ageing light entertainers think – the slebs and their open letters might be just the thing to make up my mind for me. I’d dither, and start retching every time I glimpsed Alex Salmond’s Furby-ish mug.

But I’d do it. Yup. I’d tick ‘Yes’. I’d regret it, probably. But forever more, even as the doomsday scenarios dragged my new country back to the Dark Age, I’d have the satisfaction of knowing that I’d snubbed the likes of Sting and Sarah Lucas. We half-Scots are a prood people.

On a marginally less facetious note, McCartney’s signature alone is obviously not why the gap in the polls has narrowed in the last few days. But as I see it, the open letter is part of a bigger problem, at least in terms of the youth vote.

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