LONDON, Sept 19 (KUNA) -- Scotland voted to stay in the United Kingdom after rejecting independence, the BBC has said.
With 29 out of the country's 32 council areas having declared after Thursday's vote, the "No" side has 55% of the vote, with the "Yes" campaign on 45%.
By early this morning the "No" campaign had more than 1,737,000 votes, with "Yes" on just over 1,398,000. The vote is the culmination of a two-year campaign.
This margin of victory is some three points greater than that anticipated by the final opinion polls.
First minister Alex Salmond said he accepted the verdict of the people and called everyone else to do the same as he conceded defeat in the referendum on Scottish independence.
Later, it wad officially confirmed that Scotland has voted to stay in the United Kingdom after voters decisively rejected independence.
With 30 out of the country's 32 council areas having declared after Thursday's vote, the "No" side has an unassailable lead of 1,877,252 votes to 1,512,688.
The winning total needed was 1,852,828. Nationally, the margin of victory is about 55% to 45%, the BBC estimated.
The vote is the culmination of a two-year campaign.
Talks will now begin on devolving more powers to Scotland.
For his part, Salmond said that while he is conceding defeat, yet the leader of the pro-independence campaign indicated that the 1.6m votes cast for the 'Yes' campaign represented a substantial vote for Scottish independence at some time in the future.
He called on the main unionist parties to make good on their promises on greater powers being devolved to the Scottish Parliament.
Meanwhile the commentators noted that the margin of victory for the Better Together campaign is greater than that anticipated by the final opinion polls.
Glasgow, Scotland's largest council area and the third largest city in Britain, voted in favour of independence by 194,779 to 169,347, with Dundee, West Dunbartonshire and North Lanarkshire also voting "Yes". But Edinburgh, the nation's capital, rejected independence by 194,638 to 123,927, while Aberdeen City voted "No" by a margin of more than 20,000 votes.
There have also been big wins for the pro-UK campaign in many other areas.
Commentators said the outcome was a deep disappointment to the vocal, enthusiastic pro-independence movement led by the Scottish first minister, Alex Salmond.
He had seen an opportunity to turn a centuries-old nationalist dream into reality, and forced the three main British parties into panicked promises to grant substantial new power to the Scottish Parliament, they argued.
In the meantime, the decision spared Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain "a shattering" defeat that would have raised questions about his ability to continue in office and diminished his nation’s standing in the world. But while the result preserved a union molded in 1707, it left Cameron facing a backlash among some of his Conservative Party MPS, the commentators noted.
Some MPS called for similar autonomy for England itself, and even the creation of a separate English Parliament. (end)
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