3 days to go!

Till Polling Day of course. And how different it is to the last campaign I had any direct involvement in - my own election campaign in Silvertonhill in 1995! Back then the internet was in its infancy, the founders of Facebook were still at school, and Social Networking was speaking to voters at a jumble sale. We didn't even have a computer but made do with an old ex-BT Telex machine! Reading cards were hand-written and leaflets involved Letraset! It was that long ago that the organiser of my current local SNP campaign wasn't even at school!

But in many other ways the campaigns are similar, with a clearly thought out strategy linked to a high visual profile for the candidate, with a raft of leaflets and targetted supporters and first time voter letters - all very novel at the time but taken for granted now. And a fantastic team of workers - if my memory serves me correctly at one point on Polling Day in 1995 we had 40 people on the ground in two wards. With a Branch membership of 30 that was pretty good going!

It was voter contact and confidence that swung that election, in exactly the same way that those two factors are likely to swing this one. Although my own involvement in this campaign has been limited to the display of window posters and the stuffing of several hundred envelopes, I know from the many emails that there has been a team of SNP activists working away for some years identifying our support and 22,000 targetted items of literature is a staggering achievement and speaks volumes for how things have changed in a generation.

Turnout is likely to be crucial on Thursday - a lot of the polls have expressed percentages in terms of definite voters and if we can get our own voters out in big numbers it will be able to swing things in many areas. Back in 1995 we defied the odds and got well over 90% of our identified supporters out to vote. That on the back of a 50% turnout secured me the seat with approaching 50% of the votes cast, and the same may well go on Thursday.

Swings are of course, despite Peter Snow's machinations, never uniform - Cumbernauld should have fallen to the SNP in 2007 but didn't, so look out for surprises here and there. And although he's spent much of the campaign on the run, I don't really expect the Labour leader to be run out of his own town on Thursday. I do fully expect him to be run out of his leader's job shortly thereafter however.


Other than that I'm not one for predictions other than I do genuinely believe that Thursday will take us one giant step closer to Independence!