What’s next for Scotland?

LONDON, UK — Maggie Martin stayed up all night watching the results roll in from Scotland’s historic independence referendum earlier this month.

On the day of the vote, she had led two dozen friends and relatives on a half-mile walk to a polling station from their housing project in northeast Glasgow. The women sang on their way. They were voting for an independent Scotland.

Twenty-four hours later, she said, she was “absolutely gutted. Fuming. How can your countrymen nae want independence?”

Martin, 56, had never cared for politics until the Yes campaign convinced her that poverty and inequality could be better addressed in an independent Scotland.

She’s one of the 1.6 million Scots who woke up disappointed on Sept. 19. Many, like Martin, had never voted before.

The question in Scotland now is what to do with the momentum and passions of those for whom independence is now at best a dream deferred.

The referendum engaged people like nothing before in modern Scottish history. Ninety-seven percent of eligible voters registered. Nearly 85 percent of voters cast ballots, the highest turnout in British history.

For some, the optimism of the Yes campaign didn’t last the morning.

“I think it’s rigged,” said a frustrated Melissa Tierney, 18, as she checked the results on her phone at 5 a.m. on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street.

It was her first time voting. The university student found the defeat so disappointing that she didn’t think she’d bother doing it again.

For others, the loss was galvanizing. Within hours of the official result, independence campaigners were on social media reorganizing themselves for the post-referendum era.

“The 45” — the percentage of the population that voted for independence — is a loosely organized progressive movement similar in aim and style to Occupy.

A Facebook page entitled “We are the 45%” had more than 173,000 likes by Thursday.

One of the group’s first actions was to call for a boycott of companies that “scared Scotland” by speaking out in favor of the union or warning that independence would bring negative consequences.

The list includes BP and Shell, the BBC and most of the UK’s major newspapers, and the Labour Party, which formally backed the Better Together campaign.

The vote has shaken up politics both in Holyrood — the seat of the Scottish parliament — and nationally.

More than 37,000 people have joined the Scottish National Party since the referendum, making it Britain’s third-largest political party. There are now more SNP members in Britain than Liberal-Democrats, currently in a ruling coalition with the Conservatives.

Geraldine Marshall, 55, a community activist in Glasgow’s East End, was among those who formally joined the SNP this past week.

She voted with Yes stickers on both cheeks. Although she was “sickened” by the result, she feels it was a turning point in Scottish politics. “People found their voices now, and I don’t think they’re gonna go away,” she said.

The British government has promised Scotland greater control of its own affairs on everything except foreign policy and defense. That’s what a majority of Scots wanted before talk of a referendum began.

But for many people, that’s no longer enough.

The Yes vote was highest in the parts of Scotland with the most poverty and least economic growth.

Some saw independence as a panacea that would clear away all the problems of post-credit crunch Scotland. To make their case, the Yes campaign spent two years highlighting problems in Scottish society — the rise in food banks, public spending cuts, threats to national health care — that was pinned on the ruling classes in London.

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Now that those problems can’t be unseen, many Scots are angry. Angry and energized.

“What you have now is a lot of very impatient people who are traveling faster than the politicians can keep up with,” said Sean Clerkin, an anti-poverty campaigner in Glasgow. “It’s the start of a massive social movement.”

Martin, a grandmother, says her apolitical days are behind her. “I want to be involved now, definitely, definitely,” she said. She’s joining the SNP, saying she’s done with Britain’s political leadership.

“They have everything and we have nothing,” she said. “We’re getting pocket money back when we should have all that money for ourselves. The big fat cats are getting fatter and the wee poor people are getting poorer.”