Did The Wee Blue Book change minds on Scottish independence vote?

While Scotland’s Future might have been worthy and weighty, The Wee Blue Book was wiry and winning.

Few books have a solid claim on having altered political history – The Wee Blue Book probably does.

Author Stuart Campbell (below) once jokingly boasted that the book caused a 23-point swing in the polls towards Yes.

That is undoubtably overstatement and to his critics, Campbell has never been a stickler for accuracy.

The Daily Record once described his blog Wings Over Scotland as a hotbed of “conspiracy theories, hatred and paranoia”.

But if his self-reported figures are to believed, The Wee Blue Book was downloaded around 550,00 times within a month of its online publication in August 2014.

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In a nation of just five million, that is the equivalent of around 10% of Scotland’s total population at the time downloading a strongly-worded pro-independence tract. That’s a feat unlikely to have been replicated in the decade hence.

It had first been published in a physical print run in March 2014 and it may be one of the few occasions in recent history where printed word had more impact than digital pixels on a screen.

Speaking some years later, former first minister Alex Salmond (below) told this paper people had been “waving the Wee Blue Book at me, at meetings and in the streets”.

(Image: NQ)

Readers of The National will remember The Wee Blue Book. It was wee, really wee. By volume, you could fit about eight copies of it into the gargantuan Scotland’s Future.

More importantly, you could fit it into your pocket. You could press it into people’s hands. You could load up a Yes stall with scores of copies and they wouldn’t weigh nearly as much to lug around as Scotland’s Future. You could probably read it all in one sitting, if you could be bothered.

Some wouldn’t get around to reading Scotland’s Future from start to finish if they were stranded with it on a desert island.

Where Scotland’s Future was sober, serious and essentially a dry government paper, The Wee Blue Book was punchy. It was combative, scathing and at points, fizzing with anger.

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Take this part, early in the book, where Campbell skewers former Labour MP Jim Hood, who said he would still back the Union even if independence made Scots better off.

“But Scottish Labour MPs can afford not to care,” wrote Campbell.

“They’ve got safe jobs for life (Jim Hood has a 13,000 majority and has been in place for 27 years) and they get to decide their own salaries.

“If you’re living in Scotland and you DON’T have an MP’s lavish expense account and gold-plated pension to fall back on, you probably do care whether you and your family would be better off or not.”

You can’t find anything in Scotland’s Future that matches that for plain speaking. Nor anything that addresses for instance, the question of whether the UK could block the accession of Scotland to the EU, for example.

The Scottish Government’s paper does presciently argue the case that the “only real risk to Scotland’s membership of the EU is the referendum proposed by the prime minister”.

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As ever, Campbell puts it more bluntly: “The threat to veto Scotland’s membership of the EU (and other international organisations) is a bit like the Trident nuclear missile system – it’s all for show, because actually using it would mean mutually assured destruction for everyone. It won’t happen.”

It’s hard to say exactly how many minds The Wee Blue Book actually changed out of the likely hundreds of thousands who might have been given a copy, whether they wanted one or not.

But if we trust Salmond’s judgment, then he may have been right in 2021 when he said it “stood out as winning converts to our national cause” as he pointed to the 15% swing over the course of the campaign towards Yes.