Exactly a decade ago today, on 11 August 2014, the Wee Blue Book was released.
This was where things stood at that moment in time.
One month after the WBB, that 20-point gap was down, like-for-like, to two points.
(Or five or four, depending which polls you believed.)
The No lead (which had been solidly in double figures for most of the preceding three years, and as high as 30 points just a year earlier, in August 2013) never got higher than five points again in the feverish week leading up to the vote, when the expected loss-of-nerve effect took the margin momentarily back to 10.
Since then, though, we’ve gone nowhere.
The last dozen polls show an average No lead of 3.5 points, just where it was a week before the indyref. We don’t need to revisit all the events of the last decade that should have shifted that dial, but didn’t as the the SNP leadership dithered and equivocated and stalled and retreated, time and time again.
We’re just here to make the point that not once in those 10 years did anyone in the SNP ask us for advice on how to persuade anyone.
The 800,000 copies of the WBB that were put into circulation – one for every five voters in every corner of Scotland – coincided with an 18-point shift in the polls in one month, and not one single time did anyone in the SNP go “Hey, maybe these guys have got something that trying to win voters round with free iPads and pictures of rosy-cheeked babies inexplicably failed to achieve”.
(We try not to dwell on what could have been achieved if just a fraction of the money wasted on garbage literature from Yes Scotland had instead been spent printing and distributing more WBBs, because it’s too depressing. But their staff were busy actively trying to keep the WBB out of Yes hubs.)
As readers will know, the exact opposite happened. In fact the SNP went out of its way to attack our website and myself personally, teaming up with Unionists and the media to smear us, to get our Twitter account banned and to make reading Wings, let alone publicising it, an expulsion offence.
And not just us, of course. The SNP jealously attacked anyone of any degree of standing in the independence movement who wasn’t in the party – you know the list of names by heart as well as we do – in order to obsessively control the movement for themselves. And given a 10-year free run, how much progress did they make?
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: they’ve had their time. They blew it, and they blew it so badly that many of us – tragically including Iain Lawson of Yours For Scotland, who died suddenly this week – now have no realistic hope of seeing independence in their lifetimes.
This weekend we heard that very senior figures in the party are once again – incredibly – spinning loyal supporters the line that they have a “secret plan”. (This one has only three points, not 11.)
We’re not even going to insult your intelligence by going into the laughable detail of it (SPOILER: it involves a “convention” of the same collection of useless pontificating tossers who’ve been bumping their gums at each other self-importantly since 2014 to no effect whatsoever), because 10 years of your time wasted is more than enough.
The fight for independence cannot even seriously begin again until the SNP are the cold ashes of a footnote in history. They are far beyond the hope of salvation now. Sometimes even the biggest and once-all-powerful machine is so rusted and rotten through that there’s no point trying to fix it and no sane alternative to scrapping it, clearing the ground and starting again.
And we’re sorry, but we’re going to keep saying it until everyone gets it. Because as we learned 10 years ago, it’s only when people listen to Wings that anything changes.
