![Road to Referendum: Written by Iain Macwhirter, 2014 Edition, (2nd Revised edition) Publisher: Cargo Publishing [Paperback]](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/519FVSGQK4L._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
The Scottish Independence Referendum will be looked back on as a pivotal moment in British history. This is Macwhirter's claim, and he takes the reader blow-by-blow and feint-by-feint through the campaign and its immediate aftermath. Macwhirter is an excellent journalist, who kept me engaged despite my knowing how the story would end. (spoiler alert) The text is particularly strong on the aftermath of the Yes victory: that we are changed, changed utterly. He eloquently argues that there was never going to be a way back to the governance ex-ante.
The strength of the book is its raw immediacy, both by proximity in time and Macwhirter's scrabbling in the campaign scrum trying to get his hands on the ball; but the weaknesses are not unrelated. Macwhirter's previous book (and especially the parallel TV series) Road to the Referendum, drew on candid interviews with the key players in Scotland's slow slide down the slippery slope towards the referendum, whereas we are still too close to the referendum for politicians to have the time to reflect on who did what to whom, or why. In particular, the eschatological fear behind "the vow", the willingness of the Scottish Labour Party to shackle itself to the Scottish Conservative zombie, and the extent to which the SNP monopolised the Yes campaign are not explained. All of these ossified remains will someday start to fall out of the press.
Macwhirter is also not a totally impartial commentator, insofar as anyone knows what a hypothetical unbiased journalist in Scotland would look like anymore. Macwhirter's journalism has become increasingly sympathetic to independence, which in a country where most media outlets are to varying degrees unionist shows some backbone. This book will mostly appeal to readers sympathetic to independence; unionist readers will probably avoid it in the same way they would avoid looking at photos of their totalled car after a smash that they walked away from with just a bruise on the head and a plan to submit a spurious claim for whiplash injury
When read as a pair, this book and its prequel will take future readers back to a time when Scotland marched to the brink of independence, then stepped back, teetering on a narrow ridge. For some of those readers, they will look back warmly seeing this as the best of times, just a hiatus on the road to their manifest destiny, whereas others will see it as describing the moment their core beliefs were torpedoed, leaving plenty of time to rearrange the chairs, listen to the band, jump in the life-raft and ask the conjuror "OK, I give in. Where have you hidden my country?" The exquisite beauty of the scenario Macwhirter describes so well is that we are still not sure which side is which.
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