Wings Over Scotland

We’ve just received the verdict in the hearing over costs in our court case against Kezia Dugdale, and it’s an incomprehensible one. The sheriff has awarded costs in full to Dugdale, plus a 50% “uplift” mainly on the grounds of the “complexity” of the case, despite Dugdale having employed the services of perhaps Scotland’s highest-paid specialist defamation QC.

Full costs were awarded despite the sheriff having found that the core complaint on which the case was brought – namely that Dugdale had unjustly defamed me with a damaging and wholly false claim that I was a homophobe – was in fact wholly upheld, and that I had indeed been so defamed.

No explanation was given with regard to the supposed complexities from which the uplift arose. The case was in fact a quite straightforward one in defamation terms: an allegation was made, no supporting facts were provided for it and it was found to be entirely false, but the defender was excused liability on the grounds of honest belief – despite being unable to provide the sheriff with any rational basis for that belief.

That’s just about the bare minimum of complexity that could ever possibly exist in a defamation case, and readers might understandably feel that it ought to have been well within the normal skill set of the defender’s representatives, particularly given that the document comprising the entire core of the case was a single tweet of less than 140 characters.

Apparently if you’re a lawyer who’s been paid tens of thousands of pounds to debate a single tweet you also deserve a 50% bonus by way of extra compensation for all the stress and trauma of, um, doing your normal job.

Kezia Dugdale at no point before, during or after the case apologised for or withdrew her remarks – indeed, after our initial complaint she repeated and expanded them, leaving us with no remedy but to pursue the matter in court, and to compete as best we could with the astronomical sums spent on Dugdale’s defence by external parties and approved by the court even though the sum being sued for was relatively modest.

We don’t yet have a final bill, but we expect it to be in the rough vicinity of £100,000 as previously advised. We’ve already polled readers on their desired response in that event, and received an overwhelming majority of 9:1 in favour of filing an appeal against the substantive judgement on the case.

(The verdict on expenses cannot in practice be appealed itself, but were a substantive appeal to be successful the expenses verdict would automatically be overturned.)

We intend to carry out that decision, but any further views are welcomed.

When this complaint got the brush-off from the BBC, flatly refusing a right of reply under Article 28 of the Broadcasting Code to the Corporation’s grossly unbalanced and factually-inaccurate coverage of our court case against Kezia Dugdale:

We now have to go through TWO more rounds of pointless dickaboutery and dismissal from the BBC, taking up several weeks, before Ofcom will take the matter up.

(You may have noted, incidentally, that the letter gives no indication that its response can be appealed in any way. It took Ofcom to tell us it could.)

We’ll keep you posted.

As we all know by now, the active Yes movement is split into two camps. On one side are the whiners (mainly but not solely from the fringe far left), who are always full of destructive criticism and abuse for their own side while contributing nothing of any value themselves, other than to promote their own media careers.

On the other are the hard workers who actually get things done, quietly producing materials and work that reach out to voters and make a real difference.

These people have no interest in getting their faces known by appearing as tame Nat pundits on TV and radio, no desire to get their foot in the door at the BBC or grab a lucrative seat in Parliament. All most of them care about is bringing about a Yes vote so that they can get back to their normal lives in a better country.

So let’s see if we can help a few of them out.

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Right then. Our 2019 crowdfunder is officially over (the page is actually still live at the moment because several readers have asked it be kept open until the weekend so they can make their own donations, but it’ll be finally closed down on Sunday night).

And good heavens.

The main page alone narrowly beat last year’s all-sources total (ie including donations made via other routes like direct bank transfers) by nearly £600, and the actual final figure for 2019 [EDIT: updated 24 June] is, jawdroppingly, this much:

£171,849

Blimey.

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Our 2019 crowdfunder now has just 24 hours to go, and to be honest it’s exceeded our wildest expectations. Despite the moribund state of Scottish politics over the last two years we’re currently around £3200 beyond the previous all-time record, and that’s just phenomenal. You never stop taking our breath away, folks.

But we’re going to rattle the tin one last time by repeating something we said last year.

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We probably don’t push the annual Wings fundraiser hard enough. Sure, we tweet about it every few days, but other than that we pretty much leave it to get on with itself – we haven’t run an article about it since launching it nearly a month ago.

That’s partly because thanks to the phenomenal generosity of the approximately 1% of readers who’ve donated so far, we’ve very comfortably covered our basic outgoings for the next 12 months and then some – the vast salaries for myself and near-regular cartoonist Mr Cairns, of course, plus webhosting and various other operating costs (eg commission to the fundraising/payment processing companies), money for some more opinion polls and a boost to the Wings Fighting Fund.

But as it enters its last few days we’re going to nag you a bit now, because we don’t think there’s a better-value investment in the independence cause to be had anywhere.

With all costs covered, every £1 you donate from this point onwards will basically put FOUR copies of Wee Blue Book 2.0 through Scottish letterboxes when the next indyref happens, and if you know of a more practical and effective thing you can do to bring independence about with a quid then we’d love to hear about it.

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Click the image or here to go to the fundraiser page.
Click here to donate directly by other means.
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Total at 9am, 18 June: £169,266. Last 24 hours: £6,357
(Includes donations from all sources)

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Well, hopefully there won’t be too much of that, as we’ve got a sitter in to keep the Separats in check while we’re away. But activity on Wings will probably be a little sparse over the next few days, for hopefully-obvious reasons.

There’s a limit on how much we’ll be able to say about the case, and chances to post on the site will be restricted in general, but we’ll try to keep on top of any important events. Normal service will be resumed ASAP. In the meantime, behave yourselves.

Apologies for the shortage of content in the last couple of days, folks. The 10-year-old Wings PC has been wheezing and groaning and emitting smoke for a few weeks, but it’s now reached a point where we can barely keep it from crashing for five minutes at a time, and we’ve run out of sticking plasters (and stuff to delete on its tiny C drive to give it a bit of cache space and stop it falling over clutching theatrically at its throat).

(Don’t even get us started on a rant about all the idiot software that insists on stealthily clogging it up with mysterious useless bloat but won’t work anywhere but the C drive. Who knew it was even possible to hate iTunes any more than we already did?)

We ordered a new one a while back, but until it gets here we might be a bit light on anything that involves a lot of typing, linking or formatting. Please bear with us.

A couple of months earlier than we were expecting it, we’ve had the Sheriff’s decision on our court hearing a month ago against Kezia Dugdale.

tl;dr version: we won.

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We happened to be looking at a couple of old articles this morning, and noticed that some of them had blank spaces where videos should be.

We didn’t think much of it at first, because people do sometimes delete old videos or shut down their accounts, but when we checked one of them we discovered it was hosted on the Wings Over Scotland channel.

Or rather, it USED to be, because our YouTube channel isn’t there any more.

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Chris Cairns continues to slack in the USA.

We anticipate his return to the drawing board next weekend, the wastrel.