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.
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.
I hope you’ll forgive a personal indulgence here, folks.
Especially alert readers may recall that just before the independence referendum in 2014 I came home and attended a number of events, including being smuggled into a huge, fascinating and enlightening Muslim Friends Of Labour meeting at the Marriot Hotel in Glasgow just a few days ahead of the vote.
The man who managed to somehow get a solitary white guy into a room of 1000 Asian people was my friend Irshad Malik (known to all simply as Malik). At the time Malik was running a convenience store in Bathgate (in addition to an office job elsewhere), where my parents live and have known him for many years.
He’s a committed Yesser, a tireless worker and gave The Wee Blue Book out in the shop (one of very few places in Bathgate which sold The National from day 1).
I mention this now because he’s in a spot of bother, and I owe him one.
Chris Cairns continues to slack in the USA.
We anticipate his return to the drawing board next weekend, the wastrel.
So, yeah, this happened:
The new crowdfunding platform we used this year is a curious and arcane beast, and as a result the honest truth is that we’re still not quite 100% certain what the precise final total (including “offsite” donations and a few that squeezed in after the technical deadline) is. But as best as we can make out, including everything, it’s this:
And, y’know, good heavens.
With 14 hours to go:
Like, wow, readers 🙂
…is all you have to put up with before we stop nagging you for cash again for another year. The 2018 Wings fundraiser ends tomorrow morning, so this is your last chance to put a little of your money where our mouth is.
(Fundraiser page here, or click here to donate directly.)The current total stands at a phenomenal £128,600 – already the second-highest ever by a five-figure margin, and just £11,447 short of the all-time record.
So one last time, we’re going to remind you:
– the average Wings reader gives the BBC £72 a year, and Wings just 43p.
– the Unionist “grassroots” organisations who we also have to fight are funded by Lords, Dukes, Earls, Countesses, Sirs and billionaires.
– we use your money to produce stuff that actually makes a difference, rather than just lecturing an internet audience that already agrees with us.
– we’re the only pro-indy site the Unionist/media establishment fears enough to constantly attack, smear and try to silence.
If any of that is worth anything to you, now’s the time to show it, folks.
This was us for most of yesterday:
Because we were genuinely concerned about this year’s fundraiser. It was coming off the back of our lowest traffic month in four years (February was absolutely dead in Scottish politics, and we had almost no internet for the last two weeks of it), and some other indy sites had had badly underachieving crowdfunders in recent months.
So it’s quite the pleasant surprise to be able to say that the total (direct donations as well as through the fundraising page) for the first 24 hours alone was… £72,429.
Bear with us just a little longer, folks.
We’re hoping to have a man in the garden with a ladder some time this afternoon.
The latest Wings Over Scotland annual readership stats are in:
2017 average monthly unique visitors: 303,719
2016 monthly average: 286,162
2015 monthly average: 290,522
(pre-2015 stats from different provider not comparable on a like-for-like basis)
That’s a 6% increase year-on-year, which is pretty respectable going for the dullest 12 months in Scottish politics since this site started (and particularly given the challenging circumstances we had to operate in for the whole of the autumn).
We also found out we were by some distance the most popular website of the Scottish Government, which was nice:
Thank you for all your support, your financial backing, your tip-offs and your company. 2018 is shaping up to be somewhat more interesting, so we hope you’ll stay with us.
I apologise in advance to readers for the personal indulgence of this post.
Some months ago, quite coincidentally, I happened to avail myself of Twitter’s archive function, which allows users to download their entire tweet history. For various reasons I’ve been looking at it recently, and until I did I’d been unaware that it records not just a user’s own tweets, but also the tweets from other people that they’ve retweeted.
I’ve collected some of Wings’ tweets and retweets – in reverse chronological order – below. (Famously, of course, RTs aren’t necessarily endorsements, but you can decide on the underlying tone for yourself. Each of them links to the original tweet so you can see the whole conversation, or click on the links being referenced.)
They’re all on one subject, by way of illustration, because Twitter is a transient medium full of people all too eager to jump at the slightest excuse to make spurious and hateful allegations about everything (and anyone) under the sun to serve their own agendas, and for the sake of the future of human discourse it’s worth remembering that nothing exists in isolation or free of context, and we shouldn’t jump too easily to conclusions.
Because the other way never ends anywhere good.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
Wings Over Scotland
