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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
