Wings Over Scotland

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.

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:

£153,215

And, y’know, good heavens.

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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.)
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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.

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