Wings Over Scotland

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.

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We’ll only be making a very brief comment on the story in Tuesday’s Herald, for hopefully obvious reasons. The piece by Tom Gordon has been written for maximum innuendo to allow the wildest speculations on social media – which are of course duly taking place – but the alleged events relate entirely to some tweets from our Twitter account, none of which have been deleted and all of which are still publicly visible.

Nothing more sinister or serious than some tweets has occurred, or been alleged to have occurred. None of the tweets involved are in ANY way threatening, not even in a joking sense. That’s all we’ll be saying on the subject at this time.

Just a quick one-week-on update: thanks to your incredible support, our fundraiser for legal action now stands at a phenomenal £14,683 including all sources. We’re well beyond the initial target of £5000, but since even a modestly-eminent QC costs slightly over £8 a minute, every extra penny helps.

Click pic to go to the Indiegogo fundraiser page, or click here to use PayPal.

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The Yes movement, like almost all movements, is plagued with a small but incredibly loud faction of intolerant, destructive extremists. Alert readers will have noticed that this site has again been the victim of them this week, but we’re not alone. They’ve also gone after two print publications – The National and iScot – over their “transgressions” against the beliefs of these self-appointed arbiters of what people are allowed to think.

What those two outlets and Wings have in common is achievement.

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Click pic to go to the Indiegogo fundraiser page, or click here to use PayPal.
All-sources total as of 9am, Tuesday 25 July: £11,640.

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We’re going to take our own advice, chill out for a few days and enjoy the show as the No Surrender Tories desperately try to Frankenstein some sort of hilarious government together. There’s nothing much anyone can do to advance the cause of independence right now, there’s no urgent crisis in need of addressing, everybody’s pretty frazzled and crotchety, and a wee bit of downtime is probably the best thing for everyone.

It seems a better plan, at any rate, than running around panicking, screaming that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE IMMEDIATELY! or that nothing must be done ever again, that we must either declare UDI or give up on what many of us have believed in our whole lives and settle meekly for 2017’s feeble equivalent of The Vow – a shoddy, snivelling “soft Brexit” that’s not going to happen and would be awful even if it did.

Independence will still be here next week, folks. It’s not going anyplace. Obviously if anything dramatic should happen we’ll be on it, but otherwise we’ve got some movies and books and games and stuff to catch up on, and we recommend that you all do the same. Recharge your batteries. Smell the flowers. It’s been a long five years, frankly.

1 day remaining. Total at noon, April 2: £132,072 (Since last update: £975)
(Including non-Indiegogo donations via PayPal, bank transfer etc.)

So it turns out that this:

…is even more amazing than it initially appears.

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The Wings Over Scotland Fundraiser 2017:

Please give generously, or we’re all screwed.

A few people objected to this post when we first ran it a year ago, then came to regret their decision. So for their sake we’re putting it up again, in a new and updated form, in the interests of civilised and productive discourse about Scottish politics.

It’s the most constructive contribution we can think of to make Twitter a less toxic place over the next 12 months. It’s our block list.

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