The text in the image below might be the scariest words we’ve ever read.
If you’re not sure why, read a little closer.
We’re at the halfway point of our 2018 fundraiser, and the all-sources total so far is a thumpingly impressive £103,266 in just two weeks. But while that’s a tremendous sum, it’s sobering too.
Firstly because with an average monthly readership of nearly 304,000 people it comes to an average contribution of slightly under 30p per reader. As with most crowdfunded ventures, fewer than 1% of the site’s users have actually backed it financially so far.
And secondly because for perspective, the average Scottish adult – independence supporters included – sends the BBC about £72 a year. (£323m from 4.5m adults.)
While obviously a minority of folk do boycott the licence fee, that still means that the average Wings reader gives the BBC 240 times as much money every year as they give Wings to fight it.
And as well as its own output, which is hugely financially incentivised in favour of the Union, the BBC is now using your money to directly fund Scottish newspapers hostile to independence by paying them to hire more reporters.
(It’ll then also massively amplify those hostile voices by featuring them on multiple daily “papers review” shows from which online media with readerships many times bigger are arbitrarily excluded, enabling the anti-independence outlets to dictate the political news agenda every day without having to sell a single copy.)
So, y’know, it’s a tough job.
We’ve been scouring our picture archives all afternoon for something more surprising than the fact that the UK government has screwed over the Scottish fishing industry again after it voted Brexit and Tory in 2016 and 2017, and we found this one.
See also: literally anything else that has ever happened on Earth.
So here’s a headline from the (Dundee) Evening Telegraph.
You know how we’re always pointing out how newspapers love to lie to readers without actually saying things that are untrue? Let’s have a quick case study.
We could all do with some cheering up at the moment, so it’s with great pleasure that we can announce fantastic news for Scotland – the ancient plague of sectarianism has finally been defeated once and for all!
At least, we assume it MUST have been, because this week the Scottish Parliament is set to give its final assent – thanks to Labour, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats and the all-important Scottish Greens – to abolishing the Offensive Behaviour (Football) Act, against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the Scottish population.
And as we can plainly observe from events yesterday, they would only be doing that if sectarianism was no longer a problem and it was safe to send out an encouraging message to the bigots that their worldview is now acceptable in Scotland again.
An alert reader conveniently located in the Aberdeen area pointed us to an “SNP BAD” story in the ever-willing Press & Journal today.
And it raised an awful lot of questions the P&J didn’t seem to want to ask.
From today’s Scottish Daily Mail:
The slightly-less-well-known definition of “force” that means “a minority government persuading three out of four opposition parties to agree with it and democratically vote a measure through”, there.
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
