Wings Over Scotland

On 20 May 2012 this site ran a headline which read “BREAKING: Lockerbie bomber still alive”. That was of course the day it was announced that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi had died of prostate cancer. Even I did a double-take before the penny dropped.

The attached story was a mere 17 words long, but going by the links the assertion that Megrahi was not in fact the ‘Lockerbie bomber’ seemed to draw on three sources: the fact that the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission had found six grounds to believe the conviction might have been a miscarriage of justice; a documentary by Al-Jazeera based on investigations by George Thomson (a private detective who’d worked for Megrahi’s defence team); and a review article by English solicitor Gareth Peirce.

All good sources, but I had better reasons for believing that Megrahi was innocent.

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Because it’s aimed at you. (As judging by the increase in donor numbers set against the number of clickthroughs we registered from yesterday’s piece to the benighted Yes Scotland fundraising page, there’s no mistaking where the money came from.)

Bella and Newsnet both now over £10,000 too, even though it’s barely over a week until Christmas. Take a moment to give yourselves a wee pat on the back, readers.

Now, we’re not putting ourselves up as some sort of expert fundraising authority just because we’ve run a few successful ones, but you didn’t have to be a genius to slap your forehead with your palm last month when the official Yes Scotland campaign AND two of the country’s biggest pro-indy websites (as well as a couple of smaller ones) contrived to launch appeals for very large amounts of cash not only all at once, but in the weeks leading up to Christmas when everyone’s budgets are stretched to the limit.

Bella Caledonia

Newsnet Scotland

Yes Scotland

(To give plenty of notice so that hopefully this sort of thing doesn’t happen again, our second annual Wings fundraiser will be in late February and March 2014.)

Still, we are where we are, and all three are now entering their final phases some way short of their targets. That’s not necessarily a big deal – the Scotland Yet one looked like failing by a big distance at this stage (as did the Common Weal’s before it), but reached the finishing line after a big boost from generous Wings readers.

But time’s getting tight, and the Herald has already had a bit of a sneer about the response to the Yes Scotland pledge drive, so if you can spare a quid or two for any or all of the three, we’re sure it’d be both appreciated and well used, especially in the context of the grisly collection of Tory millionaires, bankers and spooks who just handed “Better Together” another million and a half quid.

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Julie McDowall’s splendid piece for this site on call centres yesterday is causing something of a stir in the medical community today – social media is alive with shocked and disgusted doctors horrified or disbelieving at the news that their trade union, the British Medical Association, outsources its legal-advice helpline to a Serco call-centre and misleads members about its nature.

For those questioning the veracity of the claims, some references follow.

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We have a stalker. It’s a long story, pre-dating Wings Over Scotland and involving creepy, highly detailed rape/murder threats, sustained harassment over a period of months, a dedicated blog many tens of thousands of words long (including all manner of truly vile sexual stuff involving family members and ex-girlfriends), abusive phone calls to our home and far too much more to describe.

It eventually resulted in an arrest, and a report by Glasgow police to the Procurator Fiscal recommending prosecution, which to everyone’s surprise was declined, after a very long delay and for unclear reasons.

The main perpetrator, although several people were involved, was a virulent Unionist and Rangers supporter (he’s a proud advocate of “The Famine Song” and a big fan of Loyalist multiple-murderer Michael Stone) in his 20s called Murray Brady. He continued with the campaign even after he’d been arrested and questioned, but eventually went to ground after the discovery of a revived version of the forum on which he made some of the comments. It was all a pretty ugly business.

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Okay, it seems safe to say already that reaction to the idea is very positive, so why waste time? The new fundraiser page is now live. The more money we raise the more questions we can ask, so let’s see what we can find out.

[EDIT: Base target crushed in 70 minutes. Wow. But keep it coming, folks, because we’d love to get to 10 questions, which will take a total of about £3,600.]

For the sake of tidiness, comments on this post will be closed – please carry on commenting and suggesting questions in the original thread.

Recently we’ve seen quite a few people on social media wondering why there hadn’t been any opinion polls on independence published in a while. We thought it was a bit curious ourselves, so we rang a few polling companies with a view to commissioning our own one, but Panelbase told us they were doing fieldwork on one as we spoke, to be published roughly a week today (they’re every two months).

But even though we don’t need to do one on the straight Yes/No thing now, that’s no reason why we can’t take it upon ourselves to ask a few other questions.

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We got up late and we’re a bit bleary.

So here are some things to catch up on while we pull ourselves together, particularly for those of you still too scared of tractors and television sets to follow our Twitter feed.

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We’re still mulling over the exclusive design/logo for “Heroes” in the fundraising campaign, but we were so pleased with this when we came up with it this morning that we thought it was too good to limit to people with lots of money.

It’s also the first Megastore sub-section with the new version of our masthead logo, designed to show progress from 2012 to 2013. (Last year we’d just found our old wings in the attic, now we’ve well and truly got them on. Not sure what we’re going to do for 2014 yet, maybe patch up all the holes.)

We might do a special version or exclusive colour run for Heroes or something, or come up with something different entirely. For now, click the image to see the product range, or just simply look at it and bask in our genius 😉

Alert readers might have noticed that this morning we tweeted a link to a post on the Facebook page of Labour For Independence. It was a retort to a sneering claim from Anas Sarwar that the group had “one or a maximum of two Labour members” and was in fact a front for the SNP, and it responded by printing a list of 13 named Labour Party members who were active in the group. One of them stood out a little.

Now, we have absolutely no idea if that Alex Foulkes is the same Alex Foulkes who’s the son of arch-Unionist peer and Nat-basher Lord George Foulkes. We’re sure there are lots of people called Alex Foulkes in the Scottish Labour Party. But given that Lady Judy Steel (the excellent wife of Sir David, another prominent No voice) came out for independence a while ago – prompting a slightly misjudged joke from Murdo Fraser last week – it’d be a moderately amusing development if it was.

After all, if the leading lights of the No campaign can’t even convince the closest members of their own family to back the UK, how the heavens are they going to be able to sell the ailing Union to the rest of Scotland?

I’m a fairly placid chap, readers. I really am. I’ve been around a bit, seen a few things. It takes a lot to raise my blood pressure. You’ve been reading this site for over a year and you know the only thing that’s really got under my skin is Craig sodding Levein.

But tonight I’m just about boiling over with rage. When it came down to it, four Liberal Democrat MPs – including the one I’ve voted for for the last 20 years – rebelled against pretty much the most evil thing any UK government’s done for about a century. Four. They couldn’t even be bothered to try to make it look good.

I’ve already got my most upbeat Spotify playlist running just to stop myself screaming profanities into the night out of the window. I should probably delete the last hour’s tweets. (But won’t.) So post cute pictures of kittens. Tell a few jokes or heartwarming stories. Anything, anything at all that’s nice and beautiful and good and suggests maybe this entire country isn’t just a stinking, rancid sewer full of subhuman scum.

I hate these people so much – these vicious, monstrous Tories, these treacherous Lib Dems, these grubby, cynical Labour hypocrites – that I’m scaring myself a little.

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie should be commended for starting 2013 with a legitimate request rather than a party-political attack. The Herald today reports his renewed call for a public inquiry into the events of the Lockerbie disaster.

The call was prompted by the new Libyan government’s pledge to release documents relating to the incident “as soon as time, security and stability permitted”. But what will such documents reveal beyond what we already know?

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