Right, back to normal service after this. But it’d be remiss of us not to carry an update on the astonishing progress of our second annual fundraiser in its first 24 hours. Launched at 10am yesterday with an ambitious goal of £53,000 in 34 days, the Indiegogo appeal sits, as we write these words, at £70,493 after just one.
That’s not even the whole story. People who can’t or don’t want to use Indiegogo have also donated a further £14,349.50 – £10,000 of that coming in one donation from a single inconceivably generous reader – making the current running total £84,842.50.
In one day.
Where do we even start with that?
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Tags: fundraisers
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admin
We’ll have some comment on that for you when we’ve prised our jaw off the floor.
Tags: fundraisers
Category
admin, wtf
It’s time to finish the job.
Just over a year ago now, the readers of Wings Over Scotland quietly revolutionised the independence campaign. When we launched the first ever formal public fundraising appeal for a Scottish political website (indeed, as far as we know the first for a politics site anywhere in Britain), your response was incredible.
Click to go to this year’s fundraiser
Our £30,000 target was smashed, enabling the site to become a full-time professional concern, and others followed in our footsteps. By our reckoning around £150,000 was raised in 2013 for various pro-independence sites and projects, including the Common Weal and “Scotland Yet”, a full-length documentary currently being produced by Jack Foster and Christopher Silver, makers of “The Fear Factor”.
Now we need to do it again.
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Tags: fundraisers
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admin, stats
We’ve got a lot to do tonight, readers, so this is just a quick passing thought. We’re constantly told, among the endlessly contradictory stories about oil, that the biggest problem with it is that it’s running out. Production is declining, they say, and what’s left is harder and more expensive to get to and might not be worth all the bother.
We can’t be independent, then, because while we might be fine for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years, after that we’ll be knackered and bankrupt. (Which assumes we don’t find any more oil west of Shetland, or in the Clyde Basin, and that we’re too incompetent to build a lucrative renewables sector in four decades, and that we weren’t able to budget for an oil fund. But let’s go with it for now.)
There’s one question nobody asks, though.
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comment, scottish politics, uk politics
From the Scotsman today:
“Without the offshore tax revenues, an independent Scotland’s public finances would be in a far worse state than are the UK’s. The better the argument that these revenues will carry on flowing, the more credible is the Yes campaign.”
Firstly, of course, the assertion fundamentally isn’t true. We know from official figures that an independent Scotland even WITHOUT oil would have a GVA of 99% of the UK average, and an independent Scotland wouldn’t have to follow UK spending plans, like blowing public cash on a vastly inflated military. But that’s not even the point.
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comment, media, scottish politics
A story from Reuters tonight:
“A majority of FTSE 100 chairmen oppose Scottish independence as they fear splitting up would be bad for British business and dilute the UK’s economic influence”
Ooft. How big is this majority of the chairmen of the 100 leading companies, then?
“The poll by executive search firm Korn Ferry found 65 percent of chairmen of 32 FTSE 100 companies said it would be bad for business if – “
Woah there! 65% of 32? Isn’t that, um, 21? That’s not really a “majority” of 100, is it? And while we’re here, how many of the chairmen of FTSE 100 companies have a vote in the Scottish independence referendum anyway? We have a strong suspicion that the effective sample in this survey might actually have been zero.
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comment, media, uk politics
By an old pal of ours.
Let’s just walk through that one for a moment.
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comment, scottish politics
If you were wondering why we hadn’t written about today’s oil-industry shenanigans yet, it’s because we’ve been scratching our heads for hours trying to work out what the heck David Cameron thought it was he was proving on the Cabinet’s trip to Aberdeen.
Sadly, we’re still none the wiser.
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analysis, scottish politics, uk politics
We’ve written often about the contempt with which both the No campaign and the media regards voters, particularly in respect of their willingness to tell them even the most insultingly transparent lies in the assumption they’ll be swallowed anyway.
Allan Massie in today’s Telegraph may have set a new all-time record, though.
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Tags: arithmetic fail
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comment, disturbing, media, scottish politics
