PRO-INDEPENDENCE group Wings Over Scotland has raised over £15,000 in donations from kind-hearted Scots after launching a campaign to help a starving English woman fined £328 for stealing a pack of Mars bars.

Their anti-poverty fundraiser, which still has a week to go, has gone way beyond all expectations after setting out to raise £500 to pay the fines for Louisa Sewell, 32, who was heavily penalised for nicking a pack of four chocolate bars despite choosing them because they “were the cheapest in the shop”, and they still have loads left to help other people.

Stuart Campbell, of Wings Over Scotland, said the response had been “phenomenal” and now they plan to distribute the money across Scotland to foodbanks and the grassroots network Back to School Banks, modelled on the Yes Campaign and exclusively revealed in The National last month.

The magistrates court told Sewell, from Kidderminster, Worcestershire, that being hungry wasn’t a sufficient excuse for stealing and she was fined and ordered to pay costs totalling £328.75.

Campbell was horrified when he read about her plight and within 24 hours had raised the sum needed to pay off her debt.

Campbell said: “The response to our appeal was astonishing and far exceeded our expectations. It means that we now have enough money, not just for this poor woman who was fined for stealing Mars bars because she was starving, but to give to food banks and to help families in poverty get school uniforms for their children through the Back to School Banks.

“You see cases like this woman’s in Kidderminster all the time. There are two reasons why this case jumped out at me: one was the amount of money was just so farcically ridiculous, with the pack of Mars bars costing just 75p, and the second was the juxtaposition with the case of the investment banker who was let off a prison sentence. In the same week, the newspapers reported a wealthy and privileged young city investment banker who escaped jail after angrily glassing two people in a nightclub because the judge feared a prison sentence would damage his career.

“While I’ve read other benefit sanction stories, this one was especially dreadful and I felt she had been failed by society on so many levels and so many points down the line.

“We can’t fix every injustice in the hideous, heartless society the UK has become. We’re a Scottish website and the woman in question doesn’t even live in Scotland. But there are no borders on solidarity, and for some reason this case hit us as particularly sickening.

“For someone to have decided to go ahead with the prosecution in this case is grotesque.

“In her fines and charges, the woman was penalised £328.75 for stealing food worth 75p — over 438 times the value of the theft.

“It seemed likely that she would be unable to pay and could have ended up in prison, so we have donated £500 to the woman.”

He said that, “not for the first time”, Wings Over Scotland had been blown away by the generosity of its supporters.

Campbell added: “We only set out to raise £500 for the woman in Kidderminster, so she gets that and we are trying to track down this other person in Derbyshire who got fined £300 for nicking three bottles of baby milk in what appeared to be similar circumstances.

“The fundraiser still has a week to run and when we get the final tally in we will decide exactly where the rest of the money will go, but a big chunk of it will be going to Firstbase in Dumfries and other foodbanks across the country as well as the school uniform bank which has been sent up recently.”