PRO-INDEPENDENCE website Wings Over Scotland has smashed its latest annual fundraising target, raising more than £72,000 in a single day.
In a post this morning, the site’s author Stuart Campbell said Wings readers had contributed £72,429 in the space of 24 hours, sending a “rocket into the heart of the Union”.
Campbell, who edits and maintains the site and writes most of the content, told The National he was amazed by the scale of the support, which has already soared past his target of £45,000 and is even ahead of where it was at a similar point last year.
"I honestly couldn't tell you why it's gone so well this year,” he said. “I mean, I probably shouldn't be surprised, because all our fundraisers have smashed their targets, but I always am, because I always think there's some reason why the latest one won't be as successful – in this case it was the general deadness of the Scottish political scene combined with the fact that we had a really quiet February due to technical problems. But every year the readers amaze me."
Campbell said most of any extra funds raised would go toward the ambitious target of printing and distributing one million copies of an updated version of the Wee Blue Book, a campaigning tool which many independence supporters say played a vital role in converting Scots from No to Yes.
"The one we produce for the second referendum will be pretty much all-new,” he told us. “An awful lot has changed since 2014, and we aim for it to be as up-to-date as possible at the time when people are really thinking about their vote.
“But we work fast – I wrote the 2014 one in a week, with another week's editing and tweaking on the input of an advisory panel, so I'd expect the next one to be pretty similar."
The fundraiser follows a difficult year for Campbell, who was arrested and then later told he would face no further action after a months-long investigation into harassment claims.
He is also involved in high-profile legal action against Kezia Dugdale after the former Scottish Labour leader said he was “homophobic”, and Wings has also been threatened by Scotland in Union lawyers over the leak of a database of their donors.
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