06.11.2014

Plan B

Robbie Rix is perturbed at the precision demanded by the Post Office

On behalf of the Weekly Worker team, let me apologise to all subscribers for a mistake we made mailing out last week’s paper. We didn’t use enough stamps to cover the inclusion of the latest issue of Labour Party Marxists (we were 4p short!) and as a result readers of the print version will be faced with a surcharge of £1.04 when they are invited to collect their paper from Royal Mail.

As I write (on Wednesday November 5), subscribers are starting to receive cards telling them this. We will compensate readers for our error by extending their subscription by a week, but, once again, we do apologise.

This failure has rather overshadowed a success - the achievement of going over to a full-colour front page, which began last week. Although a minority of readers have told us the money could have been better spent (who cares about appearances anyway?), most have welcomed the improvement, and some have shown their appreciation by immediately sending us a donation towards our fighting fund, which from this month has a new target of £1,750 to cover the extra printing costs.

October’s target was the last set at £1,500, but I am pleased to say that we pulled in a total of £1,611, thanks to the £90 we received on the last day of the month. Thanks to GH for her £20 bank transfer and to LY (£40), BN (£20) and TF (£10) for their PayPal gifts.

And the first few days of November have gone well too - a total of 18 in standing orders (the first of the month is the most popular payment day) produced £248, while MD, TS and CK all donated a tenner via PayPal. Thanks also to VF (£20) and TR (£15), who sent us cheques. Then there was BB, who transferred £25 into our bank account after reading us online - he is one of those unlucky subscribers who had to resort to “plan B”, as he puts it.

He was one of 1,212 readers based in the UK, according to our stats monitor, which also tells us that the USA remains the site of our largest internet readership (1,241). I must say that the accuracy of these figures is uncertain: I can’t believe that our website had only one visit from Ireland (the same as Chile and Indonesia, for example) over the last seven days. But that’s what the site tells us.

Anyway, we start November with £338 after five days. That’s one-sixth of the month, so if we carry on at this rate we should make the new target. But that depends on you, our readers.