20.04.2017

Taking us for granted?

It's hands in pockets time, says Robbie Rix

The Weekly Worker chalked up exactly 3,000 online readers last week, but only one in a thousand of them made a donation to our fighting fund. That’s right - three comrades. But that’s about the going rate unfortunately. While, of course, by no means all of those 3,000 will be supporters or even sympathisers, it’s still a very small proportion indeed.

I think the problem is that many of the comrades who read us regularly tend to take us for granted: they appreciate the ideas we provide and the arguments we make, but that’s only what they expect of us. So it doesn’t occur to them that we rely on the financial support of comrades exactly like them. This week there were donations via PayPal from FU (£15), JK and WP (£10 each), but that’s about it.

There was also a nice cheque for £50 donated by comrade SD, who writes: “Brilliant coverage of Livingstone!” That’s what we like to hear. Finally there were four standing orders totalling £185 - MM’s usual extremely generous £75, plus £50 from TB, £40 from TR and £20 from KB. So all that adds up to £270 and takes our running total for April to £837.

Well, I hate to say this, but we’re way behind where we need to be at this time of the month. Our target is £1,750, so we’re less than halfway there with only a third of April ahead of us. In other words, a bit of acceleration is called for!

Can you help? Were you among the 3,000 last week? How about clicking on that PayPal button?! We need you to translate your support into hard cash.