Happy New Year to all my readers and followers.

This year my blog hit another milestone since it was launched in 2009 after I left the Guardian . The number of hits on the site topped three million – 3,113, 413 to be exact.

Last year this blog received 286,840 hits and over 203,000 visitors. This is smaller than the previous year but still a substantial number for a single handed blog. It is also the year when I started to solicit donations for my investigative work and I have now received close to £2000 in four months.

Part of the reason for the drop is that Back to 60 campaign which I still support has now morphed into a broader campaign – CEDAWinLAW- which people have needed time to get their heads round. Back to 60 was a simple single issue campaign concentrating on getting full restitution for 3.8 million 50s born women who have had to wait up to six years for their pension. Now it has changed into a much bigger campaign covering ALL discrimination against women based on a UN convention which we ratified in 1986 but have never fully implemented- the UN Convention on Eliminating All forms of Discrimination Against Women.

This is now making its mark – two of my highest blogs hits last year- relate to the new CEDAW campaign getting 6500 and over 8,800 each.

The top blog came from a tip off from a reader, Rosie Brocklehurst, who received a threatening letter from the Department for Work and Pensions as part of an anti-fraud exercise to gather information from pensioners. The top line was : ““If you fail to be available for this review and do not contact me, your entitlement to State Pension may be in doubt and your payments may be stopped. ( Bold type my emphasis). This had 25,652 hits.

The second highest at 20,643 came from a 50s woman whose Freedom of Information request revealed the Department for Work and Pensions had never conducted an impact assessment on the effects of raising the pension age for women from 60 to 66.

One older blog which exposed the huge £271 billion savings made by successive governments putting money into the national insurance fund made the top ten blogs – adding another 9828 hits – taking it to an astonishing 331,000 hits since it was published.

One controversial blog leaking the maladministration findings of the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s draft report on 50s women over the raising of the pension age had 9,688 hits. Senior members of the WASPI campaign who knew this wanted me to take it down for fear the Ombudsman would change his mind. This turned out to be groundless and a lot of people were given advance warning.

More next year on Whistleblowers

Next year as well as following through CEDAW, keeping an eye on pension developments, I will also be taking up more and more whistleblower cases -involving doctors in the NHS, Sellafield and other areas. One case I took up last year was the plight of Dr Usha Prasad, a cardiologist who has been dismissed by Epsom and St Helier University Health Trust after exposing an avoidable death there. The combined blogs in her case have topped over 8000 hits. Expect more of this.

Global reach of the blog

An analysis by WordPress shows that my blog has a very big UK audience – over 264,000 hits out of the 286,840 last year – with the remaining 22.700 coming from overseas. Biggest overseas hits were from the United States ( 6821), Spain (3071) and the Republic of Ireland ( 2143). But on a much smaller scale it also has a global reach covering almost every country in the world, including hits from the Marshall Islands, Greenland, Russia, China, India, Mauritius and nearly every country in South America, Asia and Africa plus Canada, Australia and New Zealand and the whole of Europe.

Next year will be challenging – I already have enough new stories to investigate -plus a some long term investigations which take a while to come to fruition. Please continue to donate to my blog to keep my investigations going.