BACK in the 1990s when Scotland was still campaigning for a devolved Scottish Parliament, the Labour Party assured us that once they got into government and ushered in a new era of light and goodness the powers of the new parliament would be far ranging. That era of light and goodness turned out to be Tony Blair and Gordie Broon and we all know how that turned out, so it’s not surprising in retrospect that Labour also fell far short on the promises it had made regarding Scottish devolution.
The original proposals included the devolution of broadcasting, but Labour reneged on that commitment and removed Scottish broadcasting from the remit of the new devolved parliament. The result was that when Scotland achieved self-government, it became the only self-governing country in Europe without a public service broadcaster of its own.
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Instead, we have BBC Scotland, a branch office of a decidedly British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC is British, and it’s not going to let us forget it. The mendacity of Labour back in the 1990s has set the tone for the media coverage of Scottish politics ever since.
Scotland is short-changed by its public service broadcaster. Scotland contributes more than £320 million annually to the BBC in licence fee payments, but only 54.6% of that is returned to Scotland in the form of Scottish produced programming. Scotland is very much the unfavoured child amongst the devolved nations of the UK.
In Wales, 95% of the BBC licence fee raised is spent on Welsh programming. In Northern Ireland, 75% of the BBC licence fee raised is spent on Northern Irish programming. Scotland is the largest devolved nation, and the one with, as British nationalists are very fond of telling us, the most powerful parliament. Yet it’s the one which is the most deprived in terms of broadcasting.
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That poverty of resources and ambition is in stark contrast to what happens in other self-governing but non-independent countries. Whereas Catalonia has a rich and diverse set of TV channels of its own, including a 24-hour seven-day-a-week news channel, Scottish news is covered by our national broadcaster in a half-hour segment after the main evening news.
Two decades on from devolution, Reporting Scotland still isn’t anything remotely close to a national news programme for a self-governing country. It’s still a regional news segment, telling those of us outside London about the news where we are. It’s an uncomfortable couthy mixture of cute kittens, murders and far too much sport.
BBC Scotland has decided that its focus on the coverage of Scottish politics lies in finding new ways of telling us how bad the SNP is and how rubbish Scotland is. If the news agenda in England is focussing on problems in its Conservative run health service, the BBC in Scotland will likewise focus on the health service, even though Scotland’s health service is performing considerably better than its English counterpart.
READ MORE: BBC's flagship Reporting Scotland criticised as 'parochial’
Reports from economic think tanks which can be spun as damaging to the cause of independence receive wall-to-wall coverage, but reports from pro-independence think tanks like Common Weal, or reports which show how the economic priorities of the UK are damaging to Scotland, scarcely get a look in. The Fraser of Allander Institute recently published a study demonstrating that the Scottish economy exports over £9 billion annually in Scottish generated wealth to the rest of the UK and abroad. It never got a look in on a BBC Scotland which is fixated on SNPbaddery, and because the BBC chose to gloss over it, the rest of the media in Scotland could ignore it too.
There remains widespread suspicion amongst the independence movement that there is a definite patter of pro-independence voices being excluded from the BBC. Hardeep Singh Kohli has claimed that his name was on a blacklist.
READ MORE: ‘The BBC doesn’t understand what’s wrong ... that’s why it cannot fix it’
Another respected broadcaster told me in a private conversation that since coming out as a supporter of independence, invites to appear on BBC current affairs programmes had all but stopped.
I’m active in the independence movement, doing public speaking events the length and breadth of the country, but it was only last week that I received an invite to appear on a BBC current affairs programme – one which I was unable to accept due to other commitments. And that invitation was to speak during a segment attacking a pro-independence newspaper.
Scotland is being systematically let down by its public service broadcaster. That would be bad enough in a country with a diverse and representative privately owned media, but in Scotland the press is overwhelmingly biased against independence.
Out of some 38 daily and Sunday newspapers just two support independence, despite the fact that almost half the people in Scotland back it. That in turn means that the BBC in Scotland ought to be bending over backwards to ensure that that part of Scottish public opinion which isn’t represented in the print media gets a fair representation in the broadcast media.
But that’s not what BBC Scotland does. Far from it. BBC Scotland acts as a sounding board and amplifier for the bias that already exists in the Scottish print media. The media in a democracy ought to act as a mirror to that country. Scotland’s media doesn’t present Scotland with an image of Scotland, it presents us with an image of Ukania.
None of this is going to get any better with the introduction of the new Scottish digital channel promised by the BBC, a channel which is provisionally titled BBC Scottish Ghetto. The new channel will be tucked away in the distant reaches of the EPG, broadcasting only for a few hours in the evening, and working on a shoestring budget. It’s almost as though it is being set up for failure, and then the BBC bosses in London can claim there’s no demand for Scottish broadcasting.
It’s right and proper that the Scottish Government should be making submissions to Ofcom about the shortcomings of broadcasting in Scotland, as Ofcom consults on the licencing of the new Scottish Ghetto channel.
However the problem with broadcasting in Scotland is essentially a political issue, not a regulatory one. The Scottish Government shouldn’t just be making submissions to Ofcom, it should also be making a political demand to Westminster for the devolution of broadcasting. It’s only when Scotland has control over Scottish broadcasting that this country will get a broadcast media that is truly representative of all of Scottish opinion.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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