THE British media is currently obsessed with the unnamed BBC presenter who allegedly paid a teenager for explicit photos. According to reports, the anonymous man started to pay the teenager for sexually explicit photos when the young person was 17 years old. A total of £35,000 was paid to the youth. The young person's mother told the Sun newspaper that this money was spent to fuel a cocaine addiction.
Although the age of consent is 16, if these reports are correct an offence could still have been committed by the anonymous presenter as the law on explicit images classifies sexually explicit photos of a young person under the age of 18 as child pornography, possession of which is punishable by a jail term of at least six months.
The man at the centre of this story has not been named, although there is apparently no legal injunction preventing his identification. Social media has predictably descended into a fervid whirl of allegations and finger pointing. We're now trawling such depths that certain individuals are being named as the person responsible on no other basis except that they supposedly have pronouns in their online bio.
READ MORE: 'No truth' to scandal around BBC presenter, young person's lawyer says
There is no story, no controversy, that happens these days without some frother immediately trying to shoehorn into it their obsession with trans people. These are invariably the same folk who are just as quick to accuse everyone else of being obsessed with so-called "trans ideology”.
Over the weekend, Tim Davie (below), the former Conservative candidate who is now director-general of the BBC defended the corporation's decision not to name the individual concerned. He said: "By law, individuals are entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy, which is making this situation more complex."
Right now on the BBC lunchtime news a presenter is explaining that people who have not been charged with any offence have a right to privacy and to have their names kept out of the public domain.
In response to that statement, all over Scotland you could hear the sound of SNP members laughing so hard that they cracked some ribs. Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell have not been charged with any offence, but that didn't prevent the BBC from not only naming them, but camping outside their house for days on end and broadcasting more than enough information for anyone with access to Google Street view to work out exactly where the couple live.
On at least one news report I saw, the house number was not blurred out. Broadcasting this particular piece of information was almost certainly an error, but the entire sorry episode does betoken a gleeful lack of care for the privacy of some people who have not been charged with any offence, and who are involved in an investigation in which, even if the absolute worst comes to pass, involves offences less serious than the possession of child pornography. But then those involved are not BBC presenters.
The BBC's double standards could not be clearer.
Why would Tories change the bent rules that benefit them?
On BBC Scotland's Sunday show, the look at what the papers were saying gave but a cursory glance at the story about the unnamed presenter which was dominating the headlines and spent most of its time talking about an alleged spat between two SNP MPs, because that's the real issue here.
Westminster sleaze is again in the spotlight, at least outside the SNP-bad obsessed Scottish media. It has come to light that the wife of Scots Tory MP David Duguid (below), who voted four times against windfall profits on oil and gas companies, has more than £50,000 worth of shares in BP.
The Guardian newspaper reported that after analysing BP's register of shareholders it appears that Duguid transferred his shares in the company to his wife five years before he was elected as an MP. The shares generated a dividend worth approximately £2000 last year. Duguid has not declared the shares to the House of Commons register of interests.
As a junior minister in the Scotland Office, Duguid had a role in shaping energy policy for Scotland, energy policy reserved to Westminster. Duguid was a junior minister in the department from June 2020 until September 2021 under Boris Johnson, and again under Liz Truss in October 2022.
Under current rules MPs are only obliged to declare shares that they hold in a single company worth more than £70,000. This means that MPs can potentially have what most people would consider a substantial financial stake in a particular company without having to declare it.
Duguid has stated that he complied with all the rules, and indeed it appears that he has done, the point however is that the rules are woefully inadequate. The MPs who benefit from the current system do not seem to be in any great rush to tighten it up.
Half and half
The Scottish press is gleefully reporting that according to a new poll from YouGov, half of Scots believe that First Minister Humza Yousaf is doing a bad job, 100 days into his new role.
This could just as easily be reported as half of Scots don't think that Humza Yousaf is doing a bad job, which is quite a remarkable finding given the incessant barrage of negativity and nit-picking from an anti-independence Scottish media which all but turns a blind eye to far worse outrages committed by the Conservatives.
But 'half of Scots don't think Humza Yousaf is doing a bad job' doesn't fit their preferred British nationalist narrative.
This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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