As Britain’s national broadcaster, it’s high time the supine BBC woke up to the SNP threat
And the biggest problem, warns this former minister, is that the Beeb’s metropolitan bosses are blind to the unfolding crisis which could destroy the UK – and the organisation itself
SCOTTISH voters are to be given a once-in-a-generation choice – and I don’t mean a referendum. The choice is whether to indulge Nicola Sturgeon’s latest attempt to deflect from the country’s serious problems, or to hold her failing government to account at last.
There can be little doubt that the First Minister’s announcement of another referendum on independence is no more than an attempt to focus everyone’s attention on her party’s long list of grievances against the UK Government. Because if we’re watching that shiny object over there, maybe we won’t notice all these other failures closer to hand – in our schools, our hospitals and our shipyards.
Our national broadcaster will play a crucial part in how this debate is conducted.
Will the BBC continue to tug its forelock in Nicola Sturgeon’s direction, offering unchallenged airtime to her many lieutenants who are eager to make the case against the Union as the date for their pointless rerun referendum draws nearer? Or will they finally stand up to the Nationalist bullies who have sought to muzzle them and who hate the very word that the first ‘B’ in ‘BBC’ stands for?
One of the most depressing and worrying developments in the 2014 referendum was the demonstration outside the BBC’s Glasgow HQ at Pacific Quay, when hundreds of angry nationalists demanded the sacking of the corporation’s political editor, Nick Robinson, for having had the temerity to criticise Alex Salmond.
That signalled a new phase of Scottish democracy, in which journalists were personally intimidated and targeted by political parties for daring to go against the accepted party line. Robinson survived but the memories of that time remain etched in the memory of everyone who values journalistic freedom and integrity.
The general election that followed the referendum reshaped Scottish politics, when the SNP won all but three of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats. From that moment, the BBC recognised the new reality of a Scotland dominated at every level, political and civic, by the SNP.
BBC executives in Scotland scurried around trying to find ways to appease their new overlords. For years the Nationalists had demanded that BBC Scotland produce its own ‘Scottish Six’ as a rival to the UK-wide teatime bulletin. This was part of the Nationalist game plan, to remove any traces of ‘Britishness’ from Scots’ daily lives, including the TV schedules: if Scotland could produce its own news programme – and, crucially, if that bulletin were not in addition to the existing broadcast from London but instead of it – then Scots could be persuaded that we didn’t even need the rest of the UK to provide our news.
Desperate to please the SNP leadership, the BBC came up with a plan: a new digital channel that would broadcast exclusively Scottish content and provide news reports from a Scottish perspective. The new, imaginatively titled BBC Scotland channel was launched to great fanfare and, crucially, to approval from SNP ministers.
Alas, despite having millions of pounds of licence-payers’ cash thrown at it, the channel has bombed with audiences, with its flagship news programme, The Nine, attracting as few as 4,000 viewers.
But it was during the Covid pandemic that the BBC really earned the appreciation of the independence movement, when Miss Sturgeon’s daily press briefings were broadcast simultaneously on BBC1 Scotland, BBC Scotland and Radio Scotland. But in autumn 2020, perhaps suddenly aware of its obligation to objectivity, the BBC announced it would no longer broadcast the First Minister’s address to the nation – during which she could be asked questions about any other political topic aside from Covid – as standard practice.
This was met with howls of outrage from nationalists. The kind of people who are offended when a journalist refers to the First Minister as ‘Sturgeon’ instead of ‘Nicola’ bombarded the station with accusations of Unionist mendacity and demanded a U-turn. The BBC could have stuck to its guns. It could have reported the relevant, newsworthy parts of Miss Sturgeon’s statements as part of regular news bulletins.
Instead, BBC bosses capitulated to the mob, then tried to make it sound as if they were doing so because of journalistic principle. ‘With the pandemic still a major cause for public concern, we will, over the commeans ing weeks and as we have done this week, look to cover the ScotGov health briefings live on TV,’ a spokesman said.
It was a shameful surrender, but it helpfully illustrated the influence the Government wields over editorial decisions of the national broadcaster.
According to the Scotland Act, the legislation that set up the Scottish parliament, broadcasting is a matter reserved to the UK Parliament. That MSPs technically have no oversight of what the BBC, or any other broadcasters, do.
So why do BBC bosses seem to worry so much about what MSPs, and particularly the First Minister, think of them? Do they imagine that the fight for the UK is already lost, that they must have an eye on their own future in an independent Scotland?
Some might conclude that BBC Scotland simply can’t win in this fratricidal constitutional debate. Nationalists themselves have not called any form of ceasefire since they attempted to blockade Pacific Quay in 2014, blaming the ‘Unionist’ mainstream media, particularly the BBC, for their loss in that year’s referendum.
To its credit, the BBC recently paid scant attention to Miss Sturgeon’s latest attentionseeking globe-trotting, when she paid a two-day visit to the US. That dearth of coverage was lambasted by nationalists, who believed that the leader of a devolved government, with no international responsibilities whatever, was more newsworthy than Rangers’ appearance in the Europa League final in Seville, which happened at the same time.
But this is about more than individual editorial decisions. It is about more, in fact, than the role of the BBC or its future. This is about the future of the country that gives the BBC its very name. This is about whether Britain will survive in any meaningful way and whether the BBC should be giving an easy ride to those whose feeble justifications for breaking up the UK are rarely challenged on air.
That charge is more easily made against the BBC in London than in Scotland. Journalists in Edinburgh and Glasgow are experienced and cynical enough, and are as knowledgeable about Scottish politics as they need to be, to know when they’re being spun a line.
Down at Broadcasting House and at No 4 Millbank, a few hundred yards from the Palace of Westminster, journalists with a deep knowledge of UK politics are often at a loss as to how to deal with the Nationalists.
This is to the SNP’s advantage, of course, because so long as they sound confident about whatever subject they’re expounding on, any journalist without an in-depth knowledge of the same subject will be cautious in their attempts to challenge what is being said.
A perfect example came on the day that Miss Sturgeon announced her latest PR initiative in support of independence, when Drew Hendry, Nationalist MP for Inverness, was interviewed by Amol Rajan.
There are a number of Scottish clichés that are trotted out regularly by Nationalists to justify their belief that Scots really are exceptional beings on this island. One is that our education system is world class, and Mr Hendry duly recited the party line that Scotland was the ‘most educated’ country in Europe, citing a Eurostat survey showing more Scots possessed post-school qualifications than anywhere else in
‘They hate the very word the first B in BBC stands for’
Europe. Quantity does not equal quality, of course, and had Mr Rajan been more familiar with the situation in Scotland, he could have challenged his interviewee on the Scottish Government’s lamentable failure to close the schools attainment gap between rich and poorer areas of Scotland, and the SNP’s Curriculum for Excellence, which substitutes children’s ‘wellbeing’ for academic excellence.
Similarly, such interviews are a walk in the park for SNP politicians who remain unchallenged over their party’s confused and contradictory position – or positions – when it comes to North Sea oil. For decades, Nationalists claimed it as exclusively Scotland’s resource, and spent months during the referendum campaign denying claims that reserves had peaked. Since then, SNP chiefs, with the help of their Scottish Green sidekicks, have performed a reverse ferret: Unionists were lying about the amount of oil still to be exploited, but the First Minister opposes extracting it anyway.
Oil exploitation is destroying the planet, says Miss Sturgeon – but she was up in arms when those companies doing the exploitation, many based in Scotland, were ‘disproportionately’ affected by the UK Government’s windfall tax on energy companies.
She is both the champion and the arch-critic of the oil industry, lauding the wealth it would bring to an independent Scotland then demanding it extracts no more oil, basing the entire economic prospectus for separation on oil wealth, then insisting that her Caledonian utopia will be powered by wind, solar power and lentils.
What did Mr Rajan and his BBC colleagues do to expose this absurd web of contradictions and half-truths?
Meanwhile, his key question on how Scotland’s public services would be funded after independence was allowed to go unanswered, and Mr Hendry left the studio unchallenged.
This isn’t good enough. Doesn’t the BBC understand that the quest for independence isn’t just an obscure constitutional argument being played out 400 miles away? In Spain, the separatists of Catalonia are regarded with deep resentment by ordinary citizens because they are seeking to destroy their country without justification.
Yet the BBC in London seems to see the independence debate as somewhat interesting, something that requires precious little research and no understanding of the existential threat it poses to Britain. Perhaps it’s the middle class affliction excoriated by George Orwell, who despised Leftwing intellectuals ‘who would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than stealing from a poor box’.
Perhaps the BBC, as its many critics suggest, is trapped in a woke, anti-Brexit bubble, and harbours some sympathy for Miss Sturgeon’s ambitions to leave the UK behind and join the EU (after all, she has been a lifelong proEuropean since 2016).
Those who harbour a disdain for Britain, for its flag, institutions and history, are the same people who, even though they live in southern England, regard the First Minister as progressive rather than nationalist.
But this is a dangerous game. Nationalism today is the same as it has always been. It aims to divide by sowing grievance. It offers easy, simple solutions to complex problems and scapegoats the innocent to excuse its own failures.
Its Scottish incarnation represents the same level of threat to our nation that all previous iterations of nationalism have to their host nations. When Nationalist MPs and MSPs enter the radio or TV studio to perform the party line about how awful Britain is and how easy independence would be, does the BBC recognise the existential threat these politicians pose to the fabric of our country?
Or do they see Scottish nationalism as just another respectable political viewpoint?
When a country faces being torn apart by nationalist forces, espe
‘Regarded as progressive rather than nationalist’
cially when those forces have already been rejected in a democratic, free and fair referendum, and when Scots have not changed their minds since that vote, the onus is not on defenders of the status quo to make their case. The obligation to make a robust argument for change is the agitators’, who need to establish the case for reopening settled arguments.
That means the interrogation they receive from the national broadcaster should be particularly intense and – to use a favourite word of Keir Starmer – forensic.
A half-hearted tick-box exercise will not do; such an approach lets down journalism, but more importantly, it lets down the entire country because Scottish independence is a threat, not just to the majority of Scots who support the UK, but to the UK itself.
The Union has prevailed for 315 years. It has shaped the United Kingdom and all our institutions and our history. It would be absurd if a minority obsession by the SNP were to receive no more scrutiny in the nation’s TV and radio stations than a campaign to prevent a road being built or to promote a new electoral system.
Nationalism must be challenged. Opposition politicians must lead the charge, but the BBC can no longer sit on the sidelines, kow-towing to SNP politicians and pretending it has no interest in the outcome of this debate.
Nationalism isn’t just an existential threat to our country: its triumph would spell the end of the broadcaster itself. Without a Britain, there would be no British Broadcasting Corporation.
The BBC needs to recognise that before it’s too late.