BBC kowtowing

Viewing the BBC’S most recent Question Time programme left me feeling saddened and a little ashamed.

In my view, Alex Salmond and his cohorts have bullied the BBC into believing the fake news that the broadcaster’s supposed bias caused the “Yes” campaign to lose the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

To try to appease their SNP critics, it would seem that the Question Time production team felt it necessary in presenting their programme on 16 February from Glasgow to compromise their usual high standards of well-balanced political debate.

More specifically, they assembled a panel comprising a front-line SNP minister and two other panel members who were introduced as being SNP sympathisers as well as a solitary unionist politician.

The programme audience appeared to lack political balance insofar as most contributors also seemed to be SNP supporters, who constantly jeered and heckled. Indeed, one might be forgiven for thinking that present in the hall was a contingent of the SNP rent-a-mob who intimidated journalists at BBC Scotland’s Pacific Quay head-quarters in September 2014.

In view of the above, I fear for the level of debate in any future Scottish independence referendum. SALLY GORDON-WALKER

Caiystane Drive, Edinburgh

Your correspondent Allan Sutherland (Letters, 18 February) was spot-on. Last week’s Question Time from Glasgow was another prime example of the BBC’S kowtowing attitude to the SNP.

They have caved in and now do not even offer a semblance of balance in the panellists and audience make-up. How, one wonders, were the audience vetted? It seemed to me as if they were shipped in en bloc from last year’s SNP party conference.

In their eagerness to please the SNP they have forgotten what the BBC is supposed to be and represent and it is indeed sad and shameful to see the corporation, which I have long admired, act in this demeaning manner.

Non-nationalist viewers pay their licence fees also. ALEXANDER MCKAY New Cut Rigg, Edinburgh