Rejoice! Rejoice! The land that begat John Logie Baird is to be blessed with another Public Service Broadcasting television station. BBC Scotland will cater for the interests of Scottish viewers. There is general agreement among anthropologists that these include state benefits, state-run healthcare, state-controlled education and blaming the English for the inadequacies of all three.
The budget for the new television channel is £30m which, after allowing for BBC executives’ salaries, should provide a generous £1.7m for programme making. BBC broadcasting north of the Border is almost exclusively concerned with Glasgow so that programme makers seldom have to venture outside a five-mile radius of Pacific Quay, where the Corporation’s mother ship is moored, and this is reflected in its news bulletins, popularly referred to as Murder-’n’-Fitba’.
Whenever the theme music of a Scottish news bulletin strikes up it triggers exciting speculation whether the opening scene will feature the familiar yellow police ribbons fluttering gaily in front of the grey porridge-clad houses of a sink estate where a drug dealer has fallen victim to the only form of free-market competition accessible to the local community, or an interview in a deserted stadium with a problem-ridden football manager. On high days and holidays these may be displaced by scenes from the Scottish parliament, a crumbling adobe slum at the end of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, where the tribunes of the people have just triumphantly passed the Nationalisation of Children (Scotland) Act.
In his announcement of this latest media wonder, the BBC’s director-general Tony Hall hubristically claimed: “We know that viewers in Scotland love BBC television…” This provokes the question why the majority of Scots do not express that love by watching it. The BBC has problems in Scotland. Many Scots, especially nationalist voters, believe the Corporation is politically biased. Well, of course it is – the BBC invented fake news before the term was coined – but not in the way the Cybernats mean.
BBC bias is a long-accepted feature of British life. It has been investigated and publicly acknowledged by the Corporation. It was James Naughtie who famously asked on the Today programme on 2 March 2005: “If we [sic] win the election, does Gordon Brown remain Chancellor?” A year later the BBC held a navel-gazing seminar at which Andrew Marr complacently observed that the Corporation “is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”
The BBC acknowledges its bias, is comfortable with it and maintains it; which is why only the banditry of the compulsory licence fee enables it to survive in a Britain that distrusts and despises it, especially in the wake of its grotesque anti-Brexit partisanship during the referendum. But Scots are incensed by a different bias: the perceived anti-Scottishness of the Corporation. If it sets up a new channel it can only be to disseminate pro-Union propaganda; if it had not done so, it would have demonstrated its disregard for Scots and contempt for their culture.
The tedious, long-running campaign by the journalistic fellow travellers of Holyrood for a “Scottish Six” – i.e. a news bulletin at peak viewing time of 6pm focused on Scotland – was a desired exercise, like the old curtailing of BBC Newsnight when Henry Kissinger was abruptly faded out to be replaced by an embattled Ayrshire provost, in honing the narrowness of the Scottish mind.
It is an open secret in the more separatist reaches of Scotland that BBC broadcasters are subjected to special training in a secret facility in Surrey run by GCHQ. There they learn skills such as taking the most unflattering photographs of Nicola Sturgeon, misrepresenting Scotland’s fiscal statistics to obscure the fact it is the richest country on earth but for its riches being creamed off by the English, and pretending that the UK could survive without Scotland. Scottish nationalism is paranoia without the vestigial sense of reality.
It is difficult to think of two entities that deserve each other more than the BBC and the Scottish grievance culture. The interplay between the two is an increasingly entertaining spectacle. It is almost a pity this comedic interface has an inevitable time limit to its subsidized existence, dictated by the eventual ending respectively of the licence fee and the Barnett Formula.