My persistence (and your persistence) has finally paid off – at the third attempt, I’ve managed to get a petition published on the UK Parliament website. It calls for the full devolution of broadcasting powers to the Scottish Parliament, and also incorporates my original call for a Scottish entry at the Eurovision Song Contest. This is a very timely moment to be considering the question of where decisions relating to broadcasting should be made, because the Westminster power-grab is currently being replicated within the BBC’s own internal structures – control over BBC Scotland’s studios is being seized by London, and since BBC Scotland is but a mere branch office, there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.
The new Director-General of the BBC, Tim Davie, is a former Tory politician, and his political views have quite clearly not changed one iota – his notion of “addressing BBC bias” is, ludicrously, to make the corporation even more right-wing and British nationalist. The chances of it reflecting on, let alone addressing, the catastrophic mistakes it made during the 2014 independence referendum, are now even more remote.
Before starting this petition, I did an internet search for “devolution of broadcasting” and discovered to my surprise that it’s recently been a much more live topic in Wales than in Scotland. There’s a hilarious article from last year in which the director of BBC Wales declares himself to be “neutral” on transferring powers from London to Cardiff but then lists umpteen sneering reasons why it shouldn’t happen, and not a single reason why it should. If that’s what “neutrality” looks like, the mind boggles as to what he’d be saying if he was opposed to the idea!
If the petition reaches 10,000 signatures, the UK Government will be required to respond to it. If it reaches 100,000 signatures, it will be considered for debate in the Commons. (I believe it depends mainly on whether there’s been a recent parliamentary debate on the subject, and off the top of my head I’ve no idea whether that’s the case.) To reach those target figures will require a lot more than simply promoting the petition on this blog, so if this is a subject you feel strongly about, please share the petition on social media and let your friends and family know about it.
To view and sign the petition, please click HERE. As the new Eurovision bigwig would say: you’re good to go. (Incidentally, if you were one of the 21 people who signed on Friday before the petition was checked for publication, your signature already counts.)
