There is certainly no love lost between supporters of Scottish independence and the BBC. It is however egregious I’m-not-a-nationalist-I’m-British bollocks to suggest, as former Labour party hack Carlos Alba writes in Wednesday’s Herald newspaper, that Yes supporters are now on the side of Donald Trump as he threatens the Corporation with a billion dollar lawsuit for defamation. Alba ran the media campaign for Ken Macintosh’s (Remember him? No me neither) failed bid for the leadership of Labour’s Scottish branch office when he stood against Kezia Dugdale. ‘Nuff said.
In their unseemly haste to lump independence supporters in the same barrel of bad apples as Trump, we are now expected to believe that the Yes movement in Scotland supports a bid to push the BBC even further to the British nationalist right and hence make it far more hostile to Scottish independence than it already is.
The BBC is objectively biased against Scottish independence and the parties which support it, this bias has been copiously documented for over a decade and has been noted by figures outwith the Scottish independence movement such as former BBC editor Paul Mason, the environmental campaigner George Monbiot, and others. The BBC’s bias during the 2014 Scottish independence campaign was shockingly blatant with the Corporation paying lip service to the Yes side while acting as the propaganda wing of Better Together.
On the other hand, Donald Trump is engaged in a campaign of lawfare which has the twin aims of enriching him personally and cowing the press into obedience and submission, forcing it to preferentially platform extreme right wing views and to close down criticism of him personally and silence left wing voices. Both those things, the BBC’s anti-independence bias in its coverage of the Scottish constitutional debate, and Trump’s assault on the freedom of the press, can be true, and both are true.
What Yes supporters expect from the BBC is not deference and obedience, not the silencing of anti-independence opinions, what the Yes movement expects of the BBC is that the BBC really does adhere to the standards of objectivity and impartiality that it claims to uphold but which it objectively fails to deliver on in Scotland. Yes supporters demand a BBC which really does reflect and represent the true breadth and range of opinion in Scotland, a nation in which there is now sustained majority support for independence, not that you would know that from the print media or the BBC.
The print media in Scotland is ludicrously biased, with just one single paper supporting independence out of 38 daily and weekly publications. As privately owned and funded companies these papers reflect the right wing and anti-independence biases of their wealthy owners, as a publicly funded broadcaster, the job of the BBC ought to be to act as a corrective to the bias in the privately owned media, not to double down on it and reinforce it.
The ire of Yes supporters is directed at the BBC because we, along with the rest of the Scottish public, are obliged to pay for it. There is horrendous anti-independence bias, outright lies and scaremongering, in the Scottish editions of the Daily Mail and the Express, but independence supporters are not made to pay for these publications and they don’t post us aggressive letters or send their representatives to turn up on our doorsteps threatening court action if we refuse to buy them. If the BBC demands that independence supporters fund it, then it has an obligation to represent the views of independence supporters in proportion to their representation in the broader Scottish public. The BBC, and particularly BBC Scotland, does not come close to this. In fact it shows no awareness at all that it should even attempt to do so.
None of this is remotely similar to Trump’s assault on press freedom. What Trump wants is the silencing of his critics and to turn the entire media landscape into a copy of Musk’s social media sewer, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, and the even more far right cable news networks like One America News Network, the Daily Wire, and Newsmax which relentlessly peddle far right conspiracy theories and ring wing culture wars bullshit. Trump doesn’t want the media to hold up a mirror to the true range and diversity of views and opinions in the population which it purports to serve, which is what Scottish independence supporters are asking for. We want a media which is truly reflective of Scotland, not one which amplifies some political views while marginalising and excluding others. That is the opposite of what Trump is trying to do.
Of course it is entirely to be expected that supporters of Westminster rule in Scotland will seek to delegitimise the well founded and well documented allegations of BBC bias against the Scottish independence movement and the political parties associated with it. British domination and control of the media and the BBC is its strongest weapon in its increasingly desperate attempts to fend off the growing inevitability of Scottish independence. Yet despite that dominance, Westminster’s grasp on Scotland is still weakening. I’ve said this before but it is worth repeating. If Scotland had a truly representative media which accurately reflected a true picture of Scottish opinion on the constitutional question, Scotland would be independent already.
However as things stand Westminster jealously guards its control over broadcasting. It is nothing short of a scandal that Scotland does not have a national public service broadcaster of its own. Every other autonomous nation and territory in Europe does, Scotland is the outlier. It should not be up to advocates for greater media diversity in Scotland to argue for a Scottish national public service broadcaster, it should fall on opponents to prove why it’s unnecessary.
When plans for a Scottish Parliament were mooted in the 1980s and 1990s, it was envisaged that the new parliament would naturally have control over broadcasting. This proposal was stripped out of the Scotland bill by Labour MPs. There is now no chance of Westminster conceding to a Scottish broadcaster,it knows how valuable the BBC was to Better Together in 2014. It also knows that when the independence question is revisited, Scotland will opt for independence.
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