 | 'In recent months it has seemed that half the Cabinet has been secretly in the pay of the Scottish National Party, inveighing against 'separatism' with arguments so puerile and dishonest that the case for Nationalism has been ceded almost by default. Gordon Brown has conjured camps of disenfranchised refugees huddled at the Border; Robin Cook has had us ejected from Europe; and Donald Dewar has painted a picture of Scotland's public finances so black you are forced to wonder just who is in charge of the economy these days. Twaddle, of course, in every particular, but with friends like these the Union has little need of Nationalist enemies. The common thread, from the office of Tony Blair to the slit trenches of local politics, is fear.' Ian Bell in the Scotsman, 24 th November 1998. |  |
By any measure, last week's refusal to allow what the mandarin tongue describes as the "national region" of Scotland to produce its own pan-British tea-time television news bulletin looked like arrogance or ignorance. Either the governors have no confidence in BBC Scotland or they do not understand the first principles of what home rule is supposed to be about. Even before Scots can find their way to the polling booths an important argument has been polarised, with "London" at one extreme, Scotland at the other. If this is an augury for the new constitutional relationship, we are in for a bumpy ride.
Fully half of the Scots in our poll who know their own minds are quite clear on the matter. For them, a "Scottish Six" is not some sop to parochialism, some bauble or fad. For them, such a broadcast is the inevitable and logical consequence of the home-rule settlement, both in political and journalistic terms. Put aside the well-rehearsed (and self-serving) official doubts over BBC Scotland's ability to produce such a bulletin: what matters is that there is no chance whatever of London being willing or able to do the job to the satisfaction of Scots.
What might the news agenda of a London editor be, come home rule? Scottish land reform? Scottish education? Hardly. As the journalists who have covered Northern Ireland down the years would tell you, only bad news impinges on the metropolitan consciousness. Holyrood, likewise, will make the "national" news only when a row with Westminster is brewing - and when competing commotions from assemblies in Belfast and Cardiff are not on offer. To pretend otherwise would be to invent a fiction over the attention spans of English viewers.
So much is, or ought to be, obvious. The news that matters to the people of England is not the news that matters to the people of Scotland, even with the odd dispatch from Caledonia tacked on. It follows, as the body of Scottish opinion agrees, that BBC Scotland should have responsibility for the production and editing of the entire bulletin.
The BBC governors know all this, of course, for they have been told it often enough. Yet what is striking about their refusal to deal with reality is not the nature of the rejection - ignorance of home rule remains profound in the metropolis - but its source. As a supposedly quasi-federal institution in its own right, the corporation, above all others, might have been expected to spot the risks of centralisation. Its charter obliges it to serve all the communities of the United Kingdom. Yet if even the BBC can be blind to the risk of patronising and marginalising one section of its constituency, what hope is there for the rest of the British establishment?
Not much, and more fool them. In recent months it has seemed that half the Cabinet has been secretly in the pay of the Scottish National Party, inveighing against "separatism" with arguments so puerile and dishonest that the case for Nationalism has been ceded almost by default. Gordon Brown has conjured camps of disenfranchised refugees huddled at the Border; Robin Cook has had us ejected from Europe; and Donald Dewar has painted a picture of Scotland's public finances so black you are forced to wonder just who is in charge of the economy these days.
Twaddle, of course, in every particular, but with friends like these the Union has little need of Nationalist enemies. The common thread, from the office of Tony Blair to the slit trenches of local politics, is fear.
Now the BBC has been dragged into the argument, first by appearing to cave in to pressure from the Cabinet, then by giving us a text-book demonstration of just how much of a mess can be made even of in-house devolution. Having bought the Government's argument that the Scottish Six would amount to no more than a propaganda vehicle for the Nats - a fine compliment to pay your own journalists - the governors have managed only to supply the SNP with yet more ammunition.
It is tempting to say that none of this would have occurred if the new Scottish parliament had been given control of broadcasting. But how so? How, precisely, would Holyrood exert control over the BBC in London and over the governors in whose thrall the regions must, in the end, remain? BBC Scotland could not be autonomous without London's goodwill and after last week the existence of such a spirit of co-operation is open to question, to say the least of it.
So the first test-run for devolution, at least as a principle, ends in tears. Our readers are not much impressed, a fact which ought to worry the governors when they get it into their heads that readers are also viewers. But if conclusions about the essential nature of the home rule settlement begin to sink in with more people, the Government will have even less cause for satisfaction.
What ought to have been obvious cannot now be ignored. First, devolution's success will depend almost entirely on goodwill on all sides, an unlikely prospect given the Government's paranoia and the SNP's enthusiasm for a bare-knuckle fight. Secondly, everything of importance which Holyrood will control or covet remains in London's gift. That is the nature of the British constitution and of the British state, however reformed.
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