THE BBC has dismissed a complaint about a Politics Live broadcast which saw the question of a second independence referendum discussed “without representation from the SNP”.
The corporation’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) probed the issue after a viewer claimed that the panel on the BBC Two programme, broadcast on November 29, “lacked balance”.
Shown six days after the Supreme Court ruled that Holyrood did not have the power to hold a second independence vote without Westminster consent, the BBC programme discussed the fallout from the decision.
Included on the panel were Conservative MP Ben Bradley, Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts, Guardian columnist and former top Labour adviser Sonia Sodha, and journalist Alys Denby.
Denby, who edits CapX, a news site closely linked to the Margaret Thatcher-founded Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), attracted criticism during the broadcast after she complained that English people had not been allowed to vote in the 2014 referendum.
After the Politics Live broadcast, a viewer complained that they thought it had “lacked balance and a debate on Scottish independence contained ‘numerous challenges to the principles of Scottish independence and the performance of the Scottish government’ without representation from the SNP”.
However, the ECU dismissed the complaint, concluding that Saville Roberts (below) "was entirely capable of defending the position of the nationalist parties”.
It wrote in its findings: “Whilst the panel did discuss the legitimacy of the SNP’s campaign for another referendum, the ECU noted it touched only once on the SNP’s record of government in Scotland, a debate swiftly cut off by the presenter on the basis the SNP was not present to defend its record.
“Three of the four panellists argued against the need for a referendum in either Wales or Scotland, but the ECU concluded Saville Roberts was entirely capable of defending the position of the nationalist parties.
“In the context of a daily political programme discussing a range of issues there was no necessity to invite an SNP representative onto the panel for due impartiality to be achieved.”
The complaint’s dismissal comes after an internal review commissioned by the BBC’s board found there was “no solution” to the impartiality problem created by the difference in Scottish and English politics.
The report said that in Scotland the political centre ground is to the left of the centre in England. As such, down-the-middle impartiality created for an English audience would necessarily be to the right of what Scots could expect.
“We doubt any of this will be news to the BBC. Unsurprisingly, we’ve no solution either,” the BBC review said.
Elsewhere, the BBC’s ECU upheld a complaint that said Question Time host Fiona Bruce had “skewed” the debate by failing to count a show of hands accurately.
In a QT broadcast on October 20 – the day Liz Truss resigned as prime minister – Bruce asked for an audience show of hands on the question of whether there should be an immediate General Election.
Bruce summarised the result as: “That’s almost all of you…not quite all of you but almost.”
The ECU concluded that the QT host had fallen “short of the BBC’s standards of accuracy” because in truth “about half the audience had not raised their hands”.
