BBC Scotland breached accuracy standards by failing to disclose that Lord Haughey is a Labour peer on Debate Night on the eve of a crucial by-election.
The BBC hosted a “Glasgow Special” episode of the show on the night of June 4 – a day before voters were set to go to the polls for the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election.
The panel show featured the SNP’s Glasgow Council leader Susan Aitken, Scottish Tory MSP Annie Wells, artist David Eustace as well as both Scottish Labour MSP Paul Sweeney and Labour peer Willie Haughey.
But the BBC didn’t disclose that Haughey is a Labour peer – instead describing him as an “entrepreneur” on social media and a Labour donor.
He has donated over £1 million to the party between 2003 and 2010.
Now, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit has ruled that it represented a breach of the BBC’s standards of accuracy.
“The ECU accepted that the programme should have made Lord Haughey’s status as a Labour peer clear and agreed that not doing so represented a breach of the BBC’s standards of accuracy,” it wrote.
“It noted, however, that BBC Scotland had already published a posting to that effect on the Corrections and Clarifications page of the BBC website, and considered this sufficient to resolve the issue of complaint.”
But it was the makeup of the panel (below) that drew particular anger from the SNP and the Scottish Greens.
An SNP source at the time told The National that Debate Night appears to have “thrown the BBC's proposed guidance on balance out of the window” by including two Labour representatives.
This was before we subsequently revealed that Eustace also appears to be a prominent Scottish Labour supporter.
The Glasgow Greens submitted a formal complaint to the BBC, highlighting that it has far more elected representatives than the Tories – for example – and branding it a “farce”.
Now, the BBC have also responded to the complaint and argued that the panel makeup didn’t breach its impartiality guidelines.
“While the composition of the panel would have been inappropriate for an item governed by the BBC’s election guidelines, these apply in the case of by-elections only to coverage of the by-election itself or the constituency in which it is taking place,” the ECU ruled.
“The item in question was unconnected with the impending by-election, and focused on the future regeneration of Glasgow, a topic on which (as the ensuing discussion illustrated) there is a large measure of cross-party agreement.”
The statement added: “The ECU considered the composition of the panel appropriate to the circumstances and found no breach of the BBC’s standards of impartiality.”
