I'M SICK OF THE BBC AND BETTER TOGETHER TREATING ME LIKE A MORON

I gave up listening to the news interviews yesterday on the subject of our country’s future because they were almost unremittingly biased.

The BBC seemed to me to be taking full advantage of the fact that it has no obligation to be fair and balanced in its coverage of the referendum until the official campaign starts.

It appeared that Jim Naughtie was firmly in the camp of the No campaign, presumably with the backing of his bosses in London. I'll apologise if I've got him wrong, but I suspect that I have not.

No one, least of all Naughtie, seemed interested in asking hard hitting questions of the No side. Maybe the BBC genuinely believes that there is no need for Better Together to have a plan B, whilst it is imperative for Yes, but for the sake of decency, could they not just ask the questions about it.

The EU is a case in point. BT spreads doubt about whether or not Scotland would be accepted into EU, then whether it would be forced to accept the Euro, and then what the cost to Scotland (a rich country) would be.  But no interviewer to my knowledge has said…So Mr British government spokesman, the answer to these questions can immediately be got by you, as a sovereign state member of the EU. Why does Mr Hague or one of his minions not simply ask Brussels for that answer? They would be obliged to provide it for you.

Likewise, the question of membership of an existing sterling zone is a matter that could be settled now.

George Osborne is the Chancellor at the moment; notwithstanding accidents or serious fallings out with Cameron before October 2014, it is more than likely that he will be the Chancellor at the commencement of negotiations between Scotland and the UK.

Why hasn’t an interviewer put it to a No spokesman that Osborne has not ruled out sharing the pound?  After all he hasn’t, despite the silly hints from Alistair Carmichael that George Osborne usually gets what George Osborne wants (an interesting insight into Cabinet government in London and the habits of spoiled rich boys).

We all know the reason. By hinting and suggesting that it would not be

allowed, by international public law (rubbish) or by convention (rubbish) or by George Osborne (who knows) or Ed Balls (who may or may not ever be chancellor even if Labour wins the next or subsequent elections), the No campaign spread doubt on Scotland’s position.

 If they made a definite statement and said that certainly there would be no sharing, then the doubt would pass to sterling and its future.

International money markets would begin to consider seriously that, in the event of a yes vote and Scotland adopting a totally different currency, the pound, losing the massive petro boost, not to mention the large export contribution of Scotland to its value, would sink like a stone.

I even heard this morning that they were saying again that Scotland would be forced to join the Euro, despite it being impossible to join the Euro without first having spent two years in the ERM, and only starting that two years once the present currency meets economic equivalence with the Euro. Germany has had to spend too much money bailing out wayward economies to accept that Scotland should be able to skip all the preliminaries and go straight to Euro membership.

Surely someone in the BBC knows this, but chooses to ignore this, because it doesn’t fit with the agenda.

I wonder though, what is the point of this, particularly on Radio Scotland and Radio Four. By and large the audience is intelligent and thinking. If I can see through the imbalance in the reporting, so can the rest of the listeners. There are radio programmes with audiences which will swallow whatever the BBC throws at them. ‘Good Morning Scotland’ and the ‘Today Programme’ aren’t them. 

So isn’t the Beeb really shooting itself in the foot?

It’s strange that Labour seems to see no good at all in the paper when the Unite Union has already said that they are pleased to see some of the suggestions that the government has made with reference to industrial relations. You'd have thought that there would have been a similarity in what these two organisations, so closely associated with each other, would have thought was interesting.

The headline in the “Scottish” Daily Mail today was half a page of blistering attack on Scotland’s Future”. Even given that they are a bit on the mad side, I was taken aback by the vitriol. I haven’t read the document yet, but I'm always wary of anything the Daily Mail approves of. So I'm assuming from the paper’s outburst of visceral hatred that the document doesn’t contain any Xenophobic or Fascist policies, no cull of the poor or sick or Muslims.

So that’s a relief.

PLEASE, CAN WE HAVE A NEWS AND WEATHER PROGRAMME THAT RELATES TO US, NOT YOU?

According to the Daily Telegraph "Britain" is going to be hotter than Hawaii this week.

Of course that's not true. The South East of England, which is the only part that matters to the Telegraph, is going to be hotter than Hawaii; Scotland will be colder.

As it happens it's not going to be THAT much colder. Scotland's all lumped into one according to the Telegraph so from Lerwick to Peebles it seems we can expect around 24 C. Of course that's rubbish, but no one at the Telegraph gives a stuff about that.

Just like the BBC, in fact. I notice that on their weather forecasts that they go into far more detail about English weather and lump Scotland all in one. The other day they forgot to mention what the temperatures would be in Scotland. Presumably they ran out of time.

And, while we are on it, we seem to have a virtually exclusively English 6 o'clock news programme. We hear all about what the Justice Secretary has said about this, and the Health Secretary has said about that, and of course none of it has the square root of Jack Squat to do with us. The English Justice Secretary could announce the return of hanging, and what does it matter to us... and the English Health Secretary could announce the privatization of the Heath Service... Oh wait, he already did that...

Likewise a murder inquiry in Bristol is headline news, but one in Glasgow doesn't get a mention. We were 15 minutes hearing the outcome of a trial in Bradford the other night. We heard in incredible detail what the detective in charge of the investigation had to say; we heard the father's brave and probably touching statement... but none of it was anything to do with us.

It was local news.

Of course I'm not indifferent to the suffering that was caused by a guy that murdered his girlfriend and then lied about it, but there are horror stories like that from all over the world we could hear. But unless that sort of item is local, it's not really news. before you slate me for that, just think about it. Are you really interested in the details of English murders?

And come on, you really can't be interested in the details of the English cricket team's latest Test match; or how Gloucester has done against Warwickshire and on and on and on....

I know it probably sounds to English readers like I'm just a whining Jock, but you know, I have the choice of whether to pay for and read the Telegraph, but whilst I have the choice to not watch the BBC, I don't have the choice to not PAY for it.

So, no, I'm not a whining Scot. I just want a news programme that deals with Scottish news and Scottish weather, what the Scottish Justice or Health Secretaries have said, and what's been going on in OUR courts, on our roads and on our railways.

And no, I don't mean the comic that follows the BBC News, Reporting Scotland, with their magazine style reporting on Mrs McGinty's cat getting stuck up a tree. I mean a NEWS bulletin.

OK. Moan over. I hope some of the good weather comes our way. We certainly could do with it.

(But I feel really sorry for three sets of neighbours who are in, respectively Malta, Turkey and Spain... I do, really I do... honest... hmmmmm)

WHY CAN'T WE SHOW MORE RESPECT?

I have just read with disbelief of an incident in Afghanistan which makes my even angrier than usual when reading of the UK’s involvement in that country.

Three British soldiers have been killed by a rogue Afghan soldier while on joint patrol in southern Helmand. This is not the first time have NATO trained Afghan personnel turned their weapons on British soldiers. In November last year 5 of our soldiers were killed by an Afghan soldier in a training base. The President of Afghanistan, Mr Karzai has written to the Prime Minister to apologise.

As an aside, once again it raises questions about how much infiltration of the Afghan army there has been by the Taliban. Clearly, I suspect, a great deal. The truth of the matter is that the Afghan president, a former employee of ex-Vice President Cheney of America, is happy to have the forces of NATO in his country, but we should not necessarily infer from that that he carries the population with him. After all, despite our claims that we are there to bring democracy to the country we all know that Mr Karzai was only elected President of the country by a rigged election process, to which we have given our tacit approval, thereby implicating us in the corruption.

That we have lost another three of our lads and, according to the Telegraph’s reporting of the story, another two injured, is sickening enough. But what I find completely unbelievable is that this story is in the press, and not just the Telegraph, but I see it features in The Guardian and The Mail and the BBC too, and at the time of writing, the families had not been informed. The Telegraph actually carried the line: The families of the soldiers involved in the incident are being informed, but anyone worried about relatives serving in Afghanistan can call a special helpline on 08457 800 900, as if it were some minor incident.

For heaven’s sake surely, even in the dog eat dog world of competitive journalism, we should be able to agree as human beings rather than journalists, that not a world of deaths or injuries of lads putting their lives on the line in the forces should be reported by the press until immediate families have been informed and time for more distant members to be contacted. The newspapers involved should hang their head in shame (credit here to the Scottish papers and the Independent); and someone at the Ministry of Defence (preferably the secretary of state) should be hung out to dry over it*.

Can you just imagine how unthinkably awful it must be for someone to read this online and dial that number with shaking fingers, possibly to be held in a queue..... ?

I know that many of us do not approve of this war, but it is not the fault of the lads or even their most senior officers that we are fighting it. It was a decision taken by government and approved in parliament by a majority of members. So no matter how disapproving we are of it, let’s treat the people at the sharp end and their families with more respect.



* It did occur to me that I was criticising newspapers using this story before the families had been informed, and yet drawing attention to it myself on this blog, and that that was perhaps a little of hypocritical. The penetration of this blog, however, is so minute in comparison to the newspapers and the BBC, that I decided that that was probably paranoia more than instinctive decency.