[interestednovice]

I personally doubt that they would close BBC Scotland as, if nothing else, they wouldn’t be able to save on distribution costs because they would pretty much have to bring back BBC Two Scotland instead, as you alluded to. Considering the fact that the programming budget is already pretty small, there is little there to cut realistically. There is a bit of an argument that Scotland is perhaps overserved by getting two extra BBC channels of it’s own though - maybe BBC Alba could be merged with BBC Scotland, perhaps to create a BBC Alba Scotland? Some programmes could be in Gaelic and some in English. Gaelic Children’s content could fill the daytime when BBC Scotland currently only broadcasts filler from Radio Scotland. Other programmes could possibly have both English and Gaelic language audio tracks, where possible. Even that idea would be unpopular though. And such a channel would struggle to accumulate Gaelic-language sports coverage which takes up a lot of BBC Alba’s broadcasting time.

The UK already has a full hour opt-out from the NC global feed at One and Six, by the way, as Sportsday is on in place of the regional news. Your idea could work but it would be a cut to the length of “Newsnight” to only 15 minutes a night, plus getting people to stay after the segment (or sit through the regional segment!) could be a problem.

It would at least have the benefit of not missing the TOTH at 11pm on the NC though, so you would actually get the Newsday headlines instead of simply crashing into the programme.

I also suspect that if the “Newsnight” element only went out in England, people would ask awkward questions about that and eventually it would be dropped as a result. It wouldn’t exactly help with promotion or viewing figures either to limit the reach. Viewers elsewhere may be annoyed at not getting to see it; viewers in England may ask why everyone else was getting “more” local news. So it would probably annoy everybody!