[Globaltraffic24]

At the end of the day Scotland is part of the UK (and certainly has more in common with the rest of us than Northern Ireland) so the flagship UK bulletin should be broadcast there. The fact that the BBC aren’t willing to stand up to the SNP and tell them that Scottish licence payers are paying for exactly the same service as the rest of us and therefore will receive exactly the same amount of local content is the only reason for BBC Scotland existing.

OK. Let’s calm down a little and avoid getting overly political here. This a TV pres forum, not a political space. However, it’s worth clearing up a few of your inaccurate points (with a side note that I’m not an SNP supporter or spokesperson. I just can’t stand lazy attacks on anyone or anything).

1 - The SNP was never a big advocate for the BBC Scotland channel. It reluctantly supported it, but with a massive health warning that it suspected the BBC was launching the whole thing in the hope it would fail, and the argument for ‘more Scottish programming’ could be rubbished by saying “we tried that before and look what happened”.

2 - As others have said, there is a strong case for more devolution of domestic news programming. It’s fine when the news is more globally focused but ‘tea time’ news often has a UK skew, which regularly means irrelevant coverage of England-only stories. It happens a lot and must actually frustrate the reporters most as they now endlessly need to book end their reports by effectively saying “please note this only applies to England”.

3 - The Scottish license fee payer doesn’t receive local radio, so has in fact been under served. Obviously this is less of an issue now with BBC local radio in England facing cuts, but you can’t compare apples with oranges when it comes to service provision.


Hope that’s cleared a few things up. Personally, my frustration boiled over when this channel originally launched. As others have said, the presentation of the news is pretty good, but the closure of BBC 2 Scotland for this channel made no sense to me. Additional Scottish programming on BBC 2 was always the answer. We’ll almost certainly see the return of BBC 2 Scotland and closure of the Scotland channel, making this entire project a waste of time.

In terms of news provision, let’s get shows like Debate Night and perhaps a new more in depth late night news programme on BBC 2 Scotland and be done with it.