The Country That Invented TV Doesn’t Have Even Its Own Channel
Commercial UK TV is almost entirely London based with the exception of the regional segments of ITV (like STV based in Glasgow & ITV Border which serves the South of Scotland and is based in Carlisle in England) for local news and a small amount of local programming. Scottish commercial productions make up a tiny fraction of what would be a Scottish population share – its advertising revenue share. ITV even broadcasts England football internationals (which the Scottish regions are unable to opt out of) while Scotland games are on pay tv.
The dominant public broadcaster, likewise, receives hundreds of millions of pounds subsidy every year in the form of the shortfall between its spending in Scotland and Scottish TV licence fee payers contribution and, despite all the heavy criticism and promises to do better, is still failing to meet agreed targets for Scottish content. This has led to a practice known as
Scotland: channels: 0 (zero) BBC Scotland Productions & Staffing:
Limiting & controlling Scottish News programming
Even the modest change of airing a Scottish News at 9pm to reflect the post 1999 devolved reality took the BBC decades to allow (coming in the aftermath of the independence referendum coverage criticism). Indeed, as the 1997 Labour government were deciding what to devolve to Edinburgh & what to reserve in London, the BBC’s Director General John Birt ‘wrote to, & then went to see, the new Prime Minister Tony Blair’.
“I expounded not just from the BBC’s perspective but from the nation’s. I argued that we were one of the few institutions which bound Britain together. BBC News was iconic” – John Birt
Blair agreed (“Okay, let’s fight”) and – going against BBC Scotland and the Broadcasting Council – they ensured London would retain total control over broadcasting.
Scotland gets a particularly bad deal from the BBC: A recent study showed licence fee spend in Scotland was only 55 per cent compared to 74 per cent in Northern Ireland, 95 per cent in Wales and more than 100 per cent in England (in 2016 MacKinnon said she wanted to see more of the money raised from the licence fee in Scotland being spent here)
“There is a significant number still in Scotland whose trust we lost, and I think there’s still a bit of work to be done in that regard. I think it’s part of my mission to try and address these perceptions which may have led to that loss of trust,” – Donalda MacKinnon (the first post indyref director of BBC Scotland)
The Scottish Affairs Committee has expressed concerns about the BBC’s spending in Scotland. The BBC’s annual report revealed that in 2021, 51% of the funding raised in Scotland was spent in Scotland, compared to 71% in Northern Ireland and 64% in Wales. This has led to accusations of the BBC “short-changing” Scotland, with concerns raised by the Scottish Government and members of parliament about the level of funding for BBC Scotland. There have been calls for greater spending and control of the BBC in Scotland to ensure high-quality content for Scottish audiences
The National
Despite London’s determination to retain powers over broadcasting in Scotland, Scottish government attempts to have the BBC spend more of its budget in Scotland have been ongoing and have led to the creation of the ‘BBC Scotland’ channel.
