DOUGLAS Ross has claimed that the BBC’s “bias in favour of the SNP” may be behind public dissatisfaction with the broadcaster in Scotland.
The Scottish Tory leader’s comments came during a meeting of the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster, where Conservative media minister Julia Lopez was answering questions from MPs.
SNP MP and committee chair Pete Wishart raised a poll – reported exclusively in the Sunday National – which found that the majority of Scots did not have a favourable view of the BBC’s Brexit reporting.
The poll found that a majority (53%) either thought the broadcaster’s reports around the impact of leaving the EU had been “not very” or “not at all” accurate.
After the results were raised at the committee, Ross suggested that the poor showing for the BBC may have been because of pro-SNP bias.
The Scots Tory leader said: “To follow up the chair’s point, maybe there’s lots of complaints about the BBC in Scotland for their perceived bias in favour of the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon.”
He went on: “I certainly get a lot of complaints about their coverage with that, to the extent that the BBC had put out a statement just last week I think it was when one of their reporters interviewing the Prime Minister called Nicola Sturgeon ‘our leader’, forgetting clearly that Scotland has two governments and a Prime Minister and a First Minister, so maybe that’s where a lot of the complaints are coming from.”
Ross’s reference was to an interview with Rishi Sunak on the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland in which the radio host asked: “Are you pursuing a different relationship with our leader and with Holyrood from your predecessors?”
The incident was not recorded in the BBC’s fortnightly complaints report, meaning less than 100 people raised it as an issue with the corporation.
In 2022, the BBC did see massive numbers of complaints around perceived bias in favour of the Conservatives.
The BBC News special Our New Prime Minister, which was broadcast in October as Rishi Sunak took over in No 10, saw some 2211 complaints submitted about a lack of impartiality around the Tories’ approach to public spending and taxation.
That overtook the year’s previous highest number of complaints on a single issue, which came after more than 700 people complained of pro-Conservative bias in a Question Time broadcast featuring RMT union leader Mick Lynch.
It emerged over the weekend that Richard Sharp had helped the disgraced former prime minister secure an £800,000 loan before he was given the position at the head of the broadcaster.
