Professor John Robertson

On June 13, 2024, BBC Question Times’s chair, Fiona Bruce, interrupted the SNP MSP Kate Forbes to such an extent, hundreds put in formal complaints to the BBC but, regardless, a week later to she did the same to the SNP leader, John Swinney.

The extent of that bias had been helpfully measured by @OfOxter a month earlier when Bruce had interrupted SNP Westminster leader, Stephen Flynn, 21 times compared to only 5 times for Labour leader, Anas Sarwar and 3 times and only once for the other party leaders.

The most extreme example, in recent times, was on December 15, when Bruce and the US right-wing activist, Kate Andrews, subjected the SNP’s Angela Constance to a barrage of crossfire on the supposed inferiority of Scottish education, based on the narrow and little-used by academics, Pisa scores, ignoring the crucial fact that the English sample in this test, alone, indicated in the data tables by only a wee asterisk, was too small to be representative, due to weaker schools pulling out, and thus statistically invalid.

Seeing this, I was reminded of my own research in the spring of 2014, when I found BBC Good Morning Scotland interviewers to have interrupted Yes-supporting interviewees three times more than Better Together interviewees.

Quickly and repeatedly interrupting pro-independence politicians is one way of weaking their case. Another is to loudly and emotionally challenge them with selective negative statistics on health.

On both occasions, recently, Bruce shouted at Forbes and Swinney the claim that far more were waiting more than 2 years for treatment with NHS Scotland than with NHS England. Both were, for me, surprisingly unprepared for this very carefully extracted pair of data, from statistics which otherwise overwhelmingly favour the performance of NHS Scotland over that of NHS England. The response should have made clear the two-year waiting list for people with chronic, often painful but not life-threatening problems, had been cleared quickly in England by the UK Government throwing money at it and using the private sector, at the expense of more important targets such as the 18 week-target for those who may well die if not treated quickly. By sensible prioritising on this, Scotland does far, far, better, saving thousands from an early death.

Similarly, Bruce had plucked out the worthless fact that the average time to start chemotherapy in England was 48 days in England and 65 in Scotland. This sounds, if you know little, notable, but what matters is how many must wait longer than the 62-day target for cancer treatment. In Scotland 21% do but in England it is 36%.

Perhaps revealing Bruce’s personal role in this bias, when she presented BBC News at Six on February 19, 2024, saying what she had been told to say, she revealed dodgy counting by NHS England and prompting quick research by me to reveal far worse treatment delay waiting time ratios of 130 per 1 000 in England and only 114 in Scotland.

Finally, best revealing Bruce’s Anglocentric worldview, is not something she said about Scotland but about Wales. In March 2021, when the Plaid Cymru leader noted the absence of Wales from the Union Flag, Bruce said ‘But you’re not represented because Wales and England were part of the same country at that point.’ How’s that for an ahistorical euphemism or simple inaccuracy to describe a brutal conquest and a process of cultural genocide, aimed at wiping out Welsh identity and to allow the collective forgetting that it had ever been a different country?