OCH, THAT'S NAE FAIR

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For anyone who doesn't watch BBC 1 in Scotland, or the BBC's Parliament Channel, The Politics Show: Scotland is available on the BBC i-player. Today's edition confirmed many of the points I have made (intermittently) on this blog about the programme's various biases. I have suggested that the show's presenter Glenn Campbell is a leftie sympathetic to Labour and the Liberal Democrats while being unsympathetic to the Conservatives and SNP.
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The Pre-Budget Report of Alistair Darling and the coming Scottish S.N.P. Budget was discussed in a joint interview between the Scottish government's finance secretary John Swinney (of the SNP) and Labour's Andy Kerr. The interview could not have been less evenly handled! Though Mr Swinney got a little bit longer to speak (4 minutes 40 seconds to Mr Kerr's 4 minutes), he was interrupted 5 times while Mr Kerr was not interrupted at all. The I.C.s work out as 1.1 against John Swinney and 0 against Andy Kerr. Kerr was allowed to ramble along to the very end of his answers (with no great coherence at times) while Swinney was badgered throughout. Case proved I'd say as regards anti-SNP/pro-Labour bias. (I, naturally, don't care for either party!)
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The issue was also discussed with Tavish Scott, affable leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. Here there was only one interruption, resulting in a small I.C. of 0.3. Further proof!
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There were no Conservative on the programme. The nearest we got to a Conservative was Iain McMillan of the Scottish C.B.I., described (in typical left-wing terminology) by Glenn Campbell as "the bosses' organisation". This interview resulted in the day's highest I.C. of 1.3 (with 9 interruptions). During the interview Campbell called public-private initiatives "a rip-off" and spoke up for the public sector. This may be a questioner's stance, but it's not a surprising one for this interviewer (who is now appearing nationally as an occassional presenter on Radio 4's PM.)
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