Sorry is the hardest word...

I listen to BBC radio 4 when I'm cooking. All I can say is the radio is tuned to that station and by the time I think to change it my hands are wet. Sorry if that - Radio 4, I mean - offends people. Radio 4 sometimes offends me. Tonight I was making spag bol while there was a programme about listeners' complaints going on in the background. 

I started to listen in when I heard the words 'We could have tried harder to find an MP who supported Jeremy Corbyn.' 

Wait. 

Here's the thing: I'm not Labour and not SNP, I'm a Green. Us Greens get a lot of criticism. Yes, we're flaky and disorganised, but we're full of ideas and we do like fair dos.

I listened harder: the person speaking admitted she had arranged for two Labour MPs to comment on something or other that had happened in the Labour Party in the past couple of weeks. Both of those MPs, Caroline Flint and somebody else, were critical of Corbyn. I waited for the next step: did she try to contact an MP who supported Corbyn so there would be some sort of balance? If not, why not? But the interviewer didn't ask these questions. There was a bit of chat - between two BBC employees, remember, with no outside mediation - about lack of balance but it wasn't a heavy discussion, not like the full blown attack you would get if Corbyn's lot (or the SNP, for example) had been guilty of such blatant bias. 

When I put the spag bol in the oven, I went back to catching up with last week's papers. I searched for items which explained how Ruth Davidson had attacked the Scottish Government for poor performance by the NHS, apparently not realising that the document she was quoting from applied to England. Not a word. No mention of the trolls who commented disgracefully on Nicola Sturgeon's miscarriage but plenty of comments about Wings Over Scotland (not my favourite blog - the man is a boor) being suspended from twitter. 

Yesterday I read on the BBC website that some UK government minister or other says the issue of the Scottish 6 is a decision for the BBC to take. But I, like you, pay for the BBC, so isn't the matter of a full-blown Scotland-focused news programme for us to decide here in Scotland? Viewers as well as BBC employees. Then I remembered the comment of the Newsnight editor when asked a few years ago about a Scottish 6: 'That will only happen over my dead body,' he said. 

And then I noticed that some BBC broadcaster I've never heard of earns half a million quid for presenting Antiques Roadshow.