Can Scottish nationalists tolerate media scrutiny?

BBC Scotland’s news department has issued what must be one of the strangest clarifications in the Corporation’s history. It’s not a correction of a factual error or a retraction of an inaccurate or misleading item. It’s a statement justifying their journalists’ decision to report a major news story to the public, accurately and with all relevant parties given a right of reply. The statement reads:

Statement regarding today’s (21 November 22) NHS Scotland story pic.twitter.com/jQyJh2BfFN

— BBC Scotland News PR (@bbcscotnewspr) November 21, 2022

That is, BBC Scotland felt the need to explain itself for doing journalism. 

The story was about a sensitive document BBC journalists had got their hands on. These were the draft minutes of a meeting of Scotland’s top NHS executives in September. The news value is obvious from the contents. Among the matters discussed were reviewing the ‘cost of long-term prescribing where there are alternative options’, ‘paus[ing] funding of new development/drugs’ and ending care services entirely. 

Then there was the nuclear option: since some patients ‘are already making the choice to pay privately’, it was suggested that health chiefs ‘design in a two-tier system where the people who can afford to go private’. This would mean the end of the Bevan principle of universal healthcare free at the point of use, a principle to which Nicola Sturgeon and her government have repeatedly sworn themselves. 

The documents indicate that, following a conversation with NHS Scotland chief executive Caroline Lamb, there was a ‘green light to present what boards feel reform may look like’. It was stated that ‘areas which were previously not viable options are now possibilities’.

To say this is incendiary in Scotland would be like calling the Great Chicago Fire a mild smouldering in northern Illinois. It is especially inflammatory because one of the tactics periodically deployed by the SNP, including in the 2014 independence referendum, is to claim that NHS Scotland will be privatised by the Tories unless Scots vote to break away from the United Kingdom. 

That senior NHS management is talking like this behind the scenes turns this attack line around on the Scottish government. It raises the question whether, having won independence off the back of the NHS, the Scottish government might partly privatise it to save money in what all sides expect to be the financially straitened early days of a breakaway Scotland. This is an outcome that even the SNP’s most fervent opponents had not imagined was possible. 

Nicola Sturgeon insists ‘the founding principles on which that service is based are not up for discussion by government and will not change’. The leak is additionally embarrassing for her government. Her embattled health secretary Humza Yousaf was already under fire over his post-pandemic ‘recovery plan’ for NHS Scotland, with key indicators such as waiting times suggesting the situation is getting worse rather than better. 

The NHS minutes describe a ‘billion pound hole’ in the health service budget in Scotland and contain the warning that it ‘is not possible to continue to run the range of programmes’ currently provided to patients. The health chiefs add: ‘Unscheduled care is going to fall over in the near term before planned care falls over.’

So how did the BBC end up having to issue a statement justifying its reporting of a news story? The answer lies in the SNP’s allergy towards transparency and accountability and its fiery intolerance of journalism that scrutinises Scotland’s establishment party or its government. That kind of journalism ought to be reserved for Westminster. The SNP is Scotland and so any critical media coverage the former is a politically motivated and even unpatriotic slur against the latter. 

Yousaf, who as a health secretary is a very accomplished tweeter, linked the BBC story for his 131,000 Twitter followers and said the Scottish government had ‘never contemplated charging anyone’ for NHS treatment and ‘any suggestion otherwise is, frankly, baloney’. 

But it was unofficial channels through which attacks on the BBC’s integrity were carried out. These are the social media mobs known as cybernats, hardline Scottish nationalists who target anyone – journalists, businesspeople, ordinary members of the public – who says something unhelpful about the SNP or the Scottish government. The cybernats function as digital shock troops, bludgeoning political opponents and the mildest critics of any aspect of the Scottish government’s performance. Past victims have even included a nurse who asked Nicola Sturgeon a difficult question during a TV election debate. 

Paranoia about the BBC is frenetic among cybernats and SNP supporters more widely. Plenty of criticism is levelled at the Corporation, fair and unfair, but what is so bizarre about the Scottish nationalist vendetta is that BBC Scotland is achingly, back-bendingly keen to be deemed fair and objective by its separatist haters. No matter what it does, it only seems to inspire them to even more manic heights of imagined victimhood and hallucinated bias. 

There are entire social media efforts dedicated to hate-watching and hate-listening to every second of BBC Scotland’s output and parsing every last story, graphic, edit and extemporaneous remark for proof of anti-SNP, and therefore anti-Scottish, perfidy. Einstein said nationalism was ‘the measles of mankind’ but most measles patients don’t give the impression that they’d benefit from a course of Thorazine and having their social media passwords changed.

The ‘two-tier’ NHS leak is a Scottish political scandal par excellence. NHS bosses have been caught floating part privatisation and the outrage isn’t being directed at the SNP government on whose watch this is happening, but at the BBC for telling us about it.