A Little Knowledge…
Over three centuries ago Alexander Pope warned that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I was reminded of that earlier this week as I watched London based political commentators giving their opinions of the resignation of Humza Yousaf.
As I watched the news broadcasts on Monday evening on both the BBC and Sky News I was astonished at how little the London commentariat seem to know about Scottish Politics. For example, there was absolutely no attempt to explain to viewers in the rest of the UK that members of the Holyrood Parliament are elected via a complex proportional representation system that invariably results in either Minority or Coalition Governments. Therefore, a minority SNP administration is no big deal.
Just over half of MSPs win their seats via the Westminster style first past the post system. The remainder are elected through a somewhat complex proportional representation system known as the dHondt formula. The aim of the system is to allocate more seats to minority parties and thus make it difficult for one party to dominate the Parliament. The intention was that this would lead to more co-operation among the various parties and to a style of politics less toxic and confrontational than at Westminster.
The political heavyweights of BBC and Sky News either don’t understand that or simply didn’t think that it was worth explaining it to their viewers. The ignorance of the political scene in Scotland was quite stunning, one Sky News presenter even asking if the SNP were a centre right or centre left party!
They also made their usual mistake of assuming that the Independence Movement and the SNP are one and the same thing. They are not, the Independence Movement is much broader than that. In the decade since the 2014 Independence Referendum the SNP’s electoral performance has ebbed and flowed, but opinion polls have shown that support for Scotland leaving the UK has consistently stayed around the 45 per cent mark.
Rather than fly their star presenters up from London to Edinburgh in order to report on the story, it would surely have made more sense for both the BBC and Sky to have used their Scotland based correspondents who would surely have given a more informed analysis of the situation.
There will be elections to various local authority positions in England this week and I suspect that the London media will report them with more accuracy and context than they have reported on the resignation of the First Minister. When it comes to Scottish politics, the little knowledge possessed by the London media is indeed a dangerous thing.
Take Care.
ends
Photo by Adam Wilson on Unsplash
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