This article appears as part of the Unspun: Scottish Politics newsletter.

I’m not sure that the BBC could manage to offend and irritate Scots more than the broadcaster already has unless its commissioners aired a film nationwide at 7pm called ‘Rabbie Burns was English’ voiced by an AI version of Margaret Thatcher. 

Not only is the broadcaster serving up doltish pap to its Scottish audience, in an effort it seems to reduce the collective IQ of the entire country by a few percentage points, but there is something really rather rotten about its handling of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this summer.

It’s fair to say that most viewers were more than a little angered by the failure of the BBC to deliver live coverage of the Games - especially as Glasgow stepped in to save the event from disaster.

First, it was reported that the corporation had been outbid. The rights were secured by TNT Sports for £5million and shown on pay-to-view services. 

Then it was reported that the BBC had in fact only offered £900,000 for the rights. That’s apparently just 9% of what the BBC paid to broadcast the games in 2022 from Birmingham.

Now it is being reported that the BBC didn’t even “table any kind of official monetary offer at all”. 

Understandably, licence-fee payers in Scotland and the rest of the UK are furious that they were unable to watch a major sporting event in their own country.

BBC Scotland is dead, it just........

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