Kevin McKenna: When will BBC start calling out mince from Unionist politicians?

“I warned of the economic, uwah, apocalypse that awaited Scotland if we ripped ourselves out of this great British Union and thankfully the, uwah, nation heeded my call.”

The man from the BBC has positioned himself adroitly to greet him as he departs the stage.

“Mr Brown, if Scotland hadn’t listened to you and removed itself from the Union it wouldn’t now be facing the consequences of a hard Brexit. Do you have anything to say about that?”

“Um, awah, well ... all the more, ah, um, uwah reason to, um stick together and meet the, uwah, challenge together.”

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He’s breaking into a stride now, but his features have darkened and his aides, knowing full well what this means, move in to hustle the impertinent reporter away. The BBC man stands his ground, though and won’t be dissuaded from his line of questioning.

“Mr Brown, seven years ago you told your supporters that Scotland’s future in the EU would be guaranteed if we voted No. How’s that working out for you?”

The aides are getting belligerent now and attempt to shove the pest back into the throng. Yet still the BBC man persists. “Mr Brown, you said the future of the NHS would be threatened by independence and that it would jeopardise people’s pensions, but you never said anything about Tory austerity and the cuts to hospital services that left us even more exposed to the pandemic. Do you now regret making those predictions?”

Brown is almost running now and saying something that sounds like “chumbawumba”. He seems to be saying something, too, about families being torn apart, but you can’t really be sure, because his fans are attempting to shout down the reporter.

But the BBC man has made his point and knows that his London editor will move the item up the news list. Hell, it might even make the headlines that get barked out at the top of the main evening news bulletin to the echo of that famous drumbeat. “BAM: and as Unionists launch their No campaign, a flustered Gordon Brown refuses to answer questions on his NHS and Brexit claims from last time around.”

Tune in next week, folks for another adult fairytale when we tell you about the heroic BBC editor who insisted on showing what really happened when police, aided by British Army personnel, attacked unarmed miners at Orgreave in 1984. And how it brought about a revolution at the corporation as it stopped becoming a job creation scheme for Oxford graduates who’d missed out on those sought-after research jobs at Conservative Central Office.

You never want to slaughter other journalists, certainly not by name; even those who do little more than read autocues and the pre-packaged words of other people’s scripts.

During the first independence referendum you became slightly edgy about those demonstrations against the BBC down at Pacific Quay for the perceived bias of its coverage in 2014.

After all, you’d been treated fairly and with professional circumspection during your own occasional appearances by all BBC Scotland personnel during a period when every syllable they uttered was being scrutinised by each side for tell-tale signs of partiality.

It was really only when the London bosses sent up their top guns in those last few, feverish weeks of the independence referendum campaign that the BBC’s coverage in 2014 became grotesquely distorted in favour of the Better Together side.

ONE of them was James Naughtie, who hastened back after decades in London to add heft and insight to BBC Scotland’s daily referendum shows. That he clearly knew little of what was happening in Scottish politics became evident in his first few programmes. There’s only so much Kirsty and Sarah can provide to plug the gaps and it showed.

Gordon Brown knows he can rest easy as he reprises his 2014 role as Saviour of the Union; he’ll never be troubled by anything too probing by the BBC. The same courtesy won’t be extended to many of those who back independence, as 24-year-old Kelly Given discovered a few days ago when she was interviewed by Naughtie for Radio Four. If you want to hear what condescension and contempt sounds like, have a listen to Naughtie as he seeks to portray his young interviewee as an immature naif who’s been brainwashed by the cult of nationalism.

Young activists these days are less willing simply to retreat quietly, though, and Given took to Twitter to excoriate Naughtie and the BBC for their lack of professionalism, distortion and failure to accord her a modicum of respect. Her story was then picked up by The National.

READ MORE: BBC accused of 'blatant bias' against Yes after 'awful' interview with young voter

Quite apart from the sneering tone of the interview you found yourself wondering, not for the first time, why no BBC journalist called out the brainwashing that took place during the Brexit campaign when Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage channelled Agincourt as they strove to convey English military triumphalism.

And you wondered how long it will take a BBC Scotland political journalist to intervene when Anas Sarwar, Douglas Ross and Willie Rennie next unite to lament the viciousness of the first independence referendum which “ripped/tore/clawed families apart”. Really? Where’s the evidence? Was there a spike in emergency calls to the social services? Did divorce rates soar? Was Esther Rantzen called back from retirement to deal with the increased pressure on Childline during that Armageddon?

Scotland, as everyone knows, is a disputatious and thorny wee land where if we’re not arguing about politics, it’s football, religion and the respective merits of Deliveroo and Just Eat. If your family is falling apart because of differing views on independence then it’s safe to assume it was already a dysfunctional unit.

For the last six weeks I’ve waited in vain for a BBC reporter to call out this mince. Or even to point out to Unionist politicians advancing the GERS myth that the numbers are a contrived identikit photo that fail to account for different priorities in an independent entity.

“Meanwhile, in other news … we ask the Royal Bank of Scotland when they’re planning to pay back the £45 billion bail-out we gave them in 2008. And finally … pigs were spotted flying over the Thames Estuary last night”