On The Marches

The SNP has successfully bullied and astroturfed Borders Television into finding another 90 minutes of news per week from the area presently covered by the council areas of Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders.

As a fellow villager, I know perfectly well that plenty happens in rural communities. And that very, very little of it could be put on television.

Unprompted complaint in that regard has always been as good as unheard of, but the separatists need to get in early as many excuses as they can for the defeat of independence at next year's referendum.

Borderers are going to vote massively No, and the fact that their regional television comes from Carlisle is going to be given as the reason why.

The reality, at least in the South West of Scotland, is that their regional television comes from Carlisle for the perfectly good reason that Carlisle is their regional centre. When they need to go into town to shop, or to have a baby, or whatever, then that is where they go.

Or did anyone imagine that people from, say, Dumfries, travelled the 95 miles to Glasgow for such purposes? Say it again: ninety-five miles.

Huge numbers of the residents of that or any other Border town work in England, meaning that they spend half or more of their time in England while sleeping every night in Scotland. The SNP and its courtiers are blissfully unaware of these realities.

Representation to Ofcom were overwhelmingly of the view that news from Edinburgh or Glasgow would be at least as remote, if not very considerably more so.

More widely, 20 years after John Major's disastrous relaxation of the ownership regulations, the re-regionalisation of ITV is desperately overdue, and it is greatly to the last Labour Government's shame that it never attempted to bring that about.

A central company might usefully hold one third of the shares in each of the franchise-holders, but another third ought to be in mutual ownership, with perhaps half of those reserved for the workers, while the remaining third ought to be held by the local councils.

There would be local programming in designated time slots, but far more than that, there would be national programming made locally. The country would see itself. One Nation, indeed.

Not only soap operas made in Manchester and Leeds while set in Salford and the Yorkshire Dales, but a return to things like (fairly highbrow) game shows live from Norwich.

A minimum of one drama and one sitcom per week would be both made and set in each of the ITV regions, with at least one from each region broadcast in prime time. As would be at least one light entertainment programme and at least one current affairs programme per week.

Yes, from the Borders. Yes, from the North of Scotland. Yes, from the Deep South West. All on ITV 1. Of course.

Although in general they would be, those current affairs documentaries would not necessarily, in any given week, be about the region that made them. World in Action was a Granada programme. For 35 years, in fact. It ought to be so again.

Each edition of BBC Alba's Eorpa brings one story from the Gaelic-speaking areas and one from elsewhere in Europe; I heartily recommend it when BBC Parliament shows it with subtitles.

That seems like a very good format to adopt, in fact: one story from the region, and one from anywhere else in the world, with a particular mission to cover the parts that have hitherto been ignored by most of the British media.

There would still be complaints about lack of attention to, for example, County Durham. But that would be no small part of what the municipal and mutual ownership structures would be there to address.

The ITV companies have done a huge amount to define the cultures, including the political cultures, of the areas that they covered. Here in the Tyne Tees region, that station's creation pretty much invented from scratch what little commonality is felt, even now, among the disparate communities that it serves.

But that of, say, the Borders was already very entrenched, and had been for many centuries, stretching back long before the Union. Parliamentary constituencies on either of Great Britain's internal borders ought to be required by Statute to straddle that frontier, and to have as near as may be obtained to 50 per cent of their voters on each side of it.

Moreover, the idea of using some regional structure to give either a proportional element to the House of Commons, or an elected element to the House of Lords, might one day become a serious possibility. I am not betting on that, but both ideas do come round a lot.

In which case, the areas to be used ought not to be those currently used for the European Parliament and certain other purposes, although they are nothing to do with the EU and they were invented by the Tories.

Rather, they ought to be those which have been used in the allocation of what are now called "Channel 3 licenses" since, in several cases, the 1950s.

The only problem is that, while one of them covers the whole of the border areas both in England and in Scotland, none covers the whole of the border areas both in England and in Wales.

Another one, though, was the first ever indigenous broadcaster on the island of Ireland.