By Douglas Fraser

October 6, 2005
 
Labour ministers worked with the Conservative leadership and civil servants to intimidate the BBC into blocking a series of programmes that were seen as encouraging support for the SNP, according to secret government files.

Civil servants, who were supposed to be impartial, were required to find out the political leanings of academics taking part in the programmes. This formed a dossier of evidence with which the government accused the corporation of political bias to the SNP.

The 1977 campaign to intimidate the BBC involved Michael Foot and John Smith, both of whom would go on to lead the Labour party, as well as Francis Pym, who was Conservative shadow leader of the Commons. He was first to alert his opposite number, Mr Foot, to the programmes.

The civil servants involved in the campaign included a press officer in 10 Downing Street, and Jacqui Lait, who would go on to become a Tory MP and shadow Scottish secretary. Helen Liddell, who became Scottish secretary and is now high commissioner in Australia, was involved in the operation as well. In 1977, she had just left the BBC and become general secretary of the Labour party in Scotland.

The five programmes were made by the corporation in 1977 to examine how Scotland might look by 1980 if it became independent. At the time, the SNP had 11 MPs at Westminster, and the district council elections threatened Labour and Conservatives with a continued Nationalist surge. The pressure on the BBC was successful in having the programmes postponed, though they were broadcast after the council elections.

Information released under the freedom of information legislation has shown how a Labour minister in the Scottish Office, Harry Ewing, now Lord Ewing, feared the implications of the broadcast were "serious enough to warrant intervention by the government at the most senior level".

The revelations about Labour's campaign to intimidate the BBC because of fears about the SNP follow the release of a civil service memo advising Labour ministers on how "to take the wind out the SNP sails", while warning of the strong case for Scotland to be independent with access to oil revenues.

The memo written in 1974 by Gavin McCrone, then a senior Scottish economist, was circulated in senior government circles the following year, showing the argument for independence was much stronger than Whitehall had admitted.

That memo is to be the subject of a debate called by the SNP at Holyrood this morning. Kenny MacAskill, SNP deputy leader at Holyrood, whose research team turned up both documents from previously secret files, is to raise the new evidence of anti-Nationalist action by the 1970s Labour government."We now have government seeking to undermine democracy. The 1977 district elections were pivotal. The BBC was being leant on. If you interfere with it, then you undermine the democratic process," said the Lothian MSP.