‘Scotland’s future: a new national broadcaster’ | B. Winston- openDemocracy
The BBC was born on 1 January 1927 at the same time as the state itself – that is the state of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, also a new entity in 1927. It is not far fetched to suggest that the impulse for a unified broadcasting authority, the creation of which very much pushed radio’s technical capacities in the min-1920s, was intimately connected with the forging of a revised (if not a new) national identity consequent upon the breakaway of the Irish Republic. The BBC is, thus, a creature of Westminster in more ways than one. It is not only chartered and licensed by a distant Westminster. The Secretary of State for Culture has, by the latest iterations of these documents, direct powers: she chooses and pays the trustees who run the Corporation, for example. But more than that, its cultural and political remit is inexorably bound up with the UK (1927) project.
Jack Black 