By Rab Bruce’s Spider

One of the enduring complaints many Scots have is the tendency among some English public figures to misuse the terms "British" and "English". It’s a point of apparently petty annoyance but words are important and how they are used can influence people.

The terms "Britain" and "British" are particularly troublesome since Britain is a geographical area and everyone born on the islands can be termed British. The problem arises because the official name of the United Kingdom is Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is a bit of a mouthful and therefore usually shortened to "Britain" for convenience.

However, the conflation of the terms, "England" and "Britain" stems from the Victorian era when the Empire grew to its greatest extent. Many writers of the time use the terms interchangeably and this deep-rooted habit dies hard for many.

Of course, different people have different ideas of what "British" means. We naturally tend to associate it with our own experiences but a problem arises because what those who live in the culturally dominant South East of England mean when they say "British" is not what many people from other regions of the UK mean. However, with control of the media, this South East England vision of Britain has been imposed all across the UK and is often presented to foreign visitors as the exemplar of what Britain is.

But why raise this now? Only a few public figures ever actually make the mistake of employing the wrong word these days, don’t they?

You would think so, wouldn’t you? But, sadly, the Tory vision of One Nation is gradually creeping into TV programming, especially on the BBC. You may have noticed the growing number of Union Flags appearing in TV shows and certainly many people have commented on the number of programmes with "British" in their title. Those, however, are small issues compared with what I saw recently when I watched a BBC Timewatch Special on the life of Queen Elizabeth I.

There is no denying that Elizabeth I was an important figure in British history, her influence and the result of her dying childless having a profound effect on Scotland as well as England. The trouble with this particular programme, which was allegedly a historical documentary, is that the presenter seemed very confused about which nation Elizabeth I was ruler of. There was much talk of "Our Nation" which was fair enough given that the presenter was English, although the BBC is supposed to broadcast all across the UK so the presentation was a little patronising. There were some references to England but there were even more to Britain and anyone with no knowledge of Elizabeth’s reign would have been forgiven for thinking that she ruled a United Kingdom of Great Britain. This was brought to a head when the presenter proudly proclaimed that Elizabeth developed the British Navy and that Britain defeated the Spanish armada.

Wow! Talk about rewriting history. It must be admitted that the English Navy which was really begun by Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, became the mainstay of the British Navy but the ships Elizabeth built were English, not British, and it was the English Navy which defeated the Armada because Scotland was not at war with Spain.

It is one thing for British Nationalists to portray their own values of what it means to be British but an organisation like the BBC really ought to take more care when presenting what is supposed to be a factual account of historical events but which actually turned out to be little more than British propaganda. It is bad enough that I can’t watch BBC News because of its bias but when the documentaries fall to such low standards of accuracy it really makes me wonder whether it is worth watching the BBC at all.