The Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish never cease to complain that the BBC is really the English Broadcasting Corporation. Despite its chorus of regional accents, they imagine that it is full of metropolitan luvvies who venture beyond the M25 only rarely and in trepidation.

The BBC Trust's review of coverage of UK nations and regions suggests that it has embraced the same implausible view. It claims that BBC journalism is failing the UK's devolved nations and favouring England. It is utterly wrong.

By examining only UK network news, the trust has ignored whole swaths of the BBC's own journalism. Since devolution, Scots have had dedicated coverage of the Holyrood Parliament and a national news programme of their own. BBC Scotland opts out of Newsnight to transmit Newsnight Scotland. Wales is equally well supplied. BBC Northern Ireland provides for Ulster appetites on radio, television and online.

This expensive reality is overlooked by the report's assertion that BBC news shows “a general bias in favour of stories about England”.

The real losers are English licence-payers who have no Radio England and no Reporting England. The nations that are not England get dedicated journalism; England, where more than 80 per cent of the population lives, gets news restricted purely to regions that are tailored to the vagaries of transmission technology, not real communities.

Gordon Brown believes separatism can be beaten by a relentless focus on Britishness. By requiring BBC network journalism to give higher priority to “the union's variety, the state of the union and the future of the union”, the BBC Trust thinks that it can help. But it ignores the BBC's own West Lothian Question. Why should licence-payers in the largest part of the UK finance more news about Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? Why should they endure lectures about the devolved nations instead of directly relevant programming?

I am a unionist too. I would love to believe, as the report urges me to, that popular interest and enthusiasm can be aroused, by better coverage of devolved policy on network news. But until England is treated fairly what is proposed can only deepen resentment of Britain's imbalanced constitution. If nations are imagined communities, then the BBC imagines Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland better than the UK. Worse it often fails to imagine England at all.

Citizens of the devolved nations value news about their homes. Why does the BBC Trust imagine that the English are different?

Tim Luckhurst is a former Editor of The Scotsman and Professor of Journalism at the University of Kent

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