Alex Salmond’s legal attempt to be included in Thursday’s BBC debate is a far more fundamental act than a simple electioneering exercise.

It is asking some searching and uncomfortable questions about just who British the Corporation really is.

How can the BBC possibly be impartial when it excludes the party of government in Scotland from a TV debate that is shaping the way many floating voters will cast their ballot. By excluding the Welsh and Scottish nationalists, it is failing in its democratic duty to voters across the UK.

Its charter states that it must deliver “impartial and independent reporting of the campaign, giving fair coverage and rigorous scrutiny of the policies and campaigns of all parties”. But clearly this does not apply to Scotland.

Rembember it is not a case of giving a voice to who, Alastair Bonnington, the former legal adviser to BBC Scotland, terms the 'downright loony parties, we are talking about the party of government.

So keen has the BBC been to stage the leaders’ debates, that it has ignored post-devolution politics. As a result, when matters of health, education, transport or justice have cropped up in the debates so far they have applied to English voters only. That does not mean that viewers in Scotland have been less engaged, but they have had to discount much of what is said, because those matters are decided at Holyrood, not Westminster.

The BBC defend their position by stating that the SNP is not a national party so is not relevent on a UK platform. But what defines a national party? The Tories currently only have one MP in Scotland out of 59 and only 15% of the vote. So why do voters north of the border have to listen to David Cameron broadcasting to a Scottish audience when the SNP, the ruling party is not allowed to?

It is not a nationalist arguement but in essence a unionist one. If the BBC still claims to represent the whole of the UK, then it should represent fairly all areas of the union as its charter obliges it to. By barring Alex Salmond and his Welsh counterpart from taking part, it is simply reinforcing long held views of those in the extremities of the United Kingdom that the organisation is nothing more than a dressed up English Broadcasting Corporation. An organisation that pays nothing more than lip service to anything north of the Tweed or west of the Severn.