Alex Salmond condemned over BBC 'Nazi' comment

Alex Salmond is being urged to apologise by opposition politicians in Scotland after he used a term linked to Nazi Germany to describe a BBC adviser.

Scotland's First Minister hit out at the corporation after his planned appearance on a sport programme ahead of the Six Nations Scotland-England rugby match was dropped on political grounds.

Salmond suggested that the BBC was "in thrall to Downing Street" and likened the corporation to "tin-pot dictatorships".

But the most controversy came after he compared one of the corporation's advisers to a Gauleiter, a term given to provincial governors in Germany under Hitler. The term has also come to mean someone in authority who behaves in an overbearing manner, similarly to a "little Hitler".

In response, Scottish Labour described the comments as an "ugly smear", while the Scottish Tories slammed Salmond's "bully boy tactics".

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie called on Salmond to "retract this slur on the integrity of the BBC".

Speaking to The Sunday Herald, Salmond explained that his appearance on the show to discuss rugby had been arranged, but then a BBC adviser called him to cancel. Salmond then said: "The political Gauleiter we should call him now, intervened to say this shouldn't happen and, really, he's lost the plot".

He added that people like the unnamed adviser are "in thrall to Downing Street now and that is actually the worrying thing. What this means is that an editorial decision, a journalistic decision on the BBC by the sports editor, has been overridden for political reasons by the political advisers. That's what you get in tin-pot dictatorships. You're not meant to get it in the BBC."

Opposition leaders were quick to pounce on the comments, including Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson saying: "Now we have the First Minister himself using words like 'dictatorship' and 'Gauleiter' to attack a BBC official for daring to deny him his face on the television.

"It is a completely inappropriate outburst from a man supposed to be running Scotland, and symptomatic of the SNP's 'attack mode' where they try to destroy anyone with whom they disagree."

Scottish Labour external affairs spokeswoman Patricia Ferguson MSP said: "People want the first minister to get behind the team, not get on television. What is totally unacceptable, however, is for the First Minister to accuse journalists of occupying the post of a Nazi district leader. That is an ugly smear.

"Maybe he doesn't understand quite how offensive that term is, in which case he should withdraw it today. But if he is familiar with what the term means, that is a far more serious breach of the standards expected of his high office and he must apologise for it."

A spokesman for Salmond said that the first minister was "rightly referring to over-officious BBC officials, and the real concerns about editorial decisions taken by BBC journalists being overruled by bureaucrats on political grounds".

He added: "As the Sunday Herald copy says, 'the term has come to mean an overbearing bureaucrat'. That is unacceptable, and the first minister will be raising the issue with Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, when he meets him in Edinburgh on Thursday.

"The first minister didn't complain when he was compared on the BBC to Robert Mugabe, and the opposition parties' obsession with trying - and failing - to do down the SNP is clearly causing them to ignore the real issue of editorial independence."

A spokesman for the BBC said that the corporation must give "due impartiality" across all of its output, and so featuring Salmond and not any other political leader on the rugby show would have been unfair.

"Given the nature of political debate around Scotland's future and the proximity of local government elections in Scotland, it was decided that it would be inappropriate to give undue prominence at the moment to any single political leader in the context of the Scotland-England game," he said.

This is not the first time that the BBC and Salmond have clashed, as in 2010 the Scottish politician launched a stinging broadside against the "BBC machine" for his party's exclusion from the televised prime ministerial debates.

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