THE SNP has called on the BBC to address its “persistent failings” in its coverage after a former reporter for the broadcaster revealed alleged bias during the independence referendum campaign.

Speaking during an interview for the BBC Scotland Yes/No: Inside the Indyref documentary, veteran broadcaster Allan Little said some of his fellow employees at the time “thought that our responsibility was to produce a series of pieces that would demonstrate how foolish it would be to vote Yes”.

It comes after the SNP last week raised complaints over the BBC’s coverage of the Brexit votes which saw Ian Blackford’s speech cut from the live footage on their news channel on three separate occasions.

READ MORE: SNP leaders launch BBC complaint over 'downplaying' party

The SNP’s Depute Leader Keith Brown has slammed the BBC after this latest admission, demanding that the corporation “gets to grips with devolution and [how it] handles Scottish politics in general”.

Little’s comments are due to be broadcast as part of the third part of the documentary series on Tuesday.

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In it, he claims that some of his colleagues at the time assumed that the arguments in favour of independence were wrong.

“I know how hard all my colleagues in London work at trying to get it right,” he said. “I am not cynical about that at all.

“But I was quite surprised by some of my colleagues failing to understand their own assumption that the Yes side was wrong.

“And that some of my colleagues, by no means all, not even the majority, but some of my colleagues, who thought that our responsibility was to produce a series of pieces that would demonstrate how foolish it would be to vote Yes.”

Protests were held outside the BBC’s Glasgow studio during the campaign, after complaints were made about their coverage.

Then first minister Alex Salmond was one of those openly critical about how certain stories were reported.

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Little, who was a consultant for the BBC Scotland documentary and who covered the campaign while employed by the corporation, added that he also had discussions about the roots of the independence movement.

“By the end of a very short discussion, I said ‘you’ve identified between you two causes. One, the Scots are chippy, and two, Alex Salmond is wily’,” he said.

“I said ‘if that’s what you think it is, if you think it is as shallow and as insignificant as that, you haven't understood what has been going on in Scotland for the last thirty or forty years’.

“But to people in London, to my astonishment, they were hearing some of the arguments that I was making for the first time.”

The shocking revelation has caused the SNP to hit out at the broadcaster and to call on it to do more to improve its coverage of Scottish politics.

"This is a welcome, important and courageous admission by a former senior BBC correspondent, with long experience of covering stories around the globe, that the corporation made serious mistakes in the way it covered the 2014 referendum,” said Brown.

"These problems of failing to cover Scotland properly continue to persist; just this week our Westminster leader Ian Blackford was three times cut from live on air coverage from Westminster.

"It is vital that the BBC addresses these persistent failings. It needs to be transparent as to how it plans to improve the coverage of the SNP at Westminster, gets to grips with devolution and handles Scottish politics in general, if it is to stand a chance of winning back the trust that they themselves admit they have lost."

Yes/No: Inside the Indyref will be broadcast at 10pm on Tuesday on BBC Scotland