IF the plot of the 2018 BBC/YouTube scandal gets any thicker, they’ll be able to use it to plug gaps in the Great Wall of China. With subterfuge and double-dealing at every turn, it’s got more twists than a night at Jack Rabbit Slim’s.

Yesterday, just when it all seemed to have reached an uneasy partial resolution with Wings Over Scotland’s account (but for some reason not Peter Curran’s) being restored and an absolutely brutal pasting of the BBC being delivered by journo guests on the previous day’s John Beattie radio show, Edinburgh Labour councillor Scott Arthur set off a giant bomb under the state broadcaster’s applecart.

READ: Alex Salmond’s full letter to BBC Director General over Wings YouTube ban

Greatly piqued at being fingered by the corporation as the triggerman who set the whole chain reaction in motion (which it turned out he was), he went on the John Beattie Show to protest his innocence and in doing so dropped his Auntie right in it.

Councillor Elder Dr Professor Arthur took advantage of an extremely generous 14-minute slot to reveal that the BBC – flatly contradicting what it had repeatedly sworn blind on Thursday – in fact practises a two-tier protocol for copyright complaints. Scruffy good-for-nothing urchins like Wings Over Scotland and Peter Curran get immediately thrown on the mercy of YouTube’s kangaroo court of presumed guilt, in the certain knowledge they’ll have their channels pulled and have to fight tooth and nail to get them back.

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But if you’re a nice respectable Labour councillor or a Unionist party, you get a discretionary quiet word from BBC Legal and five days of “constructive discussion” instead, during which you get to discreetly point in the direction of others and then act all surprised when the lawyers go after them instead.

Had it not been for Arthur’s bruised ego, the double standard might well have gone unexposed. But while he wept ostentatiously on Beattie’s shoulder about all the terrible mean things people had said on social media when they thought he was directly responsible for the takedown of the two accounts (when in reality it may only have been semi-directly), he methodically dynamited almost everything that BBC Scotland’s director of public policy Ian Small had said the day before when he was hastily shoved in front of the firing squad with only a handful of notes scribbled on the back of an envelope to try to improvise an alibi with.

EAMONN O'NEILL: BBC Scotland should now take the lead on copyright issues

Small’s claim that copyright complaints, once instigated, were an unstoppable force blind to the colour or creed of the culprit were exposed as a flat-out fib. We now know that the BBC can and does exercise discretion over who it pursues and how, and that by its grassroots nature the independence movement is far more likely to fall foul than the great and the good of the Unionist establishment.

It’s been a terribly exciting week for Wings Over Scotland. We’ve added hundreds of Twitter followers, a four-figure sum in spontaneous donations from people anticipating a court battle, and traffic which our panicked webhosts said was “melting” the servers, as well as the sort of publicity money can’t buy.

But the biggest prize is surely finding out, beyond any last vestige of dispute, where the Yes movement stands with the supposedly-neutral state broadcaster. It’s now an established and documented fact that we independentistas are Scotland’s second-class citizens, not afforded the same avenues of justice as our opponents. And while the BBC deserves some credit for at least partly acknowledging its prejudice in public, it took a huffy local politician who couldn’t bear being the bad guy to really blow the doors off and let the light in.

We’ll be watching the outcome of the “policy review” whenever it actually arrives, although we suspect it won’t be any time too soon and the best likely outcome is simply a reversion to the status quo that had existed until this week. Whatever it says, though, those Yes supporters and neutrals who for years have been reluctant to believe the worst of Auntie Beeb may never look at her with the same eyes again.