“Failure to attend to this matter,” their report stated, would result in “stagnation”, at least, and “at worst in secession and dissolution”. Furthermore, the “accession to membership” of countries such as “Greece and Portugal would add substantially to the problem”. Because this advice was so recklessly ignored, everything has panned out exactly as MacDougall and Co predicted. If the BBC was even remotely clued-up and keen to obey its legal duty under the Charter, it might have been interesting for us to hear about these authoritative predictions. But so lost is it in that fog of ill-informed groupthink, I doubt whether anyone in that absurdly self-regarding organisation has ever heard of the MacDougall report.