A SECOND independence vote is “probably coming the down track” and the BBC must not allow a repeat of the bias of 2014, the head of the first Yes campaign has said.

Blair Jenkins, a former head of news at BBC Scotland who became the chief executive of Yes Scotland, warned his old employer to get ready for “Referendum 2”.

Last time, some BBC staff “were on a mission to undermine the Yes campaign”, he said.

Mr Jenkins was weighing into the row over BBC bias ahead of the first independence vote which has been kicked off by a new TV documentary about the referendum.

Alan Little, who led the BBC’s referendum coverage, told ‘Inside the Indyref’ some of his colleagues assumed the Yes side was “wrong” and thought it was their job to undermine it.

READ MORE: BBC in 'bias' row after senior journalist criticises colleagues over indyref coverage

He said: “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.”

Speaking to BBC Sunday Politics Scotland, Mr Jenkins backed up Mr Little’s account.

He said Mr Little had done a “great service” with a nuanced take on the referendum - painting the BBC as neither systemically biased nor blameless - and that the problems he had identified “would certainly echo my own experience”.

Mr Jenkins said: “There were BBC Scotland people saying to me that some of the people coming up from London were on a mission to undermine the Yes campaign in the final days.

“I think it is important that Alan has come out and said what he has because, you know, probably another independence referendum is coming down the track.

“I think it’s going to be really important for the BBC to learn from the first referendum experience, be better prepared for Referendum 2, if you like, than they were first time around and take more seriously the problems they would have.

He said the BBC failed to reconcile the conflict between being an impartial news provider and “the chief global cheerleader of all things to do with Britain and Britishness”.

READ MORE: Question Time row: BBC 'reject accusations' of bias after backlash over UKIP candidate

He said: “I said to someone in the BBC before I knew I would be involved in the [Yes] campaign that I thought perhaps it might be the biggest editorial challenge they’d ever faced, because the future of the BBC itself was so bound up in the result.

“It was very obvious that some of the correspondents parachuted into the final 10 days of the campaign really were struggling to catch up with the debate here. That was felt by BBC Scotland journalists, not just people external to the BBC. In a sense, the view in London was, ‘The only way Yes could possibly be winning is because BBC Scotland isn’t doing its job properly. Let’s send up the heavyweights and they’ll sort it all out’.”

Reacting to Mr Little’s comments, SNP depute leader Keith Brown said: “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."

READ MORE: Mark Smith: Of course the BBC is biased, but the bias of the switch-off campaigners is much worse

Ken MacQuarrie, controller of BBC Scotland during the referendum, defended the corporation's journalism in the programme.

He said: “Clearly people would come from their own perspective, possibly with their own thoughts but I felt that these were left behind, that people were doing a professional job as far as was possible, in every situation that they came across."

Mr Jenkins told BBC Sunday Politics that his private polling had put Yes ahead for several weeks before September 18, but this was kept it a tightly guarded secret, in case it prompted the UK Government to make a new offer on devolution.

But a newspaper poll 11 days before the vote putting Yes ahead “let the cat out of the bag”.