Day we finally learned Auntie’s dirty secrets
IN a deeply ill-judged post, Gary Lineker yesterday made light of his BBC salary of up to £1.8million, which swallows up the licence fees of around 12,000 viewers.
‘This whole BBC salary exposure business is an absolute outrage,’ he tweeted. ‘… I mean how can @chrisevans be on more than me?’
Hard-pressed TV owners, forced on pain of prosecution to pay £147 a year to keep him and his colleagues in luxury, may be forgiven for failing to see the funny side.
Nor should they accept Lineker’s smug attempt to justify his pay by tweeting: ‘I blame other TV channels that pay more.’
Leave aside that he is paid substantially more than the £1.8million, with lucrative work for Walkers Crisps and BT Sport – all thanks to his exposure on the BBC.
If there were a genuinely free market in broadcasting talent, with no BBC, neither he nor his colleagues could hope for remotely comparable salaries elsewhere.
As it is, this statist behemoth distorts the market. Indeed, in national radio the BBC
is the market. Weaker private broadcasters struggle to match its bloated generosity. This inflates their own wage bills, leaving them less for programme-making and reinforcing the corporation’s dominance. Put bluntly, the BBC is far too big.
What makes this all the more damaging to democratic debate is the monotonous soft-Left bias of BBC staff who talk only to each other and friends at the Guardian. Take Lineker, who condemned as ‘hideously racist’ those who questioned the ages of adult migrants posing as child refugees. Why should the decent people he insults be forced to shower him with cash – which this supposed liberal then greedily invests in tax avoidance schemes?
Indeed, how much longer can his like go on enjoying the best of both worlds – the security, perks and pensions of the public sector, and salaries that go with the risks in cut-throat commercial enterprise?
Yesterday’s tantalising glimpse told us nothing of the 100 or so BBC managers paid more than the Prime Minister, while the earnings of presenters such as David Dimbleby, paid through private companies, remain cloaked in secrecy.
The fact the BBC fought tooth and nail to prevent these revelations speaks volumes for its arrogance and sense of entitlement. No wonder a body that receives such largesse from taxpayers fights so vehemently for public sector pay rises.
The irony is that with female staff now raging against the gender pay gap (which shows up the hypocrisy of the Beeb’s militant feminist agenda), there’s every sign the salary bill will increase to close the divide – with women being paid more, instead of overpaid men receiving less.
But isn’t that the public sector mentality in a nutshell? It’s only our money, after all.