How we feel for the BBC women who aren’t as obscenely overpaid as the men

The main issue arising from the BBC pay revelations is not that of equality, where the BBC’S record compares favourably with that of similarly sized organisations.

All the people on the list are amongst the top 1 per cent of earners in the UK, so if the Guardian newspaper is arguing for greater equality, it ought to be on the basis of reducing male salaries.

The real issue is the salary levels revealed. John Humphrys presents a programme for three hours per day. Subtract half an hour for news bulletins, and a half of what remains to allow for his fellow presenter, and it comes to 75 minutes. Let’s give him fabulously generous preparation time on a one-for-one basis, which any teacher would die for, and his daily workload amounts to 2.5 hours. He also has researchers and producers working on his behalf. Even allowing for his Mastermind commitments – and how hard is it to ask questions? – £600,000 represents a huge overpayment.

In his interview this weekend, Mr Humphrys stated that he had already taken two pay cuts, making the mind boggle at what his starting salary must have been. Perhaps the true blame for these excesses lies with those managerial legends the Birts, the Dykes and the Grades, whose skilful negotiating technique obviously consisted of six words: “How much do you want? Agreed”. RODERICK MACFARQUHAR Viewforth Gardens, Edinburgh Are the hearts of those on National Minimum Wage or zero hours contracts expected to go out to those, it seems, “underpaid” women among the so-called stars in the BBC galaxy when it seems all too obvious many of the men are overpaid, if not overrated for what they actually do?

The BBC was intended to educate, inform, and entertain and its top heavy and well-paid executive ranks have certainly created a Corporation of their own – as for the licence payers, that is another matter.

JIM CRAIGEN Downie Grove, Edinburgh Apart from the revelations of significant gender, ethnicity and class inequalities, it was also revealing that of the 96 “personalities” with BBC annual salaries reported to be in excess of £150,000, some with hourly rates for actual time committed that truly are “obscene” for a public broadcaster, the 14 hailing from Scotland are now based around London. While some may justifiably question whether these individuals have the exceptional abilities that deserve such public funding, the fact remains that much talent continues to be drained from Scotland while those who remain, like their predecessors over decades before them, are often starved of genuine opportunities to progress their careers.

The new “Scottish BBC channel” would appear to be a step in the right direction of redressing this long-regrettable situation, but if the London-centric subjectivity (read anti-scottish Government bias) that seems to pervade Reporting Scotland and current affairs programmes is anything to go by, the ultimate ambition of many currently employed by the BBC here is to secure a more lucrative role down south. How else does one explain the constant fixation of seeking to denigrate the Scottish NHS, which on the whole functions remarkably well given the financial constraints imposed by Westminster, while the NHS in England seems to be almost on its knees and headed towards full privatisation. If genuine objectivity was to be found in the editorial staff of the BBC the recent Nuffield Trust Report (“Learning from Scotland’s NHS”) identifying leading practices in the Scottish NHS would have been headline news and the incessant drip of stories featuring supposed failures in Scottish health provision would have substantially declined, or at least been appropriately framed in a UK context, as any perceived relative deficiencies invariably are.

Hopefully the “New BBC Scotland” will open doors to those who are more interested in working to create a fairer and more egalitarian society in Scotland than those who are seduced into compromising their journalistic principles by seeking the paved gold streets of London promised by the self-serving British Establishment. STAN GRODYNSKI

Gosford Road Longniddry, East Lothian