You jealous, feminist fanatics have missed the point...again
WHY have so many perfectly sensible people suddenly turned into Bolshevik levellers and wild feminist fanatics? The BBC’s revelations about what it pays its most prominent staff have prompted a seething mass of resentful raving, worthy of Chairman Mao or Germaine Greer at their worst, while thought and reason have been flung out of the window.
This is a country where missing the point gets you promoted, but for goodness’ sake, let us please think about this. The salaries involved are all unthinkably vast for most people. If it was ever possible for the great majority to get rich by working, it certainly isn’t now. That’s why the ghastly Lottery is so popular. An annual salary of £60,000 a year would be great riches for almost everyone in Britain.
It can’t be otherwise. There isn’t enough wealth for us all to be opulent. But in a wise society we accept that there should be big rewards for exceptional talent and effort. And in a wise society, rather than hoping to pull such people down, we dream quietly of becoming one of the well-off.
Oh, and by the way, can we please stop using the daft measure of ‘paid more than the Prime Minister’? The PM’s pay is absurdly low, because two recent holders of the job were a grim puritan and a personally rich man, who held their salaries down so that they could look principled.
AS FOR the supposed ‘discrimination’ against women, I expect you’d find a similar ‘discrimination’ against men among supermodels. So what? Maybe that will change in time, but it is a fact of life now. Broadcast entertainment and news journalism have tended, until very recently, to be male-dominated activities. That’s all these figures mean. I can’t stand Chris Evans or Graham Norton, am baffled by the appeal of Vanessa Feltz and I don’t really know or care who Gary Lineker is, but I grasp that millions of other people like them a lot, and watch or listen to the BBC because they are on air. And it’s that hard-to-measure factor which leads to these Hollywood salaries.
I’m much more puzzled as to why the uninteresting Mishal Husain is paid so much more than Jenni Murray or Jane Garvey, both far more engaging broadcasters, than I am bothered about supposed sexism.
Likewise I can’t see why the Today presenter Nick Robinson is paid so much more than his colleague Justin Webb, who is at the very least his equal in skill and appeal. By saying this, of course, I invite people to make similar remarks about me. Well, let them. Because here’s the real point of this argument.
It’s not about high pay, or sexism. It’s about the fact that the BBC is financed by the licence fee. You can go to prison for not paying it. You cannot go to prison for not buying The Mail on Sunday, which is why I’m not currently planning to publish details of my own pay.
The real issue is that the BBC is not really responsible to anyone, for anything. Politicians fear to bully it, and in any case they represent themselves, not us.
Its internal government is full of dim bureaucrats who couldn’t find Birmingham on a blank map of Britain, and who cannot take or respond to criticism. What the BBC needs is a small, powerful, mostly elected supervisory board, picked by licence-payers and free of party politics. Candidates for such a board would get airtime on all BBC stations to stand for office. Among other things, it could ask if these high salaries are truly needed to stop talent being poached elsewhere, often a very thin case.
It could demand the return of real quality to drama and documentaries, and it could appoint independent commissioners to investigate complaints of bias and inaccuracy, which are currently fended off with delay and evasion. But we will only get such a thing if people are not distracted into frenzies of envy and political correctness.
MY thanks to an observant reader, who, reading and watching reports and film of an attempted robbery by motorbike-riding thieves in Penge, South London, noticed a melancholy fact.
The brazen crime, in broad daylight, happened right outside what was until 2010 a handsome Victorian police station, blue lamp and all. Opened in 1872 because of concerns about rising crime, it was closed seven years ago because it was ‘too expensive’ and ‘inefficient’.
Police chiefs still refuse to accept that their abandonment of regular foot patrols and mass closure of such stations were bad mistakes.
They also pretend, falsely, that they haven’t enough officers to patrol on foot. They actually have far more officers than they did in the days of Dixon, and fewer duties.