Way of the World
In Parliament this week, Lord Young of Norwood Green caused uproar when he said the BBC could replace Gary Lineker with a woman “at half the price”. His Labour colleagues were appalled. And rightly so. The suggestion is outrageous.
“Half the price” would be far too much. After all, the BBC pays Mr Lineker £1.35million a year. Half of this would be £675,000. That’s more than any other BBC presenter except Zoe Ball. No one, male or female, should get such a vast sum just for hosting Match of the Day.
None the less, Mr Lineker will be back hosting it tonight. A humiliation for BBC bosses. On the plus side, maybe the experience will make them realise why it’s a mistake to give so much money and power to their stars.
And anyway, if they will insist on flinging such stupendous sums at presenters, they could at least start flinging them at the right ones.
Take Ken Bruce. For years, he pulled in the biggest audience in British radio: over eight million people a day. In return, the BBC paid him £385,000.
Match of the Day, meanwhile, is typically watched by around two million. Which means that Gary Lineker is paid a salary almost four times bigger than Mr Bruce’s – while attracting an audience four times smaller.
If BBC pay were remotely related to performance, Mr Lineker would have had Mr Bruce’s salary, and Mr Bruce Mr Lineker’s. In any case, Mr Bruce is the type of presenter who actually deserves big money, because he personally boosted the BBC’S ratings. The audience would tune in specifically to hear him.
Football fans, by contrast, don’t watch Match of the Day because they like Gary Lineker. They do it because they like football. So they would still watch it if he wasn’t there.
In fact last week, in his absence, its ratings shot up by 25 per cent. Still, it’s too late to give Mr Bruce a pay rise now. To the dismay of his millions of listeners, he recently quit Radio 2 to join a commercial station. Which, rumour has it, will be paying him rather more money.
If the BBC didn’t spend quite so much on Match of the Day, perhaps it
could have afforded to keep him.
The most fascinating thing about Oxfam’s new “inclusivity guide” is not that it advises staff to avoid the words “mother” and “father”. Progressive organisations have been trying to stamp out the word “mother” for years. So if anything, Oxfam is behind the times.
Instead, the most fascinating thing about the guide is the language it’s written in. Because its authors appear to be ashamed of the fact that it’s English.
“We recognise that this guide has its origin in English, the language of a colonising nation,” they whimper, apologetically. “We acknowledge the Anglo-supremacy of the sector as part of its coloniality.”
I hope the authors don’t feel too guilty for committing this heinous crime against modern progressivism. However insensitive, hurtful or even racist it may be to speak the English language, in this particular case they had little choice, because the guide is aimed at Oxfam’s staff. And English is the language that these staff speak. Had the guide been written in, say, Belarusian or Javanese, its intended audience almost certainly wouldn’t have understood it. So they wouldn’t have known which words they’d been ordered to avoid using, because they wouldn’t have known any of the words in the first place.
Obviously, the guide’s strictures don’t apply to the rest of us. Even so, they have given me pause for thought.
And as a result, I’m now consumed with guilt. This is because, I’m ashamed to confess, all the money I’ve ever spent in Oxfam shops has been in pounds sterling. Which is, of course, the currency of a colonising nation.
How awful it is to think that, for all these years, I’ve been forcing Oxfam to accept my British coins and banknotes, without giving a thought to how this might make its bosses feel. I can only imagine how distressing it must have been, to find themselves inflicted with all this hateful sterling. A currency built on Empire, slavery and greed.
It’s high time I acknowledged the Anglo-supremacy and coloniality of my donations – and promise not to make any more.
Humza Yousaf, the gaffe-prone favourite to become the next First Minister of Scotland, has committed his latest awe-inspiring blunder. At an event in Edinburgh this week, he asked a group of female Ukrainian refugees: “Where are all the men?” Politely, one of the women informed him that the men were in Ukraine.
No doubt the men would love to have joined them at the event in Edinburgh, but unfortunately they were otherwise occupied.
Despite having read several writeups of the gaffe, I’ve yet to find one that explains why on earth Mr Yousaf asked this bizarre question. And this leaves me with an uneasy feeling. Because, if Mr Yousaf didn’t know the reason why the men were absent, then it’s possible he didn’t know the reason why the women were present. After all, the reason is the same for both. Perhaps he assumed the women had all come to Scotland on a hen do.
These must be strange times for Scottish unionists. Naturally, they want the independence movement to fail, at all costs. For this reason, they must be praying that the SNP lumbers Scotland with the most useless First Minister possible. The worse he governs their country, the better.