Good Evening. This is the BBC News and I am Huw Edwards. I get paid vastly more than you so believe all that I say. I am reading the autocue upon which are written words by someone else. I get paid far more than them too. Whoever they are. Peasants very likely. My pay grade is well above that of the most senior General in the Army so Shaddap and listen. And Believe. Here are the headlines. The Pay Gap was mentioned today in Parliament, just as it is almost every day here at the BBC. It is scandalous that ladies are paid less than Gentlemen just because they are inferior. The American people, represented by a select group rose up and demanded the removal of President Trump's testicles. 14 people blocked a road in some small village in Idaho, wherever that is. And in breaking news, that B*astard John Humphrys in the next studio gets even more than me !!
He went on and on.
The Tavern was abuzz with the news that the BBC has been forced to reveal the pay of its staff, who as Mr Edwards points out, are very keen on telling you the truth and object very strenuously to the 'pay gap'. Sitting trouserless behind his desk, the famed autocue reader tried desperately to change the subject, telling us all the truth behind Syria, Mrs Merkel and that other utter B*stard, President Trump (who insists on taking no pay at all).
Even Ben Shapiro over in the US Room was chuckling.
Leftist BBC Trumpeted The Gender Pay Gap.
Turns Out They Have A GIANT Gender Pay Gap.So, the BBC, which has been whining about the gender pay gap for a while, has a little problem: the gender pay gap among its employees is huge.BBC boss Tony Hall has promised to close the gender pay gap by 2020, but there’s a lot of work to do. Here are some examples, as The Guardian reported:
Huw Edwards, the lead presenter for BBC News at Ten, the corporation’s flagship news broadcast, and who presents BBC coverage of state and international events, makes a yearly salary of between £550,000 and £599,999.
Our US customers might want to look up the exchange rate for those UK Pound thingos.Fiona Bruce, [I rather like Fiona. Such an 'English' girl] who has presented BBC News at Six, BBC News at Ten, Crimewatch, Antiques Roadshow and most recently Fake or Fortune, has a yearly salary between £350,000 and £399,999.John Humphrys, the presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today program since 1987 and the host of the BBC Two quiz show Mastermind since 2003 makes £600,000 to £649,999. Mishal Husain, another presenter on the Today program, along with BBC World News and BBC Weekend News makes £200,000 to £250,000.Gary Lineker, the BBC’s anchorman for soccer coverage makes £1,750,000 to £1,799,999. Clare Balding, reporter and presenter for coverage of major sporting events including six Olympic Games, horse-racing, Wimbledon tennis tournament and BBC Sports Personality of the Year makes £150,000 to £199,999.Among the 96 top names earning £150,000 or more, 62 are male and 34 are female.
As Humphys pointed out, he gets far and away more than the Head of the British Army who commands tens of thousands of chaps who can be armed to the teeth and ready for war with just a fortnight's notice and 5000 tons of paperwork with their signatures for the weaponry.
Peter Oborne says let’s compare and contrast two men called Nick.
General Nick Carter, the head of the British Army, has served his country for almost 40 years. He’s seen active service in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. Frequently risking his life, he holds the Distinguished Service Order, a medal for exemplary bravery.
This 58-year-old father of four earns £175,000 a year, and few would deny that he’s worth every penny.
This rather scruffy little scrote Nick has not enough personal presence nor natural authority to order a pidgeon to shit.
He has his own BBC breakfast show, and the high media profile that affords him meant he landed another plum job as a judge on ITV’s X Factor, as well as appearing in soap operas such as Coronation Street and EastEnders.
Now in his early 30s, Mr Grimshaw, who likes to go out partying with the model Kate Moss, earns about £375,000 —
that’s more than twice as much of our money as General Carter receives.
That’s morally offensive, and in itself a sign that something has gone horribly wrong with public service in Britain.
If Mr Grimshaw worked in the private sector, it would be none of our business. We could shrug our shoulders and blame market forces.
But Nick Grimshaw doesn’t work in the private sector, he works for one of Britain’s great national institutions, the BBC.
It takes about 2,500 licence fee payers, each forking out nearly £150 a year, to pay Nick Grimshaw’s hefty salary.
Many of those people will be struggling to pay their mortgage and raise a family. Yet if they want to have a television, they do not have a choice in whether they pay for a licence. They get prosecuted if they refuse to pay.
This disparity is indefensible.
Remember that the BBC fought a long rearguard action to prevent the world knowing about the extortionate sums it pays its senior employees. Now we know why.
The bosses at the BBC didn’t want licence fee payers to know about the culture of greed that has taken over at the top of an organisation that used to be renowned for its integrity. Nick Grimshaw is not by any means the worst offender. Many of the salaries paid to the senior BBC stars are far more disturbing.
Take the case of Huw Edwards, a talking head who presents the news by reading an autocue. A soft, easy job if ever there was one. Edwards, one of life’s plodders, might struggle to command £50,000 or £60,000 a year out in the real world.
Yet he is paid an unbelievable £550,000 per annum.
That’s 20 times the national average wage.
More than 12,000 licence fee payers have to put their hands in their pockets each year to pay for Lineker, who is notorious for dabbling in tax avoidance schemes.
And that £1.8 million is just a fraction of Lineker’s income, because he also works for BT Sport and has lucrative advertising contracts for such things as crisps.
Yesterday, just before the salaries were announced, Lineker tweeted this deeply offensive message: ‘Happy BBC salary day. I blame my agent and the other TV channels that pay more. Now where did I put my tin helmet?’
He clearly thinks the whole thing is good for a joke and all very funny.
Mr Lineker then followed up with a second hilarious tweet: ‘This whole BBC salary exposure business is an absolute outrage ... I mean how can Chris Evans be on more than me?’
No doubt all those people who pay his BBC wages felt their sides splitting.
Lineker — who loves to display his Left-wing conscience on Twitter — appears to have no conception whatever how offensive to ordinary licence fee payers all this is.
It has become clear that the publication of these grotesque salaries is the BBC’s equivalent of the MPs’ expenses scandal which brought the House of Commons low nine years ago. (It is not without irony that it’s only thanks to the efforts of MPs that the Beeb has been forced to unveil these salaries.)
Parliament largely cleaned up its act after the expenses scandal.
Will the BBC do the same?
The signs are that it has no intention of doing so at all.
Yesterday morning, the BBC director-general Tony Hall was asked by Today programme host Mishal Husain whether every one of those people is worth every penny of the licence fee that they earn.
Does Hall honestly think that Radio 5 part-time ‘shock jock’ Steve Nolan is worth £450,000 per annum (paid by more than 3,000 licence fees)?
That Chris Evans is worth £2.2 million?
Consider, by the way, that while General Nick Carter earns around ten times the salary of a private soldier in the Army, Chris Evans earns in the region of 80 times what a BBC researcher would.
That hardly smacks of decent moral values. And let’s not forget that many BBC presenters use their fame to earn massive extra income from speaking fees, as well as receiving a cast-iron pension.
The fact is that in the past 25 years, the BBC has been captured by a financially ravenous metropolitan media elite.
As far as this financial elite is concerned, it is right and proper that a newsreader such as Huw Edwards should be paid nearly four times as much from what is effectively the public purse as the British prime minister.
Almost as bad, the huge sums the state-owned BBC pays its stars distorts national political debate.
Lavishly remunerated presenters naturally feel gratitude to the state for their comfortable lifestyles, and see more government spending as the answer to every problem. Perhaps that’s why the BBC seems to spend so much time putting the case for increases in public sector pay.
How can Tony Hall really believe that his overpaid and pampered talent are worth every penny they earn?
I regret to say that we need to look no further than the American political novelist Sinclair Lewis for the answer. Lewis remarked:
‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.’
But the real problem for the BBC is that if it remains so divorced from the values and experiences of ordinary Britons, why should these licence fee payers feel obliged to support it with their hard-earned money.
You heard it here folks.
Enough to drive you to drink?
Have one anyway.
Pax
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