BBC wage rows are a right-wing distraction. Stop falling for it.
Seriously, get a grip. Look at what's really going on...
Hello. I am an independent journalist whose earnings in his career have ranged from £10k in a very bad year to £16k in my first staff job (at Pensions World magazine in Croydon) to £45k (working as head of comms for a software company).
Right now, I am on course to earn about £23k this year, mainly through ghostwriting gigs, some feature writing, and producing this newsletter, Patreon essays, and Twitch. I anticipate that figure to be higher next year when some projects come to fruition, but the point is that after 15 years in the media, I am hardly the king. With that context, I want to say this:
STOP GETTING ANNOYED ABOUT HOW MUCH BBC ‘STARS’ ARE PAID, IT IS A RIGHT-WING TALKING POINT DESIGNED TO DISTRACT YOU FROM REAL CORRUPTION AND GRIFTING IN THE SAME WAY THAT POINTING TO FOOTBALLERS’ PAY MAKES US IGNORE THE INCREDIBLE PAY DISCREPANCIES IN, FOR INSTANCE, THE FTSE100.
Is it somewhat ridiculous that Gary Linker was about to take a £400,000 pay cut and still be on more than £1 million? Yes, no question. But his pay is still a drop in the ocean compared to the money earned by CEOs you’ve never heard of who run companies that treat their workers abysmally and pay them appallingly.
Gary Lineker is a jug-eared pinata for right-wing pressure groups such as Defund The BBC to swing at, despite the fact that their funding is opaque and their backers chortle from the shadows as surrogates like diddy Darren Grimes do all the embarrassing shovel work on hot air outlets such as LBC and TalkRadio.
It’s obviously galling to see people paid far more than you think they are worth for a job you could do as well for a quarter of the pay. That’s why I should be allowed to invoice Amol Rajan — a man who seems to have secured work in every corner of the BBC empire on the back of sucking up to Evgeny Lebedev and being quite partial to sucking up to George Osborne too — for the several radios he has caused me to throw out of the window and shatter on the concrete below. And yet, I still don’t think BBC pay is the issue to focus on.
The right wants you to consider the BBC to be one gelatinous mass that must be eradicated. Instead, I prefer to be very angry with BBC News, while enjoying huge swathes of the corporation’s drama and documentary output. If the BBC is destroyed, it will not be replaced and the fabric of our nation, as piss-stained and cigarette burned as it is, would be further damaged.
I want BBC News to be seriously reformed and restructured, sending many of the managers to that farm in the country where all our sick pets went to live forever, but I don’t want the BBC to be destroyed. If you do, you should join Darren Grimes’ club, I believe they have badges and natty black shirts.
The BBC can be bad, but the alternative will be much worse.