All Episodes
Previous Next
July 21, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
25:53
#BBCPayGap： Is the BBC Run by Communists？
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a publicly funded media entity in the UK, and because of this, it has to adhere to certain transparency guidelines.
On the 19th of July, these salary details were revealed, the details of which sparked a media firestorm that is still going on.
For you see, the seven most well-paid people at the BBC are men.
And that's a problem.
The BBC was reforced to veil the salary of anyone earning over £150,000, and the BBC's pay scale goes up in increments of £50,000.
It seems that the BBC top brass and the high-paying stars knew what was coming in advance, and they appear to have already braced themselves for the backlash over the revelation that most of the highest earning people at the BBC are men.
The progressive press were quick to jump on this revelation, even though they must have known in advance that this was coming.
An example of this can be seen on an article by The Independent, where the tagline is, Corporation braces itself for sexism storm after reluctantly revealing how much top talent is paid.
They say that the BBC's newly published annual report shows that seven stars are paid more than half a million pounds a year, earning more than the Director General Tony Hall, and all of them are male.
Immediately after the salaries were revealed, Lord Hall was asked whether he felt shame over the gender pay gap and whether he was worried that female stars might start making sex discrimination claims against the corporation.
Expecting allegations of sexism, the BBC has already said it wants to address a gender imbalance that saw women making up only a third of those of the organisation's high-earning 150,000 or more pay bracket.
I think this does a fine job in and of itself to demonstrate the level of control that feminism has over the media in Britain.
Merely knowing that they're going to have to release the details of who is paid what at the BBC means that they know that they are going to be accused of sexism by the media at least.
In fact, the shame that Tony Hall is supposed to feel at this point was so important they decided to repeat it again later in this article.
And he was also asked whether he feared that the salaries list would become a lawyer's charter with female stars complaining that they had been the victims of discrimination.
Because, again, that is what everyone is expecting in the current environment.
And this is despite the fact that in the article announcing it, the BBC had already attempted to head them off at the pass by explaining why people were paid what they were paid.
First, the BBC pays below and sometimes much below market rates, both at managerial level and in terms of top broadcasting talent.
Second, the move will prove inflationary.
Those on the list will think to themselves, why is that inferior presenter getting paid more than me and will demand a pay rise?
And third, if you thought it was Tin Hat's time for the talent, pity the poor agents they work with.
This is a remarkably weak defence and does nothing to challenge the logic with which the progressive inquisitors are strapping the BBC to the torture devices.
And so, needless to say, it didn't work.
This became an international story when CNN decided to publish their own article regarding this, in which they give us some interesting facts and figures.
The difference in average earnings of men and women at the BBC is 10%, which is lower than the United Kingdom's average of 18%.
So the BBC is actually more progressive than the rest of the United Kingdom.
And they provide the BBC with a better defence than the BBC provided itself.
The BBC argues that it needs the flexibility to be able to pay its stars big bucks in order to effectively compete.
To be fair, the publicly funded organisation is up against commercial broadcasters.
If this isn't an admission that they know that the people being paid the highest amounts are being paid the highest because they are actually the top talent, as in they are being paid on merit and not because they are simply men, I don't know what is.
But the problem for the progressive feminist press is not how we came to these numbers.
The problem they have is that these are the numbers.
Looking at the top earners for the BBC, you'll notice that approximately a third of them are women.
And if you know anything about gender politics, that's a proportion that will probably stand out in your mind, given how female MPs are approximately a third of the House of Commons, and that women hold around a third of managerial positions.
It seems that in a free society with stringent anti-discrimination laws against women, that out of the total number of people who have the drive, initiative, confidence, and ability to make it to the top positions, approximately one third of those people are women.
Personally, I don't see how the configuration of their genitalia has any relevance to the job that they're doing.
But then I don't work for The Guardian, because apparently it's not just the BBC.
Pay disparity is a blight on the whole UK.
In this article, Polly says, gender, age and ethnic disparities in pay and prominence matter, but she never explains why these things matter.
She just asserts it and assumes we're on the same page.
Well, I'm afraid I'm not.
I don't see why there should be some great levelling of pay based on gender.
Because really, this is an earnings gap.
It's not a pay gap.
It is what these people have earned due to the content of their career and the audience they can attract.
As the Top Gear Fiasco showed us, presenters at the BBC and I'm sure at any other broadcasting corporation are not simply interchangeable.
It is not a factory line and they are not simply doing the same job for the same hours for the same pay.
They all do different things, they all have different strengths and weaknesses, and it really isn't fair to remove their education, their achievements or their character from the equation when deciding how much they should be paid.
This is after all what freedom is.
It is the freedom to be different from one another.
And one of those differences will be expressed in the amount of money you earn.
Because you are a different person to the people around you.
It is already enshrined in law that men and women with exactly the same qualifications and exactly the same experience and exactly the same capability will be paid the same.
But most importantly of all, none of the women working at the BBC have made an allegation of sexism.
At the time of recording this, there have been zero accusations that there are women at the BBC being paid less than men for the same job on the grounds that they are women.
Absolutely none.
There is absolutely nothing concrete or real about this story.
Everything that has been driving this quote-unquote scandal is a feminist ideological construct.
There is nothing in a liberal democracy that demands you be paid the same as someone else if you are not doing exactly the same job and you are not exactly the same person.
You should expect paid disparities.
And it is only feminist ideology that demands irrationally to see an equality of the median pay between men and women.
There is absolutely no reason to expect that that would be the outcome.
Men work longer hours in more high pay jobs that are more difficult, more dangerous, and they have more commitment, they take less time off, and women do the opposite.
They work shorter hours in easier jobs, they take more time off, and so on and so on.
When adding up the total aggregate of these groups pay, what lunatic would look at that system and say, well, I would expect men and women to come out with exactly the same amount of average pay.
And if they don't, I'm going to consider that to be a problem.
Just to be clear, this is not a problem.
This is the system working as intended because we are liberals and not communists.
But for some reason, the BBC has been buying into the counterfactual, reality-denying, feminist interpretation of these statistics for years.
In 2014, Tony Hall committed himself to hiring women as co-presenters to meet diversity targets.
He said that by the end of 2014, he wished to see half of BBC local radio stations with a woman presenting on the breakfast show.
And in the years since his declaration, the number of female presenters has risen from 20% to 44%.
And by 2016, the BBC was still promising to hire more women and now ethnic minorities.
In March of 2016, it was revealed that only 12.2% of its current staff are black and minority ethnic, which simply means non-white, although some white groups are included in that, such as the Roma, barely hitting its previous target of 14.2%.
Given that the UK is 86% white, and black and Asian people in the UK make up around 13%, that's a pretty good representation.
But it's still not good enough, and we haven't had it explained to us yet why we need to concern ourselves with the race of the people involved.
And coming back to women, in 2016, 48.4% of the current BBC workforce was female, with 41% of the corporation's leadership roles held by women.
It seems that there is actually no further need for diversity quotas at the BBC, but that's not going to stop them.
The BBC, of course, advertised certain job positions for women only.
Men may not apply.
And their rationale for this is, it's been acknowledged by broadcasters across the industry that there aren't enough expert female contributors appearing on air.
This gender discrimination flies in the face of everything we stand for as a meritocratic liberal society.
And of course they also have employment schemes that are open only to non-white people, which they have defended as the right thing to do despite being accused of being anti-white.
The BBC's response to the Sun's allegations was, as the Sun knows and has ignored, these are not jobs but training and development opportunities permitted under the Equality Act and to describe this as anti-white is utterly ridiculous and irresponsible.
Well why is that ridiculous and irresponsible?
Even if they are only training and development opportunities, they're still not open to white people and they're not open to white people on the grounds that they are white.
They say as we have an underrepresentation of people from a minority ethnic background in script editing roles at the BBC, it's the right thing to do.
Again, why?
This is certainly not the liberal thing to do.
So if you were a liberal, you can't be looking at this and thinking, well, that's the right thing to do.
If you're an anti-racist or an anti-sexist, you can't be looking at this and thinking this is the right thing to do.
It's only if you have the mindset of a communist, the sort of person who wants complete control over the system and wants to see the outcome be equalised rather than the opportunity be equalized that you could possibly think this is the right thing to do.
And the BBC have naturally had to defend themselves from allegations of sexism that don't even exist.
In an article called Reality Check, The Gender Pay Gap, released in response to this scandal, they give a perfectly adequate defense of what has happened.
They say, the pay gap is the percentage difference between the average hourly earnings for men and women.
The earnings on average per hour.
They know that they are aggregating this.
They are not comparing like for like.
They are comparing two different groups of people who have different activities and interests and methods of work and they are finding, shock and surprise, these people have a different outcome, as they should.
And they go further to say that, look, the numbers don't tell the whole story.
They do not distinguish between people who are being paid for doing multiple jobs within the BBC and those who are paid for doing just one.
And they only include what the BBC pays its talent directly.
So if a presenter is paid by an independent production company or the BBC's commercial arm, this is not included.
And they even have the details for specific categories of jobs.
For example, journalists, newspaper and periodical editors, which includes broadcast journalists, is 7.1%, lower than even the BBC's average of 10%.
And likewise for artistic, media and literary occupations, which includes presenters, actors, producers and directors, but also professions such as dancers and choreographers, the gap is just 2.7%.
I do not like the BBC.
I have criticised the BBC on many occasions in the past, and so it is not with any relish that I have to defend them.
But I want to be clear, there is no problem with pay disparity in the BBC.
People are being paid what they earn, and what they earn is what they're worth.
This is not based on their gender, this is based on their career history and their popularity.
For example, there was a great deal of hubbub raised over veteran presenter and radio host Chris Evans earning over £2 million a year.
He hosts a breakfast show on BBC Radio 2 that is the most listened to show they have.
We even have the figures.
For the quarter ending March 2017, so that's January, February and March of this year, BBC Radio 2 had 15 million listeners.
Of that share, Chris Evans' radio show was 9.4 million listeners for those three months.
And just to turn this into a dick measuring competition, that's just over what I get in one month.
In the three months they're talking about, I got 23.5 million views.
And that's on this channel alone.
On BBC's programme Newsnight, there was an interrogation of the BBC's director of radio and education, James Purnell, in which he essentially had to defend two contradictory positions at once.
The first one being feminist doctrine and the second one being British law.
I'm going to play some clips, but BBC Newsnight are remarkably sensitive about content claims.
So I'm using some elevator music in the background and I'm not using the entire screen for the clip.
So sorry if that's an inconvenience at all.
We've said all on air we're going to get 50-50 and we've also said we're going to get rid of the gender pay gap.
So that's the gap between all men and women employed at the BBC which is currently 10%.
So what that means that off-air, you know, whether it is people in graphics, whether it's people in editing, whether it's people in planning, will all have pay parity by 2020, all of them.
On average, so the whole when you compare what women earn compared to what men earn, you will get rid of the gap which exists at the moment, which is about 10%.
And we've said something which I don't think anyone else has said, which is we want to get rid of the gender pay gap.
We're already a bit better than the national average, but we want to go further.
Notice how specific he has to be there.
He has to placate the screaming feminist hordes in the media, including the woman who's interrogating him.
And throughout the course of this interview, it becomes blatantly obvious that she doesn't even know why she's asking for parity.
But what actually is parity in terms of on EOP?
Is it same as same job?
That's a very good question.
I think if someone's got exactly the same job, the same experience, the same history, the same audience value, of course they're paid the same amount.
She doesn't know why this is the case.
I mean, he specifically says, well, look, it's on average.
That's how it has to be done.
And even then, I don't think that he has a method to do it because he goes on to contradict himself when pressed for details.
With top talent, that's very rarely the case.
It's very hard to compare people on this list.
So what we do to get right talent is we have an individual negotiation with them.
It's a rigorous process.
We do research.
We look at what the audience wants what they bring to their BBC, the commercial value, and we negotiate something based on that.
That will never produce parity and she simply goes, okay, to it.
Because it's reasonable.
It makes sense to interview people and assess people on their individual merits.
It's how you avoid discrimination.
It's how you operate a meritocratic liberal society.
But she doesn't even think about it.
She doesn't consider that this is a direct contradiction to him saying we're going to have a quality of outcome.
Right.
So let's just look at an example then.
You've got, for example, you have, say, three male presenters and three female presenters on the Today programme.
They're broadcasting for the same amount of time, a lot of them of extremely good experience.
Would you expect them to get the same money?
I wouldn't actually, because, you know, John Humphreys obviously brings something pretty unique.
He's the outstanding interviewer of his generation.
He's got a unique value to the BBC and that is something that we recognise.
Like all, you know, but you recognise it when he doesn't even need it recognized.
It's extraordinary because he said there that actually he didn't look for pay rises, but he kept getting them.
He kept getting pay rises because he's the best.
He was just described as the outstanding interviewer of his generation.
That's why he's making lots of money.
But again, it just goes in one ear and out the other.
She doesn't even consider what he said.
But the thing that annoyed me the most is that she shamelessly came out and said that the highest earning men at the BBC needed to have their pay cut on the grounds that they are men.
By and large, especially in the older categories, men get paid a lot more than women.
So are you going to take money from men and give it to women?
I can hardly believe the audacity of the question.
Why should men have their pays cut just because they are successful and male and have that money given to women who just aren't?
Women who have no right to claim any part of their salary.
And the worst part about this is that this isn't the only time she brings this up.
She brings this point up at least three times and listen to his response.
Quite a lot of men have been taking pay cuts already.
John Humphreys said that today.
And will you be expecting more male on-air talent to take a pay cut?
I'm not going to start negotiating live on air.
How are you going to actually do that?
I mean, how are you going to say, well, you're going to say to Gary Lineker, you know, you're earning whatever you're earning, 2.6 million.
Can you just give 600,000 up because we want to bring on new female talent and sport?
How will that go down?
Well, we've been doing that already.
So you might do it about Gary Lineker, for example.
I'm not going to start going into individual contracts.
What has Gary Lineker done to deserve a pay cut?
The answer is absolutely nothing.
And yet she's demanding it.
She's recommending it.
She's saying, so are you going to just simply arbitrarily cut his pay on the basis of his gender and then redistribute that money to someone else?
Amusingly, there is another guest on this interview called Dame Liz Forgan.
She's a former BBC executive and her opinions apparently don't line up with the prevailing feminist orthodoxy.
Thanks very much for the moment, James Purnell.
Liz Forgan, you were here 20 years ago.
Should you have done more 20 years ago?
Because as Chris Cook said, it gets more difficult the older the presenters are.
Probably yes.
And I think about myself.
It never occurred to me to ask what the pay range was of the job I was going to the BBC to get.
Now, if I had been a man, I probably would have done.
So I think women have some responsibility also in this history that we are less assertive, have been in the past anyway, less assertive than men.
Don't look at me like that.
That's not an excuse.
How would that go down?
That is not an excuse.
That is not a justification.
It may be partly a historical explanation.
She knows exactly why women at the BBC earn less on average than the men and why they are not the highest earning people at the BBC.
But her answer, the fact that it's the women's fault, goes against the prevailing feminist dogma of men are oppressing women.
And therefore, she has to apologise and try and explain, look, I think this might just be the reason.
And when she's presented with our host's suggestion to level the playing field, she balks.
And if that is really a priority for the BBC, which it clearly now has to be, then there are ways of addressing this issue without taking money away from men directly.
I think that would be a very crude way of going about change.
But if you look at the inevitability that there will be kinks and different problems around the bed, I mean, what Tony Hall committed the BBC to to be, given that we are halfway through 2017, is to have this fixed.
Essentially, in two and a half years.
Well, I would be amazed if he manages it, frankly.
I'm sure he means to, but, you know, as James started to illustrate, this is very complicated stuff.
There is never just one reason why somebody's paid what they're paid.
And so far we have seen absolutely zero evidence to suggest that it's sexism that accounts for the pay disparity.
But it doesn't matter because it looks like the male presenters might well face a wage cut and indeed as he said some already have on the grounds that they're male and the women are not excelling to the same degree.
And don't forget that they've already made this intersectional.
So there's a huge pay gap between white and non-white people.
And don't forget that last year that BBC presenter, award-winning BBC presenter John Holmes was sacked for being a white man and the corporation wanted more women and diversity.
I hope you all understand that at this point the BBC is basically being run by radical feminist fruitcake Jessica Valenti who in 2014 called for gender discrimination against men by paying them less on the grounds that they're men.
She says what if the boldest solution for the wage gap isn't about raising women's salaries at all?
What if we paid men less?
She was rebuffed by the vice president of education and employment at the National Women's Law Center who said that would be illegal and a violation of the Equal Pay Act because this is discrimination based on gender.
Feminist ideologues are completely misinterpreting the concepts of the earnings gap and the concept of equality and using it to bully and browbeat men into actually taking pay cuts.
If there is a way of portraying this that isn't vindictive and spiteful and utterly illiberal, let me know.
Because this is just obscene.
What they are asking for is something illegal that has been outlawed for the last something like 30 years.
Why are they doing this?
And why is no one simply telling them no?
And if you are a licensed paying British citizen, this is costing you something to the tune of around £100 million.
That's according to BBC's diversity advisor Lady Gray Thompson, who said that it would have to spend around £100 million on better reflecting the makeup of its audience and called for executives who fail to embrace change to be fired.
They want ideological hegemony and if you oppose these measures at all, they want to get rid of you.
Seriously, imagine as a man, you go into say nursing and you say, well, male nurses now need to be paid a portion of the female nurse's salary because male nurses are not making as much.
Oh yeah, by the way, this whole thing is going to cost you about £100 million, and yes, as a man, I personally stand to benefit.
Imagine doing that.
Why would you accept it when women do it?
Why would you accept that?
You can imagine the progressive joy when it was revealed that not only would the new Doctor Who be female, she would be paid the same as Peter Capaldi, the previous Doctor Who.
Why?
Well, it's certainly not because of their merits.
Jody Whittaker has eight nominations to her name for her acting career.
Peter Capaldi has not just been nominated for awards dozens and dozens and dozens of times, he has also won dozens of awards.
Peter Capaldi and Jodi Whittaker are not equals.
When it comes to their career history as an actor, why should she be paid the same as him?
Unless of course he took a massive pay cut and it's just the same pay for every doctor and has been since the start, which I rather hope is the case, but I can't imagine that it is.
The BBC pay gap debacle has been a feminist witch hunt based on a childish interpretation of not only what the wage gap is, and again, it should be called the earnings gap, but a childish interpretation of what equality is.
Frankly, an illiberal interpretation and the sort of interpretation I would have expected to see in the Soviet Union.
They have a Marxist interpretation of what equality is, equality of outcome, compared to the British liberal interpretation of what equality is, which is equality of opportunity.
That's what we have in this country, and we shouldn't expect to see an equal outcome, and that is a good thing.
I know it's rather gauche to be concerned about the welfare of a millionaire, but I don't see why BBC stars are forced to endure a grim day of self-flagellation.
I don't think they've done anything wrong.
And it's made all the more ironic when The Guardian, one of the farthest left, most feminist, most progressive outlets, claim it is the right-wing press who are drumming up this scandal.
When in the very same article, they still put pressure on the BBC to reduce the gender gap and achieve equality of pay.
They are pathological.
I don't even think they know that they're doing it, but they're completely hypocritical, they're completely illiberal.
▲
Export Selection