So, who feels sorry for BBC D-G Mark Thompson who moans he is paid but a third of someone doing the same job in the private sector? Isn’t it awful? I wonder that instead of Children In Need we should have a “DG in Need” – a chance for the nation to put their hand in their pocker and see if we can bridge the wage gap for poor Mark? Then AGAIN there is the pesky reality that Thompson and the rest of the BBC fatcats have the security of tenure of the State sector with salaries out of all proportion to others in this sector. I was invited onto the Nolan Show to discuss this earlier today but had no spare time. My issue is not so much the expenses, nor even the wages – it is that State funded broadcasting is anachronistic, massively expensive, biased and dangerous to liberty.
BECAUSE HE’S WORTH IT?
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Doing the same job in the private sector?
Where?
Is there a private sector company which operates a nasty scheme in collusion with the state whereby anyone wanting to buy a product from any of its competitors is compelled to pay it a fee or get a fine and a criminal record?
No. There isn't.
Well said – you should have somehow found time to go on the show though.
The BBC just don't get it. Last night the truely vile Richard Bacon (Google for drugs and Bacon) was totally defending the BBC and their corrupt little regime. We've also had the likes of Nicki Campbell doing the same.
The BBC isn't commercial. Private hospitals are commercial the NHS isn't.
If you take the BBC's line then no one should be able to find out what an NHS Nurse or Doctor gets paid as the private sector could poach them. What shit.
Working for the BBC gives you as an artist a huge market and almost unlimited funds to promote yourself. Just look at the number of beeboids that make money out of writing books or doing other TV work, writing for newspapers and so on.
The BBC can't have it both ways. Either they are commercial (my preference) in which case, scrap the TV tax and let the BBC raise its own money OR the BBC is a state controlled organisation that has a duty to keep salaries and wsate to a minimm just like the NHS.
The Director-General of the BBC has an incredibly simple solution to the problem of only being paid 1/3rd of someone doing the same job in the private sector. He can resign and go and get a job in the private sector.
Doing the same job in the private sector?
This is the same line pedalled by MPs, that is they would get paid a lot more in comparable work in the private sector. So why dont they just resign and work in the private sector if they are so highly valued? But ofcourse they wont leave – MPs and Beeboids. Most of them are useless, and not fit for any real job.
pete
Your comment is short, to the point, and deadly accurate. Post it in as many places as you can.
DP111. True most MPs that leave the House of Commons end up earning less than they did as an MP.
Thompson is a real piece of work. Fortunately he appears too stupid to realise just how arrogant and self serving he sounds.Yes I did read his special pleading.
My solution is simple. Dismiss all the top executives and offer their jobs to younger ambitious underlings at 1/3 of the money. I have no doubt you would be bowled over in the rush of applicants.
It is just no longer possible to defend these salaries and expenses. When the recession turns into a real hard depression men like Thompson are going to have to realise they are the really expendable useless drones.
Who in their right mind would continue doing a job if there was the same job out there that paid 3x as much? What is this clown smoking? What an utter cock.
He was hardly 'moaning'. He was asked about his wage, perfectly reasonable that he is held to account for this and he answered. Would you have him ignore the question.
No accuastion of bias in this post, on the other hand the BBC strangley decided to invite you on to one of its programmes even though you're an ardent critic? How odd.
Wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall at the BBC's Remuneration Committee (assuming Thompson doesn't just decide his own salary)
Just how does it decide what fraction of Thompsons potential salary in the private sector he should be paid. Lets pay him, say, Half? No, a quarter? What about a third? Mad Hatters Tea Party makes more sense.Hospitals employ around 4-5,000 staff and the going rate for Chief Executives is less than a third of Thompsons salary, and they get sacked if too many patients die. What's Thompsons level of responsibility? What does he actually do other than waffle to keep the Board happy.
This "what I could earn elsewhere" argument is toffee. The "I'm doing you a favour working here" doesn't wash. Readvertise the job with NO salary, just expenses, if its a priviledge to work there. Better still auction of the DG's job, see how much some would PAY to run the BBC.
New fake charity: "Help the Wealthy" (Prop. M Thompson)
Pete's point is wide of the mark. Thompson has no role in collecting the licence fee; nor does he set it.
The assumption of almost every poster that there is a corps of BBC types distinct from commercial broadcasters and incapable of working in the independent sector is wholly ignorant.
Senior BBC people are sought after by their commercial rivals. The people running Channel 4 programmes, ITV, Sky's main channel and numerous departments and programme strands in commercial TV are ex-BBC. Likewise, many BBC execs moved to the corporation from the commercial sector. Thompson himself was running Channel 4 in his last job.
As for security of tenure…ask Greg Dyke about that.
I see slapper Emily Maitlis has now appeared in LA. Why? So she can join 500 other beeboids? How can the BBC prattle on about climate change yet make no attempt to cut back on flying itself?
Anon: Utter bollocks. The DG of the BBC does have a say in the licence fee, in fact the twat never shuts up about it. Also he is the head of the BBC so is responsible for the collection of the TV tax. The fact the BBC outsourced it to a Labour organisation full of thugs and criminals to collect it is another point.
Nick Cohen,'Standpoint' magazine (July/Aug.):
"They Who Speak for England"
[Extract]:
"I hope that soon the BBC's presenters will not be able to pose as tribunes of the people without admitting to their audience that they live like princes at public expense and that the taxpayers will be able to hold the civil service to account for what it does in their name and with their money."
Most people don't understand how anyone can be worth the sums the likes of Thompson are paid. What do they do to deserve so much money? However, the smug, overpaid metropolitan elite overstep the line when they start thinking they're actually worth it – then they 're really taking us for idiots.
Telegraph' leader:
"Massive public-sector salaries cannot be justified"
[Extract]:
"The BBC emerges from this affair as a service corrupted by control-freak ideology and the more extreme private-sector spending habits: not a happy combination – nor a unique one. The senior employees of local councils and state monopolies are public servants when they want to protect their privileges but quickly turn into commercial players when they negotiate remuneration. This opportunistic blurring of public and private roles is an insult to the people who pay these huge salaries. Just as licence payers never agreed to throw hundreds of thousands of pounds at BBC department heads, so the public was never consulted about the lavish salaries of local-government executives. These things did not matter very much when the economy was booming but, at a time when staff are being laid off in their thousands, the inflated salaries and guaranteed pensions of public servants, to say nothing of politicians' expenses, are a source of increasing tension in society."
The "what I could earn" argument I saw best played out with Hospital Consultants. The NHS full-time consultant rate was around £90k. They just dropped 10% of it and worked in the private sector "to actually earn what they could privately" in the the 10% plus a few extra hours – usually double.
What the bloody lawyers said is what Mark Thompson said. Pay me to work in public service on a rate like what the lawyers in private practice earn – the Carter Ruck libel crowd and the coirporate fat cats. As a result we pay Cherie Blair barrister £250k, not to save lives, but to witter about the right of a schoolgirl muslim provocateur to wear a hijab.
Now you don't have to be very good at maths to work out who is good value, and who is taking the piss out of the public.
Anonymous @ 9:43 AM
As for security of tenure…ask Greg Dyke about that.
Yeah, but there was a, shall we say, special issue involved, not general incompetence and cluelessness.
And let's not act as if media types shuffling around companies like the way football coaches shuffle around from one team to the other is anything like the actual private, non-media sector. That's what everyone here is really talking about.
Nolan got told it straight by one woman who told him he was arrogant and eating himself to death. He is a fat arrogant so and so, but he is a useful fat arrogant so and so..
Pity you didn't get on the show, all the political reps on there endorsed paying the fee. Durkan even more or less said it was worth it and the fat so and so was fishing for compliments, and they were lining up to give him some.
He didn't reveal what he earned anyway, the fat hypocrite. 🙂
Word verification below:
nessee (as in is Nolan the lochness monster.)
Anon 7.01pm
Dyke resigned because he was clueless and incompetent about the Andrew Gilligan row. He failed to MANAGE, which is what he was paid to do.
Any reading of the verbatim evidence to the Hutton enquiry shows that Dyke was defending lies. He could have retracted, he could have sorted things out. But he preferred to argue blindly. It was not until the last minute that he demanded transcipts of the broadcast – and he never demanded Gilligan's tapes.
His resignation was insisted on by the BBC Board of Governors. Damn right too. The BBC's Director Generzl has always been the Editor-in-Chief.
GLASTONBURY:
The new, thrifty, non-self indulgent BBC-
"BBC sends over 400 staff to Glastonbury."
(by Steven Swinford.)
"THE BBC has sent 407 people to cover this weekend’s Glastonbury festival, almost as many as it flew out to film last year’s Beijing Olympics.
"There are so many on the corporation’s payroll that it has had to block book hotels within a 10-mile radius of the festival. The BBC sent just 32 more to cover the Olympics.
"The camera crews and presenters were joined by a clutch of senior corporation executives, who earlier this week were forced to disclose their expenses and earnings. They received free passes to attend in a 'work capacity'.
"One of the executives at the festival, Mark Byford, the deputy director-general, routinely charged the licence fee payer £240 a day for a chauffeur to pick him up each morning at Waterloo station.
"Another executive, Alan Yentob, the BBC’s creative director, once hosted a Glastonbury festival reception at his nearby country home, paid for by the licence fee. Sir Michael Lyons, chairman of the BBC Trust, was also at Glastonbury this weekend.
"The cost of coverage, excluding any fee paid to the organisers of Glastonbury, was estimated by one BBC source at £1.5m. 'We really don’t want anyone making unfortunate comparisons with Beijing,' he said. "
GLASTONBURY:
above report is in today's 'SUNDAY TIMES'.
Rod Liddle: "Lighten up Auntie, and ditch the leaden middle managers" ('Sunday Times'):
[Extract]:
"Why, for example, does the corporation need a 'director: vision' on a salary of £400,000 per year, or thereabouts? Shouldn’t the director-general have written into his contract that he ought to have a sort of vision for the BBC and that he should, at some point, attempt to put that vision into practice? If not, what does his job entail? You might argue that this is particularly the case when, over the last few years, the BBC has shown all the vision which you might expect from a blind man kept in a blacked-out basement with a sack over his head."
Anyone else notice why the BBC management are`nt allowed out very often(hence the blacked-out limousines)? They are PR disasters and Murdochs dream team in exile should he want one!
They can hardly string a sentence together and can only flannel when anything personal comes up.(as opposed to Birtspeak on "journeys "and "conversations").Has no-one along the corridor offered the poor lambs some-er "media training?".
We really need to be taking bets on the worst-my money is on the incomparable Jay Hunt for the recent "Carol Thatcher/Green Room" masterclass of platitudes and SS lexicon.
Caroline Thompson a close second-did the Luftwaffe bomb her finishing school because that plum surely is lodged firmly in her gullet?
As for poor Mark-did Ampleforth have a "self-esteem" course before he was sent to Oxbridge to stammer and sweat for Team GB?
Surely the Iranians could send us a mullah or two who seem to be more media savvy than our pondlfe in pork heaven! Burqus on expenses even-does Orla Guerin get hers from the dressing up box then?At least they GET an election over there!
Taxi for Thompson-he won`t be considered for hospital radio though now. Maybe they know that analogue shows them to be crap so hope a DAB rebranding will stop us throwing them in the landfill instaed of all our servicable radios-and you`ll not see too many polar bears or eco-warriors placed next to that item ever on the news I`d hazard a guess. Radio Nowhere indeed Boss!