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Bill Carmichael: Licence to be hypocrites
SHOULD the public have a right to know how the money raised in taxes is spent?
Well, according to senior managers at the BBC, it depends on who is spending it.
When MPs are trousering enormous amounts in expenses for everything from non-existent mortgages to a 1p mobile phone bill, the BBC insists on our right to know.
Indeed po-faced star presenters have been known to offer sanctimonious lectures to elected politicians over their lavish lifestyles and the folly of "redacting" vital information from the public.
Closer to home, however, and the story changes dramatically.
Although the BBC has agreed to reveal the salaries of 100 senior executives and the total amount spent on what it likes to call "talent", it is refusing to reveal the money paid to individual stars.
So after all the fine words about transparency and accountability, the licence fee-funded BBC has decided that old-fashioned secrecy is justified when it comes to its own affairs.
Director general Mark Thompson's excuse is risible: "There's a real danger that talent would migrate to broadcasters where confidential information about how much they are paid will not be disclosed."
Oh pull the other one! According to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, BBC radio presenters are paid more than twice what their equivalents on commercial stations can expect.
Are they really going to take a 50 per cent pay cut if the information is disclosed? If so, we taxpayers should wave them a happy farewell. There's plenty more where they came from. Playing records on the radio isn't exactly a demanding task.
Ask yourself honestly... would anyone really miss 6m-a-year Jonathan Ross if he was pensioned off to the graveyard shift on Choice FM? No, I don't think so either.
There are plenty of bright, engaging presenters prepared to do the job for a tenth of the bloated salaries these over-paid clowns are paid.
And, of course, Mr Thompson's argument could equally be used to keep the salaries and expenses of BBC executives secret, too.
The BBC receives 3.4bn a year from the licence fee, yet has become badly disconnected with the public who pay the bill – as the Jonathan Ross-Andrew Sachs affair clearly demonstrated.
The only way to get the public back on side is by complete honest and transparency – not by hiding dirty little secrets away.
And the next time the presenters climb aboard their high horses, they should remember that what's sauce for the politician's goose is also sauce for the BBC's gander.
Asylum lunacy
NOTHING better illustrates the shambles into which government policy on refugees has disintegrated than the news that a 1m scheme to help failed asylum seekers return home has resulted in just one family leaving the UK.
The pilot scheme in Kent ran for less than a year and was "mismanaged from start to finish" according to a report published this week by The Children's Society.
Free democracies such as the UK have an obligation to help genuine refugees who are persecuted for their race, religion or political beliefs. Indeed, our country has a long and proud record of doing precisely that – from the Huguenots to the Kindertransport and the Ugandan Asians.
Those arrivals have worked hard to integrate with and contribute to the host community and have immeasurably enriched British life as a result.
The problem with the Government's open-doors approach to immigration over the last 12 years is that it has undermined the case of the genuine refugee.
It no longer mattered whether arrivals were genuinely fleeing persecution, or even prepared to obey British laws.
And once here, as the Kent scheme demonstrates, there is little chance they will ever leave.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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