CARRIE Gracie’s outburst brilliantly knocks the BBC off the lofty moral high ground it has occupied for far too long.
In accusing the corporation of deliberately – illegally – refusing to treat men and women equally on pay, she exposes the lie behind its liberal leftie egalitarian facade.
Director general Lord Hall has known of this gap for months, and of the anger it creates among his staff.
He pledged to do something about it to a Commons select committee.
Yet the supportive reaction the corporation's now ex China editor had from so many female colleagues yesterday betrays how little he has done.
But what her brave blast also shows is simply how much cash washes around New Broadcasting House.
She asks for parity and is offered a whopping £45,000 rise, which would have given her significantly more than Dame Barbara Woodward, the British ambassador to Beijing, earns.
No other news organisation would pay her anything like that because nobody else has billions of taxpayers’ cash to throw around.
But incredibly even the £180,000 they eventually offered Gracie – who admits she was already “very well paid” and never asked for MORE money – was still not parity.
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They just can’t make themselves play fair.
And what of the alternative to offering a rise?
What about the levelling down of salaries that Lord Hall has talked of?
Pay the men less. Why not?
Until Hall is prepared to treat men and women equally AND pay wages that don’t appear obscenely lavish to the rest of us, the nation’s growing anger at his corporation will continue to fester.
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