Yesterday, it was reported that Boris Johnson received £1 million in fees in about a month, just for giving four speeches. Yet, the Tories won't pay nurses, and other workers enough to ensure that their wages are not savagely cut in real terms, as the inflation the government and Bank of England have created, bites into workers' pay packets. Of course, Johnson is just the tip of the ice-berg, and a recent easy target for the media to highlight. In reality, lots of Tories and their supporters pull in much more than that, especially from their ownership of shares. But, that they now even refuse to talk to the nurses they had everyone clapping for just a few months ago, shows just how brazenly hypocritical they are.
The level of support for striking workers presents a problem for the Tory media, because it can't be too strident in its hostility to workers, because the reality is that strikes are now so extensive that nearly every household in the country has someone living in it who is, has been, or shortly will be on strike. And, for those that don't, many will have people who have already had pay rises bigger than those being demanded by public sector workers, as private companies compete to get labour, with workers shifting jobs getting an average 14% increase just from doing so.
So, the media tone down their hostility, and leave it to selected vox pops to do the dirty work. They get individuals who complain they have not had a big pay rise to come on to complain, as though if all other workers put themselves in the same boat that would in any way benefit them. Then they have people whining about not being able to get to a birthday or Xmas party or some such like, as though that is more important than a nurses kids having the heating on, or food on the table at Xmas, or they have people claiming they are sympathetic, but nurses shouldn't strike because its contrary to professional ethics, and against the interests of patients needing treatment. Presumably, then they would be quite happy if all nurses to avoid such a conflict with professional ethics simply all left the job to get better paid work elsewhere, so that the NHS would collapse, and no patients would get seen to!
In the past, there has been lots of polls done about people saying that nurses should get paid more than footballers. Its a pointless exercise because the polls have no power to change anything, and so long as people are prepared to pay upwards of £1,000 for a season ticket, billionaires from across the globe are prepared to turn clubs into their private playthings, and TV companies will pay billions for rights to show matches, footballers will continue to be paid millions, and nurses won't. But, when looking at the media response to strikes, and the claims about affordability and so on, those kinds of comparisons are useful, about just who gets paid what, and how important the labour they provide is.
The BBC has always been the propaganda arm of the British capitalist class and its state, and continues to be so simply supplemented by the rest of the Tory media. Its only necessary to look at the range of past BBC and other journalists that were Tory student leaders, and who take up jobs as Tory press spokespeople and so on, to get the lie of the land. The BBC has always been keen to ensure that in its selection processes, it always ensures that its journalists are safe for capitalism. That's not too hard given their usual family background, their time spent in the top universities along with the rest of the kids of the ruling class, and the lifestyles they enjoy, subsequently, whilst not that of a billionaire, leaves them comfortable enough to know which side their bread is buttered on, when considering their response to other workers and their pay.
Take one of the BBC's less well-paid, front of screen presenters, Carol Kirkwood, who is one of several Weather presenters. Although her salary does not appear in the BBC's list of salaries above £150,000, leading to the assumption that she is paid less than that for presenting the weather, her total income is estimated to be around £300,000 a year, with a net worth of around £4 million. The rest of the income comes from the fact that TV presenters, in the age of mass media, and 24/7 News have been turned into celebrities, who, even back in the day of Angela Rippon on the Morecambe & Wise Show, earn money from appearing in all sorts of roles.
But, especially given the fact that, not only are the BBC's Weather forecasts usually wrong, for much of the country, the job of a weather presenter is basically to stand in front of a green screen, with a button, and read out a script. Did I really need several such presenters, over the last few days, paid these mega bucks to tell me that it was bloody cold outside, which I could see by looking out of the window? Is that something we should be happy about paying hundreds of thousands of pounds for, as against claims that we can't pay nurses, or train workers even enough money to live on?
A list of the top BBC presenters salaries is given here. Some of them, in the last year received pay rises of £100,000, and most received pay rises of around 10%. The pay rises, in many cases were themselves more than many workers receive in total as wages, and, of course, these are only the figures for what they were paid for those presenting jobs, and not what they obtained from associated activities, appearing on other programmes, writing in journals and so on.
Now, I'm not saying that these workers should get paid less, the result of which would be only that the BBC and other media companies and so on made more profits, that, in the case of listed companies would go to provide even bigger dividends to shareholders the richest of whom already obtain far more than anyone else, but its worth remembering whenever we are told that nurses or train drivers can't be paid a decent wage, or get a pay rise to cover inflation, that the job of a train driver, nurse, teacher or postie is probably far more vital than being told what the weather might possibly do today. Its certainly worth bearing in mind when listening to discussions about ordinary workers having to strike to get a decent pay rise.
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