50:50

Here's an interesting Twitter thread from someone called Marwood who identifies on his bio with William Clauston's Social Democratic Party:

Why is it you can’t move for women’s football coverage on the BBC website despite only an avg of 2K fans attending each game, Vs 40K with men’s Premier League?

You see something like Chelsea 10-0 Arsenal and think whaaatt, better check that out and then oh, double hat-trick by Sarah Smythe.

It is the political imposition of the BBC on a mission to ‘correct’ the patriarchy, and that a fair world would be same wages & attendance for men & women’s sport, which will never happen purely bc most ppl prefer the spectacle in seeing the physically best athletes compete.

Man Utd women’s sell tickets starting from £3. Avg attendance 1,891. Men’s tickets start from £98. Avg attendance 75,000. don’t know but I’m pretty sure this isn’t just sexism at play here.

The BBC’s “50:50 The Equality Project” (fwd by Tim Davie) aims to “better reflect the world around us”. They have 670 teams across the BBC using a data monitoring methodology that “monitor the number of men and women in their content to set benchmarks and track their progress”.

“In 2020, 27 Sport programmes began piloting the monitoring of their coverage of sporting events, from Premier League Football to Athletics. They are working towards equal representation of reporters, commentators, athletes and other contributors”. So there you have it.

June Sarpong - Director of Creative Diversity (salary £267,000) - “I raise up my voice - not so that I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard”. We are paying for this garbage.

Sarpong is part-time (3 days/wk, full time salary equiv. £445k) and her job so exhausting it leaves her free to rake in thousands more from book deals, corporate speaking events and her work as a diversity ambassador on the board of fashion firm Burberry.

In 2021 she said “there are benefits even if you come from a low income and you're white. You're never judged on your race” But her stated goal is “equal representation of reporters, commentators, athletes and other contributors”. She is de facto judging people on their race.

The 50:50 project's ambitions don't stop with the BBC. 100 outside orgs have signed up incl "public and private media, academia, public relations, law and corporations". June is "struck by 50:50’s simplicity and how it diversifies voice through something as simple as counting".

Affirmative action is now routine at the BBC, where this manifestation of identity politics is going to upset a lot of people. Kuenssberg and Andrew Marr’s replacement will come from an all-female shortlist.

“In your own best interests, for heaven’s sake, shut up”

  

June Sarpong, wearing whiteface

The Telegraph has been looking at the exhibits in the BBC's centennial commemorations, including a letter about The Black and White Minstrel Show [which ran from 1958 to 1978]. 

The letter was sent by chief assistant to the director-general Oliver Whitley to Barrie Thorne, the BBC’s chief accountant, and dealt with concerns about the programme by saying:

The best advice that could be given to coloured people by their friends would be: ‘On this issue, we can see your point, but in your own best interests, for heaven’s sake, shut up.’

Times change and issues come and go, but - in honour of Clive and Marianna - maybe “In your own best interests, for heaven’s sake, shut up” should become the BBC's new motto for the corporation's second century?

June Sarpong's salary

 

Looking back again....

It was a year ago, in September 2020, that we posted about the then mystery surrounding the salary of June Sarpong, the BBC's first Director of Creative Diversity. 

At that stage she'd been employed by the BBC for some 10 months but her salary was unknown. Her official BBC page at the time read ''June Sarpong's annual remuneration will the published shortly''.

Of course, it's become common knowledge since the BBC published its annual report in July this year that June Sarpong, the BBC's part-time Director of Creative Diversity, earns £267,000 for three days work per week - far more than the Prime Minister. The revelation has provoked widespread consternation and controversy.

There's something else though, and it happened between last September and this July. I half-saw at the time something, somewhere, about it being revealed that she was earning quite a lot less than £100K from a BBC job and have confirmed that now via the Wayback Machine. 

This has a snapshot of her official page from 24 December 2020 and reads ''Annual remuneration as of April 2020: £75,000'', something I presume it continued to say till this July. 

It's quite intriguing, isn't it, how long it took - nearly two years - for her £267,000 salary for a part-time job to be fully revealed? Were the BBC hiding it? 

UPDATE 

You do have to give it to June, she's very good at adding diversity to her business portfolios too. Bill Rodgers, as ever, has his eye on the ball:

Part-time BBC diversity supremo June Sarpong is still busy with business in the rest of her week. She's got a new company, called Womanly, set up in March, with four trademarks registered in May last year.

In May, she registered a trademark for The Africa Company, to be used with toiletries, cleaning products, food supplements and vitamins, tea, coffee, food products, beer and non-alcoholic beverages, and an online e-commerce platform. In July came a trademark for Kente Cola, seeking registration for non-alcoholic beverages.

Boxing Day matters

 

Hope you had a lovely Christmas Day. Thank you for keeping the blog so well-fed with comments. There's been a lot going on, hasn't there?

*******

1. Yes, BBC newsreaders on BBC Radio 4 really are repeatedly saying "France has confirmed its first case of the new variant of coronavirus which originated in the UK" this morning - which is poorly-worded at best, and 'fake news' at worst. The BBC has previously acknowledged that the variant may well have originated outside the UK and merely been detected here first by our well-equipped scientists. At least they're not calling it "the English virus"...yet.

2. Watching the BBC Reality Check correspondent Chris Morris making countless appearance on the BBC News Channel on Christmas Eve made me think of 'Why the long face?' jokes, usually made about horses. Chris had a long face on all day. After all his endless scaremongering 'on behalf of reality' over the years, here was the thing he had been so relentless down on for years coming to fruition, against all his gloomy predictions. Never was a long face more easily explained. His misery later got translated into a very negative piece on the BBC News website containing plenty more gloom. He's still carrying on regardless, and will be allowed to do so by the BBC.

3. I read recently that June Sarpong OBE, the BBC's part-time diversity chief, has recently been made a trustee of the Donmar Warehouse. Her irresistible, seemingly limitless rise continues. Despite that she's talking about "the unfairness baked into our system" in Daily Telegraph today and using the highly divisive phrase "white privilege": 

I don’t for a single second say that all white people are privileged. Of course not. But there are benefits even if you come from a low income and you’re white. You’re never judged on your race. You may be discriminated against because of class, you may be discriminated against because of your age, you may be discriminated against because of gender, size, etc, but you will never be discriminated against because of your race and that in itself feeds into the concept of white privilege.

Bring on the satirists! 

4. Lewis Hamilton is guest-editing Radio 4's Today today. and talking 'race' as much as 'races'. Even former ITN stalwart Alastair Stewart, a massive fan of Lewis, has his reservations though:

On the big issue of black history, I'd have preferred to hear Lewis Hamilton challenged by a critic, than in conversation with the like minded David Olusoga. He could easily have dealt with it. 

5. Returning to the theme of an earlier post which listed the recent questions put by BBC Politics reporters at the Downing Street press conferences and found that they were remarkably consistent in the pushing the 'The Government is not acting fast enough or hard enough' line over coronavirus, well, the last one before Christmas brought a double dose of that from BBC political correspondent Leila Nathoo. This is what she asked Matt Hancock & Co:

23 Dec: LEILA NATHOO, BBC: You've just said when it comes to coronavirus that it's better to act sooner but the Prime Minister said on Saturday that the new strain was present across the country, your chief scientific advisor said on Monday that it wasn't possible to stop it spreading beyond the South East. and you're only announcing today the widening of Tier 4 within the South East and East of England and only from Boxing Day. Haven't you wasted valuable time in trying to get ahead of the new strain of the virus? And if I may to Dr Harries, you talked about yet another more transmissible strain being identified from South Africa. How confident are you that the new four-tier system is strong enough to tackle that?

Wonder how many tiers would satisfy the BBC? 

June Is Apparently Bustin' Out All Over

 

I've been reading John Smith's recent fascinating TCW piece about what he sees as 'the next BBC scandal', concerning the BBC’s first-ever Director of Creative Diversity, June Sarpong - a woman who, by John's account, puts even Naga Munchetty to shame when it comes to 'outside activities'. 

The particularly striking thing, as far as I'm concerned, is that her wage hasn't been made public:

However, in a move that’s hard to imagine any other publicly-funded organisation agreeing to, her salary remains under wraps. Unlike the pay of every other BBC executive in the country, Sarpong’s wage has not been published.

She was appointed in November last year, so we're now so 10 months on and we've still not been told what it is. 

This is what it says on her official BBC page right now:

What's going on? 

Here's a TV celeb who, from her numerous appearances over the years, hasn't proved herself to be very wise or even slightly impartial.

The Remain campaign, as you'll recall, brought her in to front their campaign for our EU membership for the youth audience. 

Now she's supping at the very top board of the BBC. 

Even Tim Davie, despite dumping James Purnell, has kept her on in his top board. 

Tim? Really? 

You're seriously not only keeping dopey June Token on the BBC's top table but also continuing to let her control that vast budget your predecessor gave her to handle to encourage one kind of very particular diversity at the BBC? 

And YOU repeated that 20% over-representation target in your otherwise largely sensible welcome speech, thus re-committing the BBC to aim for a 20% target for BAME representation on the BBC, despite the BBC already being over-represented and the BAME population being presently just 13% of the population.

Fans of Toyah might thinks it's just a mystery as to why it's taking so long to get June Sarpong's possibly pongy salary made public. Others might want a better explanation. 

June wants diversity to bust out all over

"Britain is changing. It’s about time the media did too"
Read @junesarpong's blog post as the first Director of Creative Diversity at the BBC, at @HuffPost >> https://t.co/qgXTHeGs7N pic.twitter.com/26QwyTzab2

— BBC Press Office (@bbcpress) January 7, 2020

Here's Jon Holbrook of Spiked's reaction:

June Sarpong a “dark skinned black woman” (her words) who is the BBC’s Director of Creative Diversity wants to promote ideas & people on the basis of diversity, not merit. She’ll hasten the BBC’s demise (eg Dr Who), whilst being cheered on by woke Guardianistas.

Creative Diversity and the back-of-beyond

"The liberal echo chamber in which these people exist, which has been revealed by countless reports as well as in the baleful comments from departing staffers such as John Humphrys, Michael Buerk, John Sergeant, Robin Aitken and so on, is at last being challenged! "

Says Rod Liddle humorously (in the sarcastic rather than comical sense) because he was talking about the need for more diversity in the BBC and in particular the appointment of June Sarpong to the bespoke role “Director of Creative Diversity”. 

Well, I know what diversity means, and I know what creative means, but I’m not at all sure what they mean stuck together. (Perhaps ‘creative’ in that they’ve created a whole extraneous, tailor-made directorship solely for a person of colour) (Starting to sound a bit racist to me) but the upside is at least that disqualifies Rachel Johnson. 

The joke is that there’s already a disproportionate number of front-of-house BAMEs at the Beeb, considering current societal demographics. But, as Douglas Murray says, a certain amount of correction, or over-correction, has to be implemented to counteract the sins of the past, in this case the  actual racism of previous decades, and we have to suck it up for now in the knowledge that it will eventually  settle, adjust, recalibrate, and find its natural level. 

But what if it’s too late? I think the tipping point is due next Tuesday. They’ve stolen my adulthood! How dare they! Hand me the superglue Alice, I need to glue myself to something.

****

Oh, God! The BBC was in Penzance yesterday being patronising and misrepresenting the place in the way that only the BBC can. Having continually trailed Penzance as a coastal town with a ‘lower than average wage’….  if that is indeed the case, one might expect Simon McCoy and his team to make some effort to find out why. Then tell us. I admit I didn’t watch it all afternoon, but if they did, I missed it.

I know plenty of professional people in the area who charge average or above rates for their services. Do national companies like M & S pay less than the going rate down here? I don’t know, but if they do, I’d actually like to know why.  I do know one thing though. The seasonal influx of fruit, flower and veg pickers attracted by wages that look like a bonanza back home in Bulgaria or Portugal has changed the industry beyond recognition. I don’t think the Portuguese bother any more, but an array of Soviet-sounding languages resound in Lidl’s as they shout’n’ shop around harvest time.

There used to be a local army of skilled, daffy pickers (A specialised job, picking, uniformly bunching at speed with any exposed areas of your inside arm being burned by sap) but these days locals find welfare the best option. It’s not worth ‘signing off’ and ‘signing onagain’; far too much trouble and strife. Anyway, farmers and growers would go bust if they had to pay the living wage. I suppose that’s what comes of ease of movement plus inequality of economies. Once those conditions ‘correct’ who knows what will happen?

I digress. You could find a hard-up family on any council estate anywhere in the UK, and I don’t think the hard-up family the BBC chose to feature was representative of anything particularly ‘Penzancey’. There is probably an average number of normals down in Benzano (as someone once graffitied the signpost.)

Here is something nice for a change, and vaguely related to the above. I listened to radio four this morning - firstly I liked hearing Caroline Wyatt (instead of Kate Adie) introducing a benign (non-toxic) FOOC, and next, even better, I enjoyed Tales from the Stave.  Violinist Clemency Burton-Hill 

“explores one of the library's most valuable manuscripts, the Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26 by Max Bruch. With her is the internationally acclaimed Violinist Joshua Bell and the music scholar Michael Beckerman of New York University, along with the Morgan's head of Music Manuscripts Fran Barulich.”

And something Penzancey. Several years ago, visiting the back-of-beyond for one of the International Musicians Seminar courses (based at Prussia Cove) world-class violinist Joshua Bell dragged himself out of his sick-bed, and with a temperature and a sore throat, performed an early evening recital in a threadbare church in a grotty part of a downtrodden town (Camborne) so as not to disappoint people. The venue happened to be just around the corner from where I worked at the time so I just strolled along to listen to one of the most renowned violinists in the world.   I’m not even sure if I paid an entrance fee. Maybe I got in free as a Friend of IMS. 

Pity Simon McCoy didn’t spend a bit longer in the place.) Am I never happy?) I suppose he was glad to get out of the wind, but I can’t see much point in these flying visits. What’s the point?

W1A

How very W1A for the BBC to appoint a Director of Creative Diversity!

🆕 @JuneSarpong appointed BBC's Director of Creative Diversity: https://t.co/VVxgrOKcc7 pic.twitter.com/7Q18BJqb53

— BBC Press Office (@bbcpress) October 4, 2019

How very BBC though for her also to be an arch-Remainer! How about another new role: BBC Director for Diversity of Opinion?