When I was a child things were perfectly clear: you knew what everybody earned
Well you did if they were an employee
National rates for those in Trades Unions. Pay scales for teachers, civil servants, university lecturers. Job adverts always told you what to expect, none of these mysteriously competitive packages
I was quite used to my salary being known to anyone who consulted Whitaker’s Almanac
It all started to go wrong with the inflation of the Oil Price Shock of the 1970s. Inflation linked rises struggled to catch up & by the time official statistics of income & earnings were published (usually at least 2 years in arrears back then) it was too late to use them to find out where you stood in the league
And now we all just seem in a fog about it, even if we are clear about what we mean by ‘earn’, whether that includes overtime, allowances, expenses, performance bonuses, pension pots, whatever
But why are people so ashamed to let on?
Richard Bacon, on his own programme last night, was making much of Carrie Baker’s ‘mistake’. Seemed to think he was being clever not telling us what he gets
Why are we not allowed to know what the BBC pays people out of our licence fee? Just the salaries I mean, we’ll move on to demanding to know about their expenses some other day
