I had always assumed it was the case that the BBC was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. I had no idea why it should be given that it receives its income directly from the licence fee and taxation.
It wasn’t until I appeared on Radio 5 live and witnessed Victoria Derbyshire, I believe possibly disingenuously, attempt to mislead the public that I decided to look further into it.
I had mentioned during the interview that the BBC was exempt from the FOIA. At the end, when my mic had been switched off,
An article in the Daily Mail this week revealed just how much of our money is being used to keep that information secret.
Now, don’t get me wrong, as an advocate of the free market, I have absolutely nothing against anyone realising their true capital value and maximising their earnings in whatever way they can. The benchmark being of course, that everyone in society has the same educational opportunities to realise their own talents and maximise their personal earning capabilities.
However, I digress.
My parliamentary questions have just been submitted to probe a little further into why the BBC has been able to keep so much information, regarding how public money is spent, so secret.
It’s not just the salaries of the top presenters which is an issue, it's the extras too. When they are eventually revealed, as they will be, along with records of expenses, it will be the job of the public to determined whether or not they think presenters are worth it in the same way the public has passed judgment on MPs. And so they should. It’s their money after all.
The story in the Daily Mail does have a ring of familiarity about it. Someone somewhere in an office in the BBC is desperately, via the use of expensive lawyers, attempting to keep the facts hidden from public view.
I would like to make a suggestion to that person. Take a look at what happened in the Commons to the Speaker and learn. There is no point fighting it.
If public money is to be spent then the days of the BBC gravy train, secret expense accounts, massive salaries, chauffer driven cars and luxury hotels are coming to a dramatic end. I also suspect it may make the MPs fiasco look a little like chicken feed.
Why am I so sure? Well yesterday I sat with a large group of MPs and I mentioned a documentary the BBC wanted to produce regarding the fall out of expense-gate and the impact it had on MPs, especially those who had been wrongly targeted.
It is quite obvious now, that of 650 MPs, around a dozen or so were seriously guilty of wrong doing. The rest were all whipped in, the facts conflated to make it look worse than it was and most were presented entirely out of context.
In some cases, such as mine and many others, the allegations were entirely wrong.
I have to say that speaking as someone who was badly hurt, made worse by the fact that it was wrongly so, even I was shocked at the anger and vitriol immediately expressed by my colleagues towards the BBC. The hypocrisy of its reporting and the position many of the presenters took in feeding inaccurate and imbalanced information to the public has touched a collective raw nerve amongst MPs of all parties whose families and children were badly affected.
My children were affected. One daughter so much so, that whilst I remain an MP she no longer wants to live in the
MPs also feel strongly that those who did commit fraud have had their crimes minimised and downgraded by the fact that so much nonsense was thrown into the mix - the errors, fiction and mistakes made to appear far worse than they are as a result.
A staggering amount of young, good MPs from all parties are contemplating leaving, looking for other jobs. The result of expenses-gate will be the evolution of a professional, sterile Parliament, full of career 'yes' men and women politicians. It will be interesting to see when the day of reckoning arrives for the BBC how it will be affected.
The presenters at the BBC are entirely innocent.They are being paid the going rate for whatever they do. However, when those salaries and expenses are exposed to the public I am afraid that they may not take that view. I just hope and pray that their children and families are not affected in the same way ours were.
The BBC sang the Telegraphs tune. That tune was not always right. The BBC did not fact check.
I doubt it will ever be forgiven by the innocent MPs and the public, have yet to have their say.
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