The Tories came up with this wheeze to get the BBC to publish the salaries of its top earners as a way of kowtowing to the wishes of their masters’ at News Corp, Sky and elsewhere as part of their continuing project to undermine the BBC. The theory seems to be that people will object to TV Licence money being “wasted” on celebrities who (by definition) are not doing a “proper” job.

Agreed these are ludicrous sums, but no more so than top footballers’ pay (perhaps less) or the even more egregious amounts paid to heads of banks and CEOs/directors at large companies, who don’t do a proper job either.

And what’s appropriate for the BBC is surely good for its broadcasting rivals too.

After all, if I happen to buy a product that has been advertised on ITV, I still pay for Ant and Dec’s salaries even though I never watch them. Ditto for anyone that appears on Sky. Why should their payments be any more commercially confidential than those who appear on the BBC?

I look forward to the day when the salaries of those at ITV and Sky are made public instead of just being estimated.

I won’t be holding my breath though.

Dusk sky in Perth, 6/11/13. A stitch of three photos to get it all in.

Rangers Football Club no longer exists.

The company comprising it has been liquidated, the club along with it. So why are the Scottish football authorities scrabbling around trying to accommodate a new club apparently still claiming to be Rangers?

The sleight of hand which has seemingly transferred the assets to a new company – but miraculously without also transferring its debts! – cannot carry the history with it.
It is a new company – and a new club. As such they merit no special consideration – certainly not elevation to Div 1 of the SFL when any other new club would have to start in Div 3 (and moreover would have to provide three years’ worth of audited accounts for the privilege.)

In the same way, Airdrie United are not a continuation of Airdrieonians. (They are arguably Clydebank; except Clydebank fans do not consider them so.)

Whichever title the new “Rangers” takes (I append a few suggestions below*) the club is not and never will be Rangers. The SPL, SFA and Sky may wish them to be but they simply aren’t. As I understand it they also have not much of a squad of players. That many of last season’s Rangers players are taking themselves elsewhere shows they do not think the new company is a continuation of the old.

The threats, distortions and scare stories of the SPL (and apparently, to its shame, the SFA) with regard to the potential financial apocalypse they claim will happen should the new “Rangers” not be admitted to Div 1 are a form of blackmail. What they imply is that they intend to break a contract (the annual payments the SPL makes to the SFL) or incite others to break theirs (the two years’ notice requirement for clubs to leave the SFL.) This stuff is beyond sordid. I do not believe any of the administrators, chairmen etc who put forward such arguments give a stuff for Scottish football – only for the feathering of their own nests. The hidden agenda is of course to cast adrift (via the formation of SPL 2) the smaller clubs, in other words that portion of Scottish football where its true soul actually resides.

This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for the true good of Scottish football to be asserted, to break the stranglehold that the Old Firm had/has on the neck of the Scottish game, to make the playing field more level again.

I fear it will be thrown away.

*Not the Real Rangers, (Dis)continuity Rangers, I-Don’t-Believe-It-Is-Rangers, All-Too-Real-Rangers.

I see and hear a film has been made about a certain former Prime Minister of the UK.

I must say at the outset that I shall not be going to see it – not least because the good lady (my good lady) is still too scarred by that woman’s actions that she cannot bear or contemplate anything to do with her.

I gather the film portrays its heroine as frail and dotty. (I suspect this may be a dramatic necessity for the purposes of making the film.) I have heard a speaker on Radio Scotland – a Tory MP – English of course – complain that it went beyond good taste as the person concerned was still alive and it therefore compromised her dignity. Well, that was rich.

Firstly and brutally, if she is frail and dotty she won’t know, will she?

Secondly, did she in her prime give a shit about the human dignity of all those she condemned to hardship and penury, everything she destroyed, as a result of her policies? You could call it karma.

In any case there were signs in her late Premiership that she was unhinged, if not deranged, so it’s not surprising she’s not all there in her dotage.

Yet none of this is to do with the thrust of this post.

Coincidentally I read an article from Tuesday’s Guardian that, as part of the setting up of Sky, Thatcher made the BBC pay £10 million a year to have their channels broadcast on Sky’s platform. Yet one more example of the baleful influence the woman had on British public life. And these payments persist: they are happening now.

Is this circumstance more widely known? Because I was outraged.

Does any other broadcaster – anywhere – have to pay another to have its own programmes shown on that other’s channels? Surely not.

Doesn’t the BBC sell programmes/formats around the world rather than pay others to broadcast them? Don’t the BBC, ITV and Channels 4 and 5 pay to the originator for US (or Australian or whatever) generated programmes? And doesn’t Virgin have to pay Sky to have Sky channels on its (Virgin’s) service? Doesn’t Sky itself pay HBO hefty amounts for their programmes?

We all know the reason why there would not have been much protest from the BBC at such an arrangement. The perceived power of the Murdoch Press. The pusillanimity of politicians of all parties with respect to that power.

That power may now be a busted flush and despite the Tories’ antipathy to anything that smacks of public endeavour surely the BBC ought to be demanding an end to this public subsidy of a private company. For that is what the arrangement amounts to.

As it stands it is – and always has been – a total waste of licence fee payers’ money to throw it away on Sky for no content in return.

The boot should be firmly on the other foot. Sky ought to be paying the BBC – and handsomely – for any access at all to BBC programming. Not to mention providing adequate compensation for all the years in which money has been shamefully drained away from the BBC in this way.

Edited to add:- my good lady says the speaker on the radio was none other than Jeremy (H)unt – her parentheses.