I witnessed - and benefited from - the birth of public sector wage inflation

When I got a full-time job at the BBC in the mid-Eighties, it was very definitely public service – very left-wing, over-manned, unionized to the hilt (practically a closed shop) and riddled with Spanish practices. But employees were paid less than those in the private sector – quite a lot less.

In return, we had about the same level of job security as the Queen, and an extremely forgiving paternalistic management and support-service culture that meant you knew you’d be looked after if things went wrong. And the pension scheme was sensationally generous. And no one ever got fired!

For someone who’d spent the previous seven years as a self-employed writer dependent on hard-hearted New Yorkers I’d never met finding a space for my latest masterpiece on their crowded publication list, it was all a bit of a relief – and, as I was about to get married, security suddenly meant a lot.

Everyone in News was always talking about joining ITN or Channel 4 (and, later, Sky News) in order to secure a salary commensurate with their genius – a few made the leap, but the rest of us stayed put, grumbling away, but knowing in our hearts that we’d found a ridiculously cushy number. (I worked three-day weeks and there were all sorts of weird holiday entitlements which meant that I spent twelve weeks on holiday one year – quite apart from being able to pocket things like an “entertainment” allowance and being able to charge for newspapers.) 

The outside world seemed scarily professional and Thatcherite and cut-throat in comparison.

Then John Birt was parachuted in as head of News and Current Affairs (before becoming DG), and things changed. First, an already overmanned newsroom was flooded with extra producers, mainly Oxbridge types from current affairs, so that we’d sometimes spend a thirteen-hour day producing a ten second OOV - i.e. a thirty-word script over ten seconds of pictures on a story not important enough to warrant a separate reporter-voiced video package. (I spent the whole of one day dreaming up the plot of what was became my next novel.) 

At the same time as the amount of actual work we had to do dwindled, our salaries were suddenly increased way beyond the rate of inflation – I think mine went up 20% one year.

Suddenly, we were being paid the same as – or even more than - our private sector colleagues, but for less work, and without losing one smidgin of security: it still seemed impossible to sack staff who would have been frog-marched out the door of any non-public sector organisation.

This all coincided with the colonisation of News by Current Affairs, which tipped the balance away from old-style, horny-handed news producers to highly-educated Oxbridge super-brains. The newsroom’s traditional, Labour-supporting, up-the-workers, all-Tories-are-geedy-bastards Socialism gave way to what I now recognise as new-style, London-centric, pro-European, victim-obsessed, multicultural, internationalist, EU-supporting, Gramscian cultural-hegemony, all-Tories-are-mad Liberalism.

Yes, they were New Labour. Hairy-arsed, beer-swilling, sports-mad blokes (the “stupid tendency” as one senior political correspondent dubbed them) had been replaced by the soul-mates of Harriet Harman and Peter Mandelson. The new breed lived in Islington and Wandsworth and the more salubrious parts of Ealing, had wives (or husbands) who worked in the City, holidayed in Tuscany, and supported football teams as a symbol of their compassionate classlessness – not because they’d grown up with the sport. To offset their pretended enthusiasm for proletarian pursuits, It even became fashionable to love Opera (which would formerly have been treated as an open declaration of rampant homosexuality). They routinely sneered at the SDLP to show how “real” their left-wing politics were – but they were fooling no-one but themselves: ideologically, they were the offspring of Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins.

What we were seeing was the gentrification of News. These new types tended to hang out with their fellow-movers and shakers in other fields: it wouldn’t do to admit that you couldn’t afford to send your children to acceptable schools, or drive the right make of car, or live in a civilised part of town, or that a shortage of wedge meant you had to go on holiday with oiks. And for that you needed money – and lots of it. Stands to reason! So senior management salaries went through the roof, and ours had to go up as well (to prevent resentment, I presume).

Within a year or two, the concept of accepting lower wages because you were in the public sector began to seem quaint: as long as someone  -anyone - in the private sector earned more than we were earning, where exactly was the problem? Besides, we had to attract “the right people” (i.e. Oxbridge liberals) – even though “the right people” had alwaysworked for the BBC, no matter what they were paid.

Of course, I benefited from these changes, along with much of the rest of the BBC – and the further up the greasy pole you climbed, the more fantastic and indefencible the rewards became. 

I presume exactly the same “gentrification” process was taking place at the same time across all those parts of the public sector which attracted Russell Group university graduates. Suddenly, those of us who were paid with money appropriated from the public without their permission and who enjoyed a measure of job security undreamt of in the private sector no longer saw these factors as a reason to curb our expectations.

Of course, the whole process accelerated when that greedy wretch Tony Blair became Prime Minister (accompanied by his lovely wife, Mrs. Marcos), and Gordon Brown became Chancellor (the latter seemed to work on the principle that the public sector was an even more vital component of the economy that the private – economics never was his strong suit). 

So good luck to Eric Pickles and everyone else trying to sort out the fantasy world of public sector pay. But the government urgently needs to figure out how to convince the public that whenever a library is closed or the frequency of rubbish collection is halved, it’s because a bunch of greedy, fat-arsed pigs can’t tell the difference between public and private money.