The Mail on Sunday allocated column inches (appropriately on 1st April) to Karen Brady, who proclaimed she “cannot be a victim of the BBC gender pay gap – because it’s written into her contract”. She told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I get paid the same as Claude Littner, who does exactly the same role as me.’

She revealed in a new TV documentary that she is presenting this week that she has a clause in her contract for  pay guaranteeing parity with any man or woman with the same role.

Someone should tell Karen Brady she should have kept her legal fees, because that right has been guaranteed by law for the last 40 years.

Grumpy is rather tiring of writing on the ‘confusion’ (why ??) between the “gender pay gap” and “equal pay”, but it has been skilfully manipulated by the harpies and harridans of both political parties who want to make a feminist, anti-male, point. By conflating equal pay and  the gender pay gap, they exploit people like Karen Brady and millions of others who don’t read more than headlines; they can present a facet of the current social structure (as manifest in the gender pay gap) into an example of the domineering unfairness of the ruling male class  (equal pay).

It underlines the increasing extent of distortion in the communication of news and policies, made worse by deliberate issue conflation, as in this example, and others in this blog. Ultimately it leads to the usurping of democracy when a political party can no longer win an election through truthful presentation of its policies, but instead is forced to spin, distort, obfuscate and plain lie to gain power.