After the pay furore, the BBC now has a chance to be a beacon for fairness | Will Hutton

‘The BBC is really hurting today,” declared Jeremy Vine outside Wogan House, the home of Radio 2 last week, as the country learned that the broadcaster was paid north of £700,000 a year. He was right, which is what the corporation’s Tory critics so ardently wanted. Over the day, various household names squirmed as they were confronted with the reality that by the standards of the mass of their viewers or listeners – those paying the licence fee – their pay was eye-wateringly high.

BBC arguments about needing to keep up with the market were palpably overstated. Where else are John Humphrys or Jeremy Vine likely to broadcast to such big audiences in such well-loved prestigious programmes with such fantastic production support? Dozens of broadcasters would jump into their shoes if given the chance. The architects of the BBC’s pay disclosure regime seemed to have achieved their objective: the BBC cannot be trusted with the public’s money – it plainly needs to be downsized or done away with.

Yet, as the day wore on, the argument shifted gear, in a way that will have discomfited the corporation’s legion of Tory enemies. As it became clear that the BBC’s female presenters were paid much less than their male counterparts, sometimes dramatically so, the argument moved from BBC excess to the fairness with which it treats its male and female talent.

Assessing fair pay can be tricky, but that’s hardly the case when there is such glaring gender salary inequality. Fairness, which advances in behavioural psychology suggest is a basic human instinct,is the proposition: that reward should be proportionate to outcome, just as punishment should be proportionate to the crime. To insist on such proportionality goes with the grain of humanity.

Female presenters and reporters are producing exactly the same kinds of content as men. Only sexism, male refusal to concede norms of fairness and maybe some female reluctance to press for being properly valued can explain the gap. The story became the female stars’ anger at the scale of the BBC’s unfair treatment of their talent, flushing out of an embarrassed management a commitment to rectify the situation by 2020.

If the BBC had been smart, knowing these disparities, it would have pre-empted the criticism and made its commitment to pay equality the heart of the story before the criticism broke and challenged its critics to do the same. Would rightwing media organisations, falling over themselves to wound a great public institution, make the same commitment?

If and when Theresa May decides she wants the same pay transparency extended more generally, and into the private sector, will the rightwing media support her? The cowed BBC could have got on the front foot on pay equality, but lacked the chutzpah and self-confidence to do so. Perhaps more damagingly, it would take the women’s public reaction to make its leadership understand just how unfair it had been.

Instead, it was transfixed, before the release of the information, with the prospect that it was going to be crucified for pay excess. But here it misjudged the mood. Vine suffered some difficult calls and Humphrys had to admit he could not justify his pay, but the public rage about the absolute level of salaries was more subdued than the BBC – and its critics – expected.

Again, some rudimentary reflections on what is fair might have helped. It is when pay is obviously the result of good luck, like being male, that outrage is aroused. But for those who have worked hard on an inherent skill to make their own luck, we think the reward is more justified. We know these presenters are good at what they do: we can see and hear it. Thus, in a world of extravagantly paid football stars, Gary Lineker has made his luck; he not only knows his football but has worked hard on his inherent talent and skill to become one of the most accomplished presenters in the business.

Britain is so in the grip of a vapid, rightwing celebration of individualism, low taxes and the denigration of all public initiative that it does less to compensate for the lottery of luck and chance than almost any other country. Only Portugal and Greece, basket-case economies, have seen real hourly wages fall over the past eight years to the same degree that they have in Britain. Yet even Portugal and Greece have less regional inequality than Britain: we are the most geographically unbalanced economy in Europe.

Meanwhile, our private sector elite, densely concentrated in London and the south-east, is the best paid in Europe. Their children, educated in the most expensive and lavishly provided private schools on the planet, are many times more likely to reach the upper echelons of British society than their peers (nearly half of the BBC’s stars were privately educated). In Britain, to be born to an upper-middle-class family in the south-east is to be a disproportionate winner in the lottery of life: everyone else, to varying degrees, is a disproportionate loser.

I believe the Brexit vote – and the surge in support for Jeremy Corbyn – was a revolt against too little being done to counter such rotten luck. The current order does not work. This was not the EU’s fault but it got the blame. Equally, spare a thought for the luckless BBC: it is unbelievably hard to be a public corporation embodying great Enlightenment values in such a context of monumental inequality, largely fashioned by the British political right and its faithful media. It does try to be a broadcaster for all of Britain and, by and large, it succeeds incredibly well.

Neither the BBC, nor its critics, planned for what happened last week, but paradoxically in making a commitment to pay fairness for men and women it found itself living the values it purports to represent. It finally managed to rebuke its critics. It should go further: it should commit to a fair pay process across its entire staff, ensuring transparently that its pay is completely aligned to its purpose and values, is proportionate to outcome and that luck, notably in relation to gender or private education, plays no part. So should every company. There is a lot more to do to make Britain less of a country where luck matters so much, but this would be a start. The BBC can and must give a lead.