Feeding the Intellectuals

Every ruling class in every state needs to feed its intellectual pets, so that these pets will keep telling the general population to keep believing in the ruling class; this payoff is usually much more than the pets could ever earn in the free market. The pharoahs had their priests of Ra, the Normans had their catholic bishops, and the Victorians had their Church of England. But in this secular age it has proved a little harder to declare tax tithes to feed directly into the pockets of the intellectuals, so other scams have had to be invented. For instance the BBC licence fee, the state's support of universities, and the lucrative advertisement of virtually all government jobs in the Guardian newspaper.

But usually the ruling class is careful to disguise these handouts, taken from the wallets of the general population. You usually get something back for your money; the occasional run of Doctor Who, a sociology degree, or an anti-smoking awareness counsellor job interview with the local council. But rarely have I seen such a blatant pay-off to the Outer Party, than this:

Wanted: icons of Englishness that would go nicely with a cup of tea

A cool one million pounds of your money has been taken from your wallet, without your permission, to fund a couple of offices full of the most useless parasites in England so they can run a blog, of little interest to anyone but themselves and a few friends. They really ought to be ashamed of themselves, but no doubt they've deluded themselves into thinking they're doing something useful, so useful in fact that I should pay for it whether I would like to or not.

However, I've got a couple of questions for everyone at Culture Online. What is it, exactly, that you're doing with our one million pounds which couldn't be done on a free blog site? Why don't you parasites just go instead to Blogger.com and set up something as useful which avoids the unfortunate tendency of emptying my pockets without my say so? In fact, I have set up such a Blogger web site for you; it took me almost a whole five minutes. I'll hold this site for you, for a week or two:

http://iconscultureonline.blogspot.com/

I look forward to your request for a handover and also seeing you return our million pounds back to the Treasury. Hope springs eternal.