That Dedalus Campaign

You might have seen that the Arts Council has withdrawn a £24,000 a year grant from Dedalus publishing, something which is rapidly becoming the outrage du jour amongst the literati.

Having looked at their website I am of course all in favour of their going bankrupt yesterday:

...and put British publishing at the heart of Europe.

It's the sort of vapid EUphilia guaranteed to make my blood boil.

But there is something a little more serious to be said about this. Harry's Place has an email that is doing the rounds, about how people might like to rectify this situation.

Boiling blood doesn't get anywhere near to my reaction to that. They're asking that some thousands of people go and lobby those who do the bureaucratic allocation of the cash to get the decision reversed.

But the option they do not provide, one they don't even think of, is to ask those self same few thousand to simply send in a tenner each instead. Problem solved, wouldn't it be?

I'm not quite sure why: it could be that the publishers themselves are too stupid to think of it, it could be that they're too wise: knowing that the literati likely to have heard of them, support them, would only do so with other people's money, not their own.

I just wish that people would get the point that they should be paying for their own pleasures, not taxing the rest of us to pay for their minority pursuits.