The Price Of Thatcherism

I've just seen a programme advertised which, I think, perfectly encapsulates Thatcher's Britain and the depths to which we have sunk.
The show is called "Flog It!"
I would like to credit the vacuous, brain dead makers of this televisual excrement with irony in their choice of title but, sadly, I fear that is way beyond them and it merely reflects their attitude to anything of beauty - namely that it has a price but not a value.
Morons are encouraged to come up with/find items of beauty, historical interest, craftsmanship and aesthetic value and then see how much they can get for them - flog them, in other words. That is Thatcherism/Blairism to a tee! "I don't care if it was hand-made by Egyptian artists in the Year 5000 BC, how much can I get for it?" Nothing, to them, has any value other than a value in pounds and pence. "If an historical artifact with both beauty and a tale to tell can be turned into cash to pay for a month in Florida for me, my horrid wife and equally horrid brats then bring it on!!"
The sort of people who make these programmes, take part in them or delight in watching them are the sort of people who would walk past the Great Pyramid in Egypt and think to themselves "You could get 200 holiday apartments on that site, rented out at £800-a-week each, if only they would knock down that bloody awful pointy thing!"
The stupid, who with their gimme-gimme-gimme mentalities elected Thatcher in the first place, have not just crawled from under their rocks with the advent of wank shows like Flog It, however. The genteel Antiques Roadshow has been bringing them to the surface for years. How many times have you watched people on that programme feigning interest in what the expert was telling them about the provenance of their heirloom? You could almost hear them thinking "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Napoleonic Wars, yeah, master craftsman, yeah, intricate detail, yeah, lost for more than 300 years, yeah........but 'ow mooch can I fooking flog it fer?" The experts always left the monetary value until last, and then with the excuse that the owner needed to know that so as to ensure it was adequately insured, but we all knew what the fuckers were thinking. How I used to laugh when some twat showed up with something aged and dusty they had dragged down from the loft, only to be told that there were millions of them about and it was only worth about a tenner - not even your train fare home, you fuckwit!
The growth of this "knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing" cliche over the last 20 years has been shadowed, not surprisingly, by a decline in the

reverence paid to being educated and a rise in the celebration of the academically bankrupt. Inverse intellectual snobbery has become all the rage, with wankers like Alan Sugar and Kelvin McKenzie actually being proud to tell anyone who will listen that they left school with absolutely no qualifications. "It just shows how unimportant it is because I'm a miwwionaire now!!" These turds can ONLY judge success in terms of money. If you make a lot of money you are a success, someone to be admired. If money is not you primary goal then you are a failure. Yeah, like Van Gogh, Michelangelo and Mother Theresa.
Phew!! I'm glad I got that out of my system. In the meantime, the "proud-to-be-thick" brigade and those who look around themselves and constantly wonder how much everything can be sold for can bugger off to Grantham.