Leadership Quote by Malcolm Wilson

It is a deliberately parasitic image, meant to shame an entire economic layer without sounding like a policy memo. Wilson frames artists as the origin point of value: they "make the stuff". Everyone else in the chain "sell[s]" it, and that verb does the moral work here, implying extraction, packaging, and markup rather than creation. Then he lands the insult: "ticks on our backs". Not leeches in a jar, not wolves at the door, but something intimate and hard to dislodge, feeding while the host keeps moving. The bite is persistent; the drain is slow; the indignity is physical.

As a politician, Wilson's intent is less bohemian catharsis than coalition-building. He's speaking to a recurring 20th-century grievance: the modernization of culture into an industry, where intermediaries (publishers, labels, exhibitors, advertisers, agents) often control distribution and cashflow, while creators absorb risk and precarity. The line compresses a complex system into a clean moral geometry: producers vs. parasites. That simplification is the point. It converts an abstract complaint about contracts and royalties into an affective, almost bodily outrage that an audience can carry into a meeting, a union hall, a hearing.

The subtext is also a warning about power: the "they" is deliberately vague, suggesting not one villain but a network of institutions that survive by being attached. It's populist rhetoric with a cultural target, inviting listeners to see exploitation not as a personal failure of the artist, but as a structural condition engineered by those who control access to markets.