We're allowed to insult each other, because we're family; even Morris dancers and bodhran players (!).  We're also allowed to take it badly when an outsider is presumptuous and thinks he can take the piss without having paid his dues first.  As a jazzer, Kim Howells is used to his favoured musical genre being extensively supported by grant aid; the people who make financial decisions in the arts authorities are largely biased toward jazz, and inclined to despise folk music, at least in part because they don't understand it and think it isn't "cool".

The point they often miss is that, without the support of vested interests and public money, their favoured musical form would be in exactly the same position as ours; popular in real life, but marginalised and largely ignored by the broadcast media, and the object of regular parody in the press by ignorant people who imagine that they are in some way clever.