{"id":7952,"date":"2015-05-09T06:55:19","date_gmt":"2015-05-09T11:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7952"},"modified":"2015-05-09T06:55:19","modified_gmt":"2015-05-09T11:55:19","slug":"britain-a-functioning-democracy-its-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7952","title":{"rendered":"Britain: A Functioning Democracy It\u2019s Not"},"content":{"rendered":"

Britain: A Functioning Democracy It\u2019s Not<\/a><\/h3>\n

We at the Automatic Earth always try to steer clear of elections as much as possible, because there are no functioning democracies left in the west -no more than there are functioning markets-, and no journalists reporting on them either. Interesting question, by the way: how can a journalist report on a democracy that isn\u2019t there? And where in that setting does news turn to mere opinion, and where does opinion then become news ?<\/p>\n

Still, of course we caught some bits of the UK elections along the way regardless. The decisive moment for us must have been when Jeremy Paxman interviewed David Cameron at the BBC, and asked him if he knew how many foodbanks had been added in Britain since he took office 5 years ago.<\/p>\n

Cameron, well duh obviously, had no idea, and instead of answering the question he started a flowery discourse praising the many volunteers who work in the foodbanks he didn\u2019t know existed. Paxman cut him short and said there were 66 when Cameron came to power, and 421 now. Apparently in Britain, volunteers are needed to take care of the needy, they\u2019re not going to pay people to do that. You would think that takes care of Cameron\u2019s candidacy, but you couldn\u2019t be more wrong.<\/p>\n

At least Paxman seemed to try, but interviews like his should take place on the eve of an election, not 6 weeks before them like this one. That leaves far too much time for spin doctors to repair damage done by their candidate\u2019s ignorance and gullibility. It\u2019s crazy enough that party leaders can refuse to discuss each other, let alone the public, in public. Then again, that too would only be significant if there would be an actual democracy in Britain.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Britain: A Functioning Democracy It\u2019s Not We at the Automatic Earth always try to steer clear of elections as much as possible, because there are no functioning democracies left in the west -no more than there are functioning markets-, and no journalists reporting on them either. Interesting question, by the way: how can a journalist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,93,1195,204,5276,5275,965],"class_list":["post-7952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-bbc","tag-britain","tag-david-cameron","tag-democracy","tag-food-banks","tag-jeremy-paxman","tag-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7953,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7952\/revisions\/7953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}