{"id":22307,"date":"2014-01-17T08:05:16","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T13:05:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22307"},"modified":"2014-01-17T08:05:16","modified_gmt":"2014-01-17T13:05:16","slug":"qotd-forming-a-cabinet-in-a-parliamentary-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/01\/17\/qotd-forming-a-cabinet-in-a-parliamentary-system\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Forming a cabinet in a parliamentary system"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The argument that we must do everything a Minister demands because he has been &#8216;democratically chosen&#8217; does not stand up to close inspection. MPs are not chosen by &#8216;the people&#8217; &mdash; they are chosen by their local constituency parties: thirty-five men in grubby raincoats or thirty-five women in silly hats. The further &#8216;selection&#8217; process is equally a nonsense: there are only 630 MPs and a party with just over 300 MPs forms a government and of these 300, 100 are too old and too silly to be ministers and 100 too young and too callow. Therefore there are about 100 MPs to fill 100 government posts. Effectively no choice at all.<\/p>\n<p>Jonathan Lynn, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jonathanlynn.com\/tv\/yes_minister_series\/yes_minister_episode_quotes.htm\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Yes Minister Series: Quotes from the dialogue&#8221;, <em>JonathanLynn.com<\/em><\/a> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The argument that we must do everything a Minister demands because he has been &#8216;democratically chosen&#8217; does not stand up to close inspection. MPs are not chosen by &#8216;the people&#8217; &mdash; they are chosen by their local constituency parties: thirty-five men in grubby raincoats or thirty-five women in silly hats. The further &#8216;selection&#8217; process is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,84,57,41],"tags":[458,463,101],"class_list":["post-22307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-government","category-humour","category-quotations","tag-parliament","tag-parody","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5NN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22307"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22308,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22307\/revisions\/22308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}