In it’s seemingly never ending quest to slash public spending and bring down the deficit the UK government is resorting to increasingly bizarre stunts to whip the public up into a frenzy of “slash and burn”.
One of the most recent was the YourFreedom campaign which is trying to get the public to suggest which “red tape” inducing laws they want slashed (we’d like the repeal of the badly drafted and rushed-through Digital Economy Act, thanks very much). The latest is a clearly staged video chat between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Prime Minister David Cameron, now released below, about what to do about deficit. Huh, Mark? Huh? Come on then, let’s hear your ideas…
Quite why Mark chose to “meet” the PM in what looks like his spare bedroom in a T-shirt is something there will perhaps be PHDs written about. Or perhaps not.
At any rate, it’s clearly staged because we know for a fact that Zuckerberg met the PM just before the recent Facebook Garage event in London which we covered. At the time no-one officially confirmed the meeting, but privately Facebook executives alluded to it. No-one knows what that meeting was about.
So now, the UK’s Governments new campaign “The Spending Challenge” is a sort of crowd sourced method of getting ideas to reduce UK national debt. Of course, what it will more readily be used for is justification of government cuts when they can point to the fact that, hey, look, lots of people voted on Facebook to get rid of primary schools, ok?
This campaign launches initially launch on the Democracy UK Facebook Page which was originally started during the general election, but in practice the page is simply a jumping off point for Facebook users to other sites pushed by the government. In fairness, it’s not a bad idea: 26 million British citizens are currently on Facebook, which is nearly a third of the population.