18 Policy Pointers for the new UK Government

The new UK government has just laid out its policies for government with an emphasis on economic growth. Leaving aside the arguments about growth for now, the following are some initial policy thoughts and pointers that would increase sensible economic activity in a sustainable way, try to reverse some of the environmental destruction being wrought here and beyond, and do something about the health crisis gripping Britain. These thoughts are not costed nor fully worked out, but nonetheless they point to areas of particular pain and grievance.

1. Health

• To cut the NHS waiting lists quickly and seriously: 

• Get operating theatres working seven days a week and at least till 8pm (they stop at 5:30pm) and pay the staff generous bonuses to work more. 

• Give a permanent, total exemption for frontline medical staff from the crazy measure brought in by George Osborne (tapered annual allowance for pensions, April 2016) which caused surgeons to cut their hours or face massive taxes on their pension savings. 

• Again with suitably generous bonuses, open GP surgeries over the weekend. 

• Open phlebotomy sites in all possible GP surgeries and pharmacies. 

• Increase the number of diagnostic scanners available for patients and begin to get them built here and eventually designed here (the CAT scanner was a British invention) 

• Increase the number of physician associates and give them a pathway to becoming full doctors (with additional training). 

• Train all medical staff in evidence-based nutrition – not the biased, food-industry version of nutrition currently peddled.

• Bring in nationalised, good quality care homes and a massive increase in well paid, professional carers to help those who need it in their homes.

   

2. Food 

• Institute a national information campaign to teach people how damaging animal-based foods are both to human health and to the planet. 

• Help farmers transition away from animals to growing food that humans can eat directly. 

• Educate the public about what farms and farmers actually do – and how hard it is – and encourage everyone to grow some of their own food. Everyone who wants one should have access to an allotment; there should be national courses on food growing.

• All government procurement must try to favour locally grown food for its canteens and events. It should institute a 40% plant-based rule and move towards a huge decrease in UPFs.

• Guide restaurants and pubs towards making 20% of their menu whole food, plant-based and non-UPF (ultra-processed food) – that means veggie burgers don’t count. This is a very reasonable request in theory, but the trouble is most chefs have no idea how to cook anything except meat and fish.

3. Housing

• This is obviously a huge subject and incredibly badly managed for at least the last 45 years with huge levels of homelessness and precarious living which will take years and decades to improve, however there is one thing that could be ended instantly: the scourge of rough sleeping – no one should be left living or sleeping on the street. Though the numbers are difficult to estimate accurately, there are somewhere between a few thousand and maybe twenty thousand people on the streets every night. And yet there are estimated to be at least 600,000 long-term (more than six months) empty properties in the UK and maybe more than million. The number is staggering and outrageous and in fact is so large that it could be used to help some of the roughly quarter of million people (half of whom are children) who are homeless though not actually roofless. [see https://www.ruthlessguide.com/why-is-there-so-much-homelessness-in-a-supposedly-rich-country-like-britain/]

4. Education

• Education should concentrate on producing good democratic citizens of the world.

• This means starting with something like the trivium – grammar, logic and rhetoric. Learning to make arguments based on evidence should be a critical aim, as should public speaking.

• Ensemble music would also be taught and enabled from the very beginning, eg orchestras and choirs. Everyone should have the chance and be encouraged to learn the piano and at least one orchestral instrument. The effect on the quality of life and humans ability to collaborate (instead of compete) with each other would be staggering.

• Private schools should be heavily taxed and have their charity status removed. They should also have quotas for the number of their students who can attend Oxbridge, say 5%, and another (low) percentage for the Russell Group. Ideally private schools should only exist for special purposes such as those with severe learning difficulties and or to allow educational experiments aimed at green learning. 

• Huge investment should be made into the crumbling buildings of state schools and class sizes reduced to around ten. As robots come in everywhere, there will be more people available to teach and be assistants and robots themselves will take on some of the work. AI will make personalised learning possible for every child and student.

• University fees should be dramatically reduced and the loans system phased out. The role of universities should be studied in order to make it more congruent with the aim of stopping planetary destruction. viii) From school onwards, encourage everyone to grow some of their food (again, this happened at the CStG primary in the 1960s).

• Social dancing should be taught to all school children (as it used to be). Social dancing encourages connection, coordination, collaboration and understanding and it is something that many people can still do when they are old.

• Very cheap mass adult education program should be brought in (as we used to have with the WEA [Workers’ Educational Association]) so that ordinary people can learn how the planet really works and what we are doing to it, including how bad industrial food is for us and the planet. It would also include ensemble music teaching and ensemble musical activities (without amplifiers).

• Encourage everyone, especially girls, to understand green science and engineering better. There should be prizes and clear ways of earning a reasonable living for those that do.

5. Exercise

• Exercise should be made pleasant for all children, not just those who are athletic, that means exercise that is mostly non-competitive and ideally something that you can still do when you are old. Violent, ultra-competitive sports and environmentally damaging sports should be discouraged and made socially unacceptable as was done with drink-driving and seat-belts. 

6. Energy

• Encourage vast reduction in energy usage.

• Institute policies to research, design and build solar panels and wind turbines in the UK. 

• Bring in a mass program to insulate houses properly and install heat pumps wherever practical. 

• Bring in grid scale storage as fast as possible – a really tough problem, but vital to make much more effort in this direction. 

• Bring in smart grids. 

• Reduce natural gas usage as much as possible and try to generate as much biogas as possible. It’s not a quantitative substitute for natural gas, but at least it is renewable.

7. Production

• Hugely encourage a renaissance of local manufacturing, mostly of green products driven by government procurement favouring locally made devices, machines etc.

• Invest heavily in start-ups – currently it’s a joke. Institute an organisation that offers first money for those involved in 

  • green products

  • plant-based, non-UPF food

  • AI

  • robotics

8. Communications

• Massively improve internet access, reliability and speed in public places, especially on trains. This includes upgrading the cell phone network because the signal is dreadful so much of the time. In Oxford, for instance, the signal varies from wobbly to non-existent. 

• On trains, where many people would like to do something useful on the journey, there is either no signal or else the wifi signal has no internet. 

• There should be free, public WiFi in all cities and towns that agree to it, and especially on all public transport.

9. Transport – Rail & Water

• Press ahead with nationalising the railways.
• Start to nationalise all public transport, then massively improve the rail network (including putting back as many of the branch lines killed off by Beeching as possible) and make public transport very cheap or even free in some cases and places. This would create huge amounts of economic activity and much more social interaction and pull people out of their cars. Once this policy was working, increase the tax on road fuels dramatically.
• Understand that as oil declines, asphalt will become more expensive, so roads will become very expensive and difficult to repair, but we will still have steel, so there will be a huge shift to rail and, where possible, water. Our waterways need to be made navigable wherever possible, as well as being cleaned up dramatically so that other lifeforms can live in them once again.

10. Transport – Road

• Encourage a mass return to the bicycle. Privilege pedestrians and bicycles over cars wherever possible. 
• Force car manufacturers to make much smaller, lighter cars. 
• Invest in self-driving vehicles. 
• Bring in car sharing in all cities and towns.

11. Water

• Nationalise the water companies and clean up the UK’s waterways and seas.

12. Governance

• Large global corporations should be investigated for their ability to distort or destroy democracy and create powerful anti-democratic monopolies.
• All corporations over a certain size must have worker participation and members of the public on the board. They must allow scrutiny by journalists and others who seek facts about what they are doing.
• Members of the public should be chosen randomly (though they can refuse for any reason at all) to scrutinise every level of government. In ancient Athens, politicians were chosen by ‘sortition’. Many public officials, including magistrates were chosen by lot. Positions requiring specific skills, like generals, were elected.
• Reduce the voting age to 16.
• Bring in a good form of proportional representation.

13. Fiscal Measures

• Start experimenting immediately with UBI – the robot revolution is coming like a tsunami and almost nobody is ready for it.

• UBI will force a realistic look at immigration, which needs to be seen as an artefact of overpopulation. All nations with monetary sovereignty can do this now. Those without it, will need to bring in a form of local money.

• The UK should bring in local money anyway, as it will help with many other social and environmental programs.

14. Music & Theatre

• All towns and cities should have a chief musician and have both professional and amateur orchestras and choirs. They should also have repertory theatres, independent cinemas, and opera houses. Again, local money will help with this. 

• Local filmmaking should be encouraged and with the return of local, independent theatres and cinemas, there will be places to show films. 

15. Media

• Reform the media by preventing ownership of newspapers over a certain readership by a single person or a few people. Again, as with large corporations, they must have members of the public on their boards. 

• Social media should be investigated for the serious and harmful effect that it is having on young people and democracy. Finding reasonable policies to deal with social media abuses and effects will not be easy.

16. Philosophy

• All practices which clearly help destroy the planet or foster a mentality that encourages such destruction and/or worsens societal divisions should be socially and culturally deprecated and heavily taxed, eg motor sports and golf.

• In general, try to avoid making laws wherever possible (the justice system is broken and the prisons are full anyway), but rather, try to change behaviour via cultural, media and fiscal means. Banning things will encourage criminal behaviour; better to make bad things more difficult and more expensive – this will discourage at least some people.

• We will have to start discussing what the good is and trying to be more evidence- and fact-based in our thinking and strategy. Those who favour lying and obfuscating will need to face consequences.

17. Tourism

• Mindless tourism should be discouraged. It has clearly become ludicrous. Humans love travelling, probably always have, but we need to do so within the bounds of the collapsing planet.

18. Population

• Educate all women to understand that overpopulation is the ultimate driver of all the world’s worst problems. Once oil goes into decline, it will become apparent that everything depends on oil, including industrial food production, and that will become imperative to encourage birth control to help women control their fertility towards having only one (living) child on average. The limit should be soft as accidents happen. Having children takes a terrible toll on women, so keeping the number down is also good for them.