What's your one magic thing to fix the country?

[Reluctantadult]

If you could do something to sort out the country / world, what would it be? Your one magic wish. You can have more than one of you want, I'm not adverse to a green point plan!

The issues with this are, after a while society's structure will be similar, as some will spend, some will save and some will invest. And before you know it, it's back to the same.

Scrap the NHS

Time travel and kill Thatcher

Risky business, ripple in a pond type situation.

And replace it with what exactly ?

I don’t particularly think that anything much is needed. As countries go, we’re doing OK for a small nation sitting in the North Atlantic, blessed with neither great natural resources or a particularly convenient location.

Err! We DO have great natural resources and our location isn't bad at all.

We led the World with the Industrial Revolution. That was mostly because of our natural resources, i.e. coal, iron, slate, clay, etc. In more recent years, we've exploited our oil and gas reserves. Because of rivers and canals, we could easily transport goods around the country as part of the manufacturing and distribution processes. Later, because of our iron and coal, we were the first country to have a nationwide excellent railway system, to transport not only goods, but people too!

Our climate has been perfect for agriculture & farming, plenty of green fields for crops and animals. Lakes and rivers for fishing (along with our coastlines and territorial waters). There aren't many countries that have the perfect mix of sun/rain that the UK enjoys - lots of countries are too hot or too cold or too wet, or not wet enough for the range of crops and animals we can nurture in the UK.

We were a major seafaring nation. We had huge forests of trees (mostly Oak) which were used to build boats, and of course, we're a small island surrounded by sea, so plenty of boatyards, docks, harbours. That enabled us to trade with the rest of the World, have a navy to defend ourselves, etc.

Yes, we've squandered most of it and have allowed ourselves to become less relevant and more dependent on other countries, but that's been political over many decades, not some inherent flaw in our country's "resources"!

Our resources were always fairly limited because our country is small. We expanded, built an empire and this generated huge wealth off the back of other countries' resources. UK had first adopter advantage on lots of technologies (e.g. railways) but now is stuck as a Luddite country refusing to move on.

While your observation is true - kids with not enough interest from parents - it is extraordinary to reduce people’s motivation for having them down to “getting more benefits”.

Some kids need more than interest - they need support from the ‘village that it takes to raise a child’. For example as a starter for ten, they do not need drug gangs roaming around owning the only money in a region, actively trying to look rather more exciting and glamorous than a 9-5 admin or brickie poverty wage job to recruit them. Nor do they need the glamour and status of that foul-mouthed sexist drug gang hammered home by various films and music genres.

Would be parents need to fully understand the pressures and responsibilities of raising those kids for the next 25 years rather than thinking that they want a little baby who will be the only person to ever love them completely. I’m not sure if anyone really gets that until they have them (!) and a youngster whose main relation to society is built on modern internet values of violence and commercialism has no chance.

And for ‘parents’ you can read ‘women’ there, as women always do the bull of the childcare and single women seem to be increasing as more men think they should be able to keep fucking with no consequence, in a society that, good intentions or no, looks more sexist by the day.

To try and describe the situation I see I would turn to something Tony Judt said once: about never coming across such hopelessness and dispiriting emptiness in young peoples lives since the flashy era around WW1 - 1920s.

None of that suggests we have great natural resources. It was the very lack of them that led to much of the push to establish and then extend the empire.

As for the claim that we’re blessed with outs of coal, have you really not noticed that digging that up and burning it isn’t exactly an acceptable pastime nowadays?

We are a densely populated country without much spare land sitting a long way North and not on any significant trade routes.

Our historic achievements and current situation is down to our people, and what they chose to do.

Pay social care staff a good wage and make it an attractive career. Really invest in the services. People could move out of hospital freeing up hospitals to treat people

Education education education

Best training for teachers
Great pay for teachers
Wonderful senior leadership
Something big changed within Ofsted
ALL the send support needed
Support staff / TAs I'm every classroom - also paid well
Resources where needed

Put solar panels on every house and those water heater things.
Make gardening/ growing veg a subject at school and teach kids more about finance at school.

I have a six point plan to make the world a better place.

1. On everybody’s birthday their government pays them £40 to spend on anything they wish.
2. God arranges for 10% of his angels to patrol supermarket car parks and if someone doesn’t take their trolley back an angel swoops down and kicks them up the bum.
3. Employers have to subscribe to special payroll banking software that recognises if a man is getting paid more than a woman for the same role there is then an automatic electronic adjustment transferring the excess pay to others bank accounts.
4. Every item purchased has a special bar code extension that can trace the packaging back to the purchaser. When Red Bull tins, cement bags and McDonalds bags are found along our roads and highways, God sends another angel down to castrate the perpetrator.
5. HS2 is redesigned so that at intervals it does loops and twists like some of the rides at Alton Towers at incredibly high speeds. That way it will be rammed once it’s opened and the money generated through taxing its profits will repay the taxpayer quicker.
6. God creates a new type of wasp that is attracted to loud anti-social sounds like garden parties at 2am, and drivers of souped up cars and bikes with loud exhausts. The wasp homes in and stings them injecting a hormone that gives them extremely sensitive hearing.

Qik, I am seriously liking your work.

Oh my other one is that if motorbikes or cars have those "special" exhausts which are made as loud as possible to terrify little old ladies/kids/dogs etc - you know the ones, universally driven by absolute wanker funguses on the face of humanity - everyone is allowed, nay encouraged, to shoot out their tyres.

Get rid of the Tories

God, yes!! Totally agree.

An excellent perspectives, but it requires one thing, half of the students who wouldn't normally want to focus, to actually want to learn, so then we have 90% of students getting A-C grades etc.

I actually think great teacher training plus excellent SEN support and general classroom support staff would probably help students with focus issues. Catch all the cases of stuff like undiagnosed ADHD and dyslexia, great teachers means more motivating, interesting lessons and support staff can help keep disruptive kids out of the hair of others. (For bonus points train them all in Ross Greene's methods and get rid of the kids do well if they want to thinking altogether).

OK I had brainwave of another magic thing that would help: Get rid of for-profit news media. If it's for profit, it's classed as entertainment and not allowed to call itself news. News would have to stick to new guidance and be factual, accessible, respectful (not hounding grieving families, looking for shock pictures from disaster zones etc) and educational. When you have news made for profit, it brings all the same issues as social media - to make money you need views/engagement/sharing/clicks so clickbait titles win, stories that provoke an emotional response win, leading to more scare/anger/jealousy/amusement provoking headlines, even if they have to twist a story to get that angle that will provoke that emotion. Stories that elicit a feeling of us vs them and I'm on the right side win as well encouraging tribalism and "disney" politics where everything is black and white/good and evil with no shades of grey or nuance.

If we could be informed about world events, technological and research breakthroughs etc by people who actually understand what happened and want everyone else to understand too I think we'd be better off. News shouldn't encourage you to form a particular opinion about what has happened, it should just tell you what has happened and let you draw your own conclusions.

All luxury food (non-nutritious/non-essential things like doughnuts and sweets) is purchased using a ration card, such that each person or family has a limited amount they can purchase per time-frame. Rations can be saved up for events, such as birthdays, and other events like Christmas have more rations that are allowed. The ration card would be a voluntary scheme that has reward benefits e.g. free bus travel - aim is to help people manage their weight, and better health.
Sewage disposal becomes community-owned, such that properties have joint septic tanks, and that group of housing pays for disposal. Just a random thought that one.
Energy becomes community- owned, such that each group of housing has its own renewable energy source - wind turbine/solar panels/tidal or wave energy generator, paid for from council tax and windfall tax on fossil fuel company vast profits.
Solar farms banned from agricultural land and is instead built on car parks (as roofing over car parks) and over industrial units.
Investment in companies that source from supply chains that are responsible for deforestation is banned, as are any produce/products from said supply chains.
Random thought, make holiday homes community-owned, such that individuals can't own second homes, but the community where the holiday homes can own them up to a certain number.

The words used by the pp I was responding to suggested that owning to rent would be banned!

What's your one magic thing to fix the country?

Meeee. I'll do it. 🙋

I feel there should be a world government. (but like the EU but including every country ) that way global issues would be sorted eg climate change, poverty etc. Removing individual countries wants over global needs

Ten pages of ideas to fix the country and not one of us said anything like what Liz Truss and the cabinet have come up with.

FFS surely they can do better than borrowing shit tonnes of money so that well-off people pay less tax. Hoping the well-off people spend more on stuff, and then hey presto, growth happens and we're all somehow richer - it's so tenuous.

Meanwhile mumsnetters came up with things that could actually work, like investing in childcare, health, education, caring, mental health, insulation and renewables.

Liz Truss co-wrote a book called 'Brittania Unchained', but I don't think she gets what is chaining most people.