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!

Yes, UBI is another good one.

Oh, there's so much I would do!

David Attenborough for PM

I think i would somehow limit meat and dairy per person too. Which I'm sure would go down terribly! But we'd get much better water quality, air quality, health benefits, with economic benefits of that. And the obvious environmental benefits, space for nature. Our life support system. Farmers would need to be paid more to compensate.

Tax sugar like tobacco. 1kg of sugar, in whatever form, should cost about the same as a packet of premium brand cigarettes, ie £14. This would have a massive effect on the obesity/ heart disease / diabetes crisis.

Free ice creams for when its hot

Yeah, I think some kind of universal basic income. If you remove fear of abject poverty it benefits mental & physical health, lowers crime etc. When I see how often older people in creative arts talk about how benefits or grants helped get them started, it shows how this kind of thing can make arts careers accessible to all, not just the wealthy and so on

So who would own all the properties that are rented out? Would you expect the Government to confiscate all the housing? Sounds like a Communist regime and we all know how that ends!

Dissolution of parliament. Governance by the people for the people. Universal basic income

And personally if I had a cup and I was Elvis
in a big car, that'd be fantastic!

Just out of curiosity - are any of you who are in favour of banning cars 50 miles from your nearest supermarket?

there’s more to the uk than urban metropolis you know.

I thin the logic is they're forced to sell them and then everyone who rents them can just magically afford to buy them. Always seems a bit "screw the ones who can't" to me

Ration air travel and road travel. Everyone gets a fixed amount for the year. If you want more you bid anonymously for it at a central pool. If you need less you sell it anonymously back to the pool. On 1 January everyone gets a new allocation. Harry and Meghan will bid for more and somebody somewhere who has no plans to travel can make some money to educate their kids, by a moped or put food on the table.

Of course it is not confiscated. It is just taxed more. That changes behaviour.

Sounds like a Communist regime and we all know how that ends!

LOL. That didn't take long, did it...

And those WC people who don't live in a town so have to drive miles to the shops, school, work etc can just eat less and pull their kids out of school because they can't afford extra miles

I've got a lot of maths, I love getting gold stars but I have no idea what your comment means.

Does the suggestion I give need to be paid for. Ie, something that a politician could reasonably introduce.
Or is it like a genie wish, so anything at all like, everyone is given a free house and car and never needs to go to work?

No private schools, just excellent, high quality and well funded state schools providing equal opportunities for all children.

National service. Teach everyone a trade, some discipline and how to work hard.

@MarshaMelrose more of a genie wish thread! But I'll be hugely impressed if you can back it up with anything to make it more realistic! So it can be whichever you want.

@MarshaMelrose if you say a free house, you have to say why that would fix things 😉

Overhaul NHS. No more agencies - cleaners, porters etc employed directly and managers to have experience working in hospitals. Decent access to GPs for everyone, including preventative healthcare screening services. Enough capacity for hospitals, so ambulances aren't queuing at A&E for hours and can actually do what they're supposed to do. Medically trained staff in 111 so you can get telephone advice not read from a script. Enough staff and pay staff decent wages. Mental health care actually taken seriously and properly managed/treated, again with good funding, centralised systems, adequate staff. I think decent mental health care would overall save the country money. It just costs a lot to set up and that's not popular. If the NHS was funded properly it would be the cheapest and most efficient kind of health service to run.

I'd do more if I have unlimited budget but that's the one thing I'd change to make the biggest impact.

A simple thing that costs nothing and probably improves the quality of life for many people. Stop putting the clocks back in winter. More use can be made of daylight in the late afternoon than in the morning.

The intention would be to limit excessive use and waste. A family living in Northumberland would not be penalised through having enough basic miles to live. The aim is to redistribute wealth through penalising bad activity.

It already happens through taxation. Tobacco duty and alcohol levies. Except there governments take the money and decide what to do with it. The alternative I have put forward gives tradeable wealth to people not governments.

I thought WC was mostly a redundant term now. It is more complicated than that.

Criminalize deadbeat ‘dads’ (ie sperm donors) who are more than happy to father a child but then absolve themselves of all responsibility. Make them responsible for 50% of all the child’s costs until age 21. Funds taken at source like tax and NI. Minimum threshold way higher than it is now. The vilification of single mothers is abhorrent, as is the drain on the state purse when there are men out there perfectly able to fund their offspring, they simply choose (and are allowed) not to.

In fact 111 could be a kind of one stop shop bypassing the GP - they could make you an appointment with a specialist if you need one without taking up an appointment slot.