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!

Secure, good quality housing for anyone who needs it and can't get a mortgage. This would also be rent controlled.
A basic so people don't have to worry about losing their home and can concentrate on improving their lives.

^this 100%

@stillvicarinatutu totally agree, mental health hospitals are so needed. How Many times have we seen murders committed by people left in 'care in the community' it just doesn't work.

Ban supermarkets, that solves the problem of having to drive out of town to them. Plus endless trucks. Bring live back to town and enable people to buy local cheaply. I lived in Paris for four years and never once went to a supermarket. But there were fantastic local markets every week. And once the cherries finished in May you had to wait a year to buy the next ones. That’s still the way in France, no shipping from Chile or wherever so you can have cherries all year.
This is such a utopian thread but individually there are some bloody amazing ideas. Mumsnetters really should rule the world.

Link rents / mortgages to salary so everyone pays the same percentage of their earnings / benefits in rent / mortgages.

I'd restructure capitalism so that all companies have equal legal requirements towards staff for good pay and safe hygenic work conditions; towards customers for a fair price and only then towards shareholders. Profit should never be at the expense of welfare or fair cost.

I'd put immediate levies on companies avoiding business tax.

I didn't read the whole thread, but a better taxation system.

• For working Joe Blox:

Tax should be paid in % by income AND circumstances. So your if you have children, you retain a certain % of your wages rather than a fixed amount of child benefit. Personal allowance should be higher for families with children or just one woking prtner - no big form filling just a different tax code. Proofen by adress and birth/ marriage certificate. Same for couples where one partner is retired or can't work due to disability. This should be on top of their benefits.

• Super wealthy: big clamp down on tax evasion with big fines and prisons entence min 1 year - no parole.

Obviously higher taxation.

Benefits claimant:
One fixed payment based on cost of living in the area... re assessed every 12 months- this can go up or down. (One partner woking, a straight 50% of calculated pay)
For able people: Make work pay! People should keep 50% of their wages on top of benefits for first 6 months and then a steady decline by 10% each month. You should be able to claim for 18 months + the 6 months full pay ... then a break for 18 months unless dire emergency like redundancy or severe illness..
Top up Benefits if needed for working people should be on benefits levy.

• Companies should be taxed according to how they treat their staff. Not paying a reasonable living wage (based on area benefits calculation + 20%) they will be higher taxed to pay for their employees!

Radically change our schools. It's barely changed in 50 years, a period where literally everything else has changed. Teach more "real life" skills like personal finance, personal health & wellbeing, etc. Teach kids how to research things rather than obsessing about memorising facts.

Why spend hours teaching SOHCAHTOA, trigonometry, pythagoras, etc and forcing kids to memorise how to do it, when there are now apps to do it for you? Why do we need to remember historic facts (and be tested on them) when you can easily google them on your phone? We should be teaching that there ARE apps to do trigonometry and how to use the apps, likewise teaching the generalities of history and nurturing an inquisitive mind for kids to grow into wanting to learn about things and how they can learn about them. Not spending lesson after lesson obsessing about what Shakespeare was probably thinking about when he wrote Act 5 of MacBeth or other such nonsense, even worse when the pupils are in a lower group, barely literate! Likewise, wasting time trying to teach algebra to kids with poor numeracy who don't know their times tables nor prime numbers!

And yes, I know we'll get the "it's the parent's job to do it", when it comes to things like contraception, personal finance, etc., but the fact is that "life" is more complicated now than it was 50 years ago, and a lot of today's parents don't have the skills to teach their own kids because they don't know it/weren't taught it themselves by their parents.

50 years ago, finance was simple. You got paid in cash, put it in jars/envelopes to pay the bills. If your jar was empty, you either did without or "borrowed" from another jar. People didn't have cars, didn't have foreign holidays, so didn't need to worry about travel insurance, car insurance, etc. Life insurance/pensions were either done by your employer (if lucky enough) or you just paid the "pru" man a penny a week when he came round on his bike! Lots of today's parents haven't a clue about their own pensions, so how can they teach their children?

I honestly despaired at my son's secondary school when he started there in 2012. At the first tour, it was just like going back in time 50 years to my school days. Yes, plenty of computers around (but DS later said most were never used). Depressingly one of his first homeworks was memorising the dates of the reigns of British Kings from 1066. His first "tech" lesson was starting to make a wooden fish. First English lesson was being handed two exercise books, one a "draft" and the other his "fair" book (to re-write his essays etc in neat handwriting once he'd done them in draft in the other book), the homework being to decorate and cover both!

No, this isn't teacher bashing, it's the system. All the educational reforms of the past few decades are just re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Lots of time, effort and money on achieving bugger all in terms of actual change. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.

Deprivation

No tax havens anywhere in the world.

Difficult to enforce that. If independent countries set themselves up as low tax countries do you send in gunboats to force them to change?

Using an analogy, if the UN cannot force one of its five permanent security council members to step back from invading a sovereign country then what realistic prospect is there of persuading small island states to give up a source of income.

@Ylvamoon

Personal allowance should be higher for families with children or just one woking prtner

We did, of course, have "joint" taxation as recently as the 80s, where there was a choice of husband/wife income being taxed together (under the husband) or an election could be made to be taxed separately. Unfortunately, the women's movement wanted separate taxation, so that's what happened and has remained ever since, losing the "perks" of things like married mans' allowance along the way.

The women's movement should have worked for tax system reform to work around the family unit, i.e. instead of the default historic system of all marital income taxable either independently or on the husband, they should have campaigned for another option of taxed wholly on the wife, or transferrable allowances both ways, not just wife to husband, but also husband to wife. But, no, they wanted independent taxation, which is what they got!

Ironically, benefits are still "household" based, so we have a mismatch of benefits granted according to the household situation, but tax based on individual circumstances, hence two systems working in different ways, often causing illogical outcomes.

But re your other points, yes, our tax system is antiquated and needs root & branch reform, but politicians of all parties are too scared to say that or to start long term changes required, as of course, they're obsessed only with the next 5 years until each GE and they're not interested in anything that takes longer. Hence we get this constant fiddling around the edges which achieves nothing.

Extend the 30 hours free childcare so it’s from birth instead of 3 years old, and for the full year instead of just term time. Childcare costs are hugely prohibitive to lots of women returning to work.

Renationalise utilities.
Actually, that might not be my number one thing, but it's certainly something I'd investigate if I had the power.

I fully agree. We'd also have to "incentivise" tax havens to stop doing it, as most/many of them only exist as they do because of being tax havens. It would probably cost more in "aid" to such countries than it does in lost tax revenues.

How much would the UK have to pay the Isle of Man if IOM suddenly lost it's financial services industry because it was forced to tax individuals and companies registered there the same way as other European countries? The IOM would suffer badly with the loss of their financial services industry and would need massive grants/investment to re-purpose itself. You could say the same about all the other tax havens, i.e. Gibraltar, Monaco, Jersey, Cayman Islands, Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Bahamas, etc. To varying degrees, they'd be stuffed without their tax haven status as tourism alone wouldn't make them viable countries (and without millionaires, they'd be less attractive to tourists!).

World leaders have been working for a good few years now to try to curtail tax haven activity, and have made some inroads, such as information exchange of bank accounts secretly held in tax haven countries. But, until there's some kind of reciprocal/beneficial arrangements put in place to "compensate" tax haven countries for the loss of their main (or only) income source, they're not going to do it voluntarily!

Radically change our schools. It's barely changed in 50 years, a period where literally everything else has changed. Teach more "real life" skills like personal finance, personal health & wellbeing, etc. Teach kids how to research things rather than obsessing about memorising facts.

Absolutely agree. We aren't in Victorian times anymore, school lessons and uniforms need modernizing, we are in the 20th century anymore !

Hold politicians accountable to their election manifestos. Stop them making promises they don't keep!

How would that work? Why would anyone take a job with higher responsibility or that needs a higher level of education or training for no more money?

There’s no one magic fix, but since you said magic: never having allowed house prices to go beyond the range of ordinary wages 20 years ago would be a good start. We would all be less impoverished now without that.

Yep

That actually seems to be what’s happened, as jobs that require education now carry lots of responsibility at low wages, usually the public sector jobs on minimum wage, while jobs that don’t like cleaning and retail have been raised by minimum wage. Yet the first set of jobs all carry debt from degrees… result, people don’t want to work in the public sector jobs any more and it’s collapsing.

tax wealth not just income

I would use my genie wish to delete the country debt, but not erase the memory of it.
We need to teach proper money management and budgeting in schools from an early age.

Starting with the Politicians that created the debt?

Reform the political/voting system. Have voters vote on individual political ideas for all key sectors rather than politicians representing parties. Then have qualified people from those sectors in charge of implementing the plans. Have the plans fully costed and project-managed, and a fully independent body to address underperformance or incompetence.

Oh, and institute a land tax.

But then no-one on a low salary would ever be rented a nicer place, so it wouldn’t change anything.

There are some fabulous ideas on here but the ones like paying everyone the same wage are just a bit too communist like and look how well that went.

Ban high profits from essentials food, medicine and fuel

that food can be left to rot or destroyed is criminal