What would you do if you were Prime Minister? 2024

[Halcyon]

So, Labour have just got in and it is time for a shake up!
But what would YOU do if you were elected Prime minister?
Many moons ago I asked this same question on these forums with some interesting replies.

What would you do today in 2024?

Here are my rules if I was PM:

1. Re-nationalise the railways, helping to lower prices and get people to be using public transport.
Trains will broadcast adverts for the first 5 minutes of your journey bringing in money to lower prices.

2. Invest in Electric cars so the govenment have a stake or produce their own cars, thus making these cars cheaper for people to own.
When your battery fails, you can get one free replacement from the government scheme.
Government purchased cars will have adverts on the side of them to help lower costs. If you listen/watch an advert before you can set off off you will unlock features such as the ability to go faster.

3. Help single people to buy houses. It is near impossible to buy a house without support from someone else. Single people should be given help to buy, whether you've owned a home before or not.

4. If you come to this country and stay longer than 90 days you will be expected to work. You will pay a one off settling in tax. Tourists to be charged a visiting tax. This will be calculated on the length of their stay.

People who wish to live here or have second homes are charged an annual fee for taking up space, and living the good life.
Unskilled people will be trained to work in bakeries, making bread and food for the government supermarkets.

5. Job seekers or people who do not accept work when it is offered to them will be forced to work. Disabled or those who can't work will be execmpt from this.

6. Overseas businesses operating in the UK will have to keep their money in Government owned UK banks. The interest made on these accounts will go towards free public transport buses in UK cities.

7. MP's to be stripped of all second homes or offices. A big hotel in central London will be built for them. Transport costs or additional costs will not be covered and they'll have to suck it up like everyone else.

8. Free up room in UK prisons by dedicating an island off the shores of Scotland to be used as a final resting point for criminals. The island would be surrounded by electric fences.

9. UK Schools to include Wednesdays dedicated to PE and getting children healthy. Wednesdays will be sporting days.

10. Fast Food outlets and any takeaway food establishment to be charged a clean up tax for all the rubbish thrown out. This money will be sent to schools to create healthy living programmes.

11. Children to be taught mandatory "life" skills such as how to cook, how to wire a plug, change a tyre, use money wisely, etc.

11. Speed limit to be raised to 80 Miles Per hour on motorways.

12. Elderly people to be paid by the police to spy on street corners / spot crimes. The more they help out the more fuel vouchers they can get.

13. Ban the elderly from voting if they cant complete a sanity test.

14. Additional bank holiday on the 11th November to remember those that have died in the wars.

15. Dog owners to be charged a dog owners tax of £50 per year.

16. Old factories and buildings to be used to create super hub hotels for the homeless. New jobs would be created to run these facilities.

If you are homeless and complete tasks each day, you can exchange this for a free nights stay.

17. Men to have equal rights as women for looking after their children.
Independant research group created to help families with legal proceedings and navigate family laws.

18. The government to stop immediately any money being spent on space programmes and instead spend that money on Free meals for all primary school children.

19. The government to invest in tiny homes, creating forest villages with little pods. These inexpensive homes will help reduce the homeless situation and help people to buy homes. Homeless people can work their way up completing jobs to rent a pod.

20. The government to open their own supermarkets helping the nation who are struggling to feed their families.
This would be a non proffit organisation selling healthy products.
Job opportunities would be created to staff these places.
Money to fund this would come from a new food tax for anyone earning over £30000.

21. Businesses to be charged a pollution tax which would be 5% of their annual turnover. This would go to paying the wages of the new government run supermarkets.

22. Hospitals will include new staff known as happy entertainers to help cheer people up. This could be from singing to back massages, to reading stories. All to improve mental health.

23. MP's salaries to be capped at £60000.

24. The government will invest in developping an offshore Maglev railway on stilts, linking the North and South. UK tax payers will be charged a new Transport tax of £25 per year to cover developing the new railway. This will also bring in new jobs. As an incentive you will get 4 trips a year free.

25. Children to be offered free training or aprenterships.
This would be paid for by reducing MP's salaries and also by a new Training Tax that would be paid by businesses.

[Pierre]

A very similar post to the other.

1. Don’t make any plans beyond 2029.

[Escapee]

1. One rate of income tax, with everyone paying the same percentage of their wages which is fairer than penalising those who earn more.
2. Close the Welsh devolution shambles in Cardiff Bay and bring control back under Westminster.
3. Have a single policy on recycling across all local authorities.
4. Remove the choice for people who decide to claim benefits and not work if they are physically and mentally capable.
4. Withdraw from the EHCR.
5. Sack civil servants who refuse to carry out orders.
6. Assess illegal immigrants in a timely manner, remove the appeals process and remove from the country those who should be removed.
7. Have recycling points for unwanted junk mail, where it cam be sorted and companies fined per item.
8. Focus on the skills that the younger generation need for employment, reduce the number of degree courses and increase apprenticeships.
9. Fund degree courses for the brightest individuals where the course is a benefit to the country.
10. Build more prisons, come down harder on criminals and increase sentences.
11. More police and have them out there dealing with the real issues.
12. Ban Labour voters from voting.
13. Pass a law that protects me from being removed from power, declared a dictator and being imprisoned.

First thing would be to ban forum posts with excessive use of blank lines.
I have reduced it to about 50% of its original size. JFYI, you have two number "11"'s

[jfman]

Tell the truth that there is a magic money tree.

[Mr K]

1. Make Test Match Cricket free to air.
2. Life imprisonment for all geography teachers.
3. Send all Audi and BMW drivers to Rwanda.
4. Public flogging of Jeremy Clarkson.
5. Unlimited support for British viticulture.
6. Ban milk chocolate. Only proper dark stuff allowed.
7. The Premiership to be nationalised and all players on the minimum wage.
8. All toilets to be free ( right to pee legislation).
9. Plastic grass/plants to be outlawed.
10. Any cars on pavements to be crushed.
11. An 8pm curfew, no need to be disturbing anyone else after that time.
12. Get rid of voter id, but introduce an IQ test before people are allowed to vote.

[ianch99]

Is this a parody thread?

[Escapee]

Originally Posted by Mr K

1. Make Test Match Cricket free to air.
2. Life imprisonment for all geography teachers.
3. Send all Audi and BMW drivers to Rwanda.
4. Public flogging of Jeremy Clarkson.
5. Unlimited support for British viticulture.
6. Ban milk chocolate. Only proper dark stuff allowed.
7. The Premiership to be nationalised and all players on the minimum wage.
8. All toilets to be free ( right to pee legislation).
9. Plastic grass/plants to be outlawed.
10. Any cars on pavements to be crushed.
11. An 8pm curfew, no need to be disturbing anyone else after that time.
12. Get rid of voter id, but introduce an IQ test before people are allowed to vote.

I assume you are advocating the abolishment of the TV licence for number one.

[mrmistoffelees]

1. Order a big mixed kebab on naan with extra hot chilli sauce and yoghurt and mint chutney and eat it off a posh plate with best cutlery
2. Get a 120” 8k tv installed on the premise of watching important briefings on but secretly plug in my PS5 to play Call of duty on.
3. Replace the cat with a dog
4. Write two letters

[Anonymouse]

For a start, stop treating people out of work due to illness as if it's their fault.
Properly take people's circumstances into account - and stop assuming the DWP knows better than the medical profession if someone's fit for work. Newsflash: They. Do. Not. Time was, if you had a sick note, that was the end of the matter. In fact after my accident in 2000 I got the impression whilst on a 2-week note that my job could be forfeit, so I reluctantly went back to work - only to discover a few months later that this was an empty threat, for the simple reason that if you went back to work on a sick note, you weren't insured, but I didn't know that. We need a return to those days.
Reduce the requirement for unfair dismissal from 2 years to ZERO. It is entirely possible for circumstances defined as unfair dismissal to occur from day one, let alone after 2 years!
Make it illegal to render someone homeless, as this benefits no-one - the tenant gets caught in a Catch-22: if they lose their job because they can't pay and therefore lose their home, then they can't pay because they've lost their job. How does that pay the landlord? I grant you that some people are on the streets because they choose to be. But too many are there through no fault of their own.
Destroy TVL. Fund the BBC some other way than licensing. Mention TVG licences to an American and they'll look at you as if you've gone strange. Or at least downgrade failure to pay from a criminal offence, which it is not, to a civil offence, which it is.
Legalise prostitution and brothels. Treat the profession as a profession. Ensure trade union protection, health checks, and above all self-defence lessons. True, this won't solve the problems of STIs, violence or drug abuse. But it'll go a long way towards a solution - and they'll be able to back each other up.
Definitely take back all industries that were privatised, i.e. stolen. No-one asked me if I wanted this to happen. Those industries belonged to me and to every other taxpayer, paid for via taxes. There is a difference between ownership and control - they were controlled, not owned, by the government, as we owned but didn't control them. Hey, anyone who bought shares in them: haven't you realised yet that you've paid for your own property?
Find some way to fund media and consumer services other than all those bloody ads!
Make spam illegal! That is, actually enforce the laws and stamp it out! Save millions of trees every year by banning those damn leaflets!
Put 'None Of The Above' on a voting card. This will tell whoever's vying for power how many people aren't voting for them. At present they just think we don't care. We do. We just don't think our vote matters any more. We don't trust them.
On a related note, take a leaf out of Clarke and Adams (in fact Heinlein also suggested it in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress) and give the post of PM to someone who doesn't want it.
Invest more in something like Spaceguard - it is a statistical certainty that we'll be hit by something (and according to one theory we are in fact overdue to be hit). It's not a case of if, but of when. We have to make all governments, not just ours, see that.
And buses definitely need to be made more reliable. As things stand, companies such as TfGM deserve an award. I can just see it now:

"And this year's award for Complete Speculative Fiction goes to...TfGM, for their bus timetables! A purer piece of utter fiction we've never seen!"

Oh, I nearly forgot: swap football players' and nurses' salaries. We don't need football. We do need nurses. Football doesn't save lives. Nurses do.

Originally Posted by Anonymouse

Oh, I nearly forgot: swap football players' and nurses' salaries. We don't need football. We do need nurses. Football doesn't save lives. Nurses do.[/FONT]

Typical nonsense really. We dont "Need" Tv, phones or a host of other things.
Relatively speaking, there are only a few well paid footballers compared to the total number of nurses.

Also, most nurses do not generally "save lives" as such, thats more the Doctors etc.
Nurses more generally provide the care after the doctor [or other] has done their work.
Dont bother with the old "well such and such does/did". There are always exceptions, I specifically said "in general".

There are many jobs performed by people that you could consider more important than entertainment, picking out one is somewhat pointless.

Many of the other items in your post are nonsensical as well, but I cant be bothered to pick them out. Fortunately for the country, they will never happen.

[TheDaddy]

Originally Posted by Paul

Typical nonsense really. We dont "Need" Tv, phones or a host of other things.
Relatively speaking, there are only a few well paid footballers compared to the total number of nurses.

Also, most nurses do not generally "save lives" as such, thats more the Doctors etc.
Nurses more generally provide the care after the doctor [or other] has done their work.
Dont bother with the old "well such and such does/did". There are always exceptions, I specifically said "in general".

There are many jobs performed by people that you could consider more important than entertainment, picking out one is somewhat pointless.

Many of the other items in your post are nonsensical as well, but I cant be bothered to pick them out. Fortunately for the country, they will never happen.

Good nurses should save lives just by doing their jobs properly and noticing changes with their patients sadly it's 50/50 in my experience if they're good or not and falling. That notwithstanding it is a nonsense much like a lot of the stuff on the lists, for a start footballers don't decide their wages, the market does and they do so because of the money they generate for their clubs, if we all turned around and stopped paying subscriptions their pay would drop dramatically, I remember when John Barnes and Chris Sutton struggled by on just 10k a week, the massive wage growth since is due to the massive revenues they make for their clubs obviously. Does smack of slapping the working man a bit also, for a start why are footballers wages still done as weekly in the press, who gets paid weekly anymore? Makes them easier targets than say F1 drivers whose salary is never criticised but just as high.

---------- Post added at 11:47 ---------- Previous post was at 11:46 ----------

Originally Posted by ianch99

Is this a parody thread?

Yes

[Escapee]

Originally Posted by TheDaddy

who gets paid weekly anymore?

---------- Post added at 11:47 ---------- Previous post was at 11:46 ----------

I get paid weekly, it's a pain.

[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by Mr K

1. Make Test Match Cricket free to air.
2. Life imprisonment for all geography teachers.
3. Send all Audi and BMW drivers to Rwanda.
4. Public flogging of Jeremy Clarkson.
5. Unlimited support for British viticulture.
6. Ban milk chocolate. Only proper dark stuff allowed.
7. The Premiership to be nationalised and all players on the minimum wage.
8. All toilets to be free ( right to pee legislation).
9. Plastic grass/plants to be outlawed.
10. Any cars on pavements to be crushed.
11. An 8pm curfew, no need to be disturbing anyone else after that time.
12. Get rid of voter id, but introduce an IQ test before people are allowed to vote.

Several of those I can get behind.

[jonbxx]

Massively subsidise childcare. My Belgian colleagues pay £150 to £300 per month per child. When ours were young, we were paying nearly £800 per child. We had to make a real decision on whether it was worth my wife working as all her wages would go on childcare. If you don’t subsidise childcare, then….

Evidence of outgoings for childcare should be admissible to banks for mortgage playability. See also rent payments that are higher than mortgage payments but not used as evidence an applicant can pay a mortgage.