Coffee Space 
Today’s blog is brought to you by a random shower thought. I don’t think it will come as a shock that many people around the world have found leadership rather lacking, in a time when it was required to be robust. I found myself asking the question: “If I were the Prime Minister of the UK, what would I do better?”.
I imagine I’m not the first person in the world to think of this, this isn’t even the first time I’ve thought about it. But it’s possibly the first time I’ve liked some of the ideas I came up with, hence believe they are worth noting and sharing.
I consider the following to be perhaps a campaign to be elected, a series of ideas and promises to the public to actually improve the state of the Country.
Going into this enormous task, I think it’s important to have several very clear goals:
The first idea in this space is to have regular private meetings with opposition leaders. These would be non-recorded, completely private meetings (to the point where all electronic devices are confiscated) perhaps for 60 minutes a week with each political leader. It would be encouraged that other people important positions also do the same.
The goal of this is to encourage robust debate, to raise genuinely important issues without the need to put on a show and point score - to actually open proper dialogue amongst parties. This of course only works based on trust, if this trust is broken and things spoken about privately are used to misdirect or are leaked, this defeats the purpose of these open discussions. Perhaps ultimately it should just be accepted that this will be an information channel from opposition leaders to Prime Minister only - but not the other way around.
The second idea in this space is to keep people who disagree with my opinion close, even going as far as to hire a team of people whose job is always to find the faults in any points I make. Of course some balance would be needed with supportive voices of my ideas and a person can over do it - but generally it’s better if ideas are robust before reaching the public.
(I think this last idea came from ‘The Darkest Hour’ film. Coincdentally it’s also a great film and well worth the watch, so watch it if you haven’t.)
It’s insane that you need a degree in order to understand the law, yet are expected to follow it. How on earth did our legal system end up in such a state? I see a way forward with one of two options:
An additional bonus is that we can then expect the police to fully understand it, and therefore to fully understand the extent of their powers. Too much of the time do the police rely on the ignorance of the public and enforce some misconception of the law.
The first idea in this space is that no law can be implemented without a sunset clause. That is to say that every law must have some deadline, where it must be renewed in Parliament. Too many times we have been bitten by legacy laws that people are hardly even aware are still in existence. No law should be exempt from this and the only justification to not addressing a deadline is a very serious scenario, like a global pandemic or war. By default, laws continue until they can be debated and the default position is to continue them.
The second idea is that each law should be written with a pre-condition, which may be considered an assumption that activates it. It must be meaningful and measurable, based on data that can be collected. If the pre-condition could be said not to be met, it can then be debated and either the pre-condition can be adjusted, the law adjusted or removed entirely. This idea really pushed the government towards a data-driven approach, rather than an outrage driven approach. Effective change can then be measured over time.
The third idea is that the law have a post-condition, i.e. a measurable outcome. As an example: if you are reducing tax to increase the wealth of the bottom 25% of earners, then this should be measurable. Non-measurable laws are ill defined and only serve to make the process more complex.
The fourth idea is that somebody proposing a law must provide supporting justification textual background. They should explain what they believe they are solving by implementing this law. This helps contextualize the reasoning behind the given law, which itself could be used as a measure for whether the law in question is effective.
The fifth idea is that all changes should documented, including who proposes what, who votes on it, all the points raised for and against, etc. Not only in this great for the purposes of history, but it further allows for the context of a given law to be properly considered when reviewing it at a future date.
The effect adding all of these conditions will mean regular reviews of existing laws and stop crazy unrelated laws being stuffed into bills without any justification (which happens more often than it should). The laws will also be accountable, with the thinking behind them explained, rather than leaving a person to guess at the intention behind it.
Requiring all this additional thinking and reasoning also means that the system should be slowed down - this is by design. More time can then be allocated to thinking about the laws being proposed. Currently changes occur quite rapidly, which does not allow for robust discussions and the consequences cannot be fully considered.
The next idea is to setup a fund that gives small grants to small projects, on the proviso that it becomes self-sustaining. This fund would give out small grants to allow people in the UK to test out company ideas. We’re talking about the scale of £100 to £1k, and there would have to be some limitations around who and how regularly they can be handed out. There would need to be some review process and the business model or research would need to be viable.
All purchases using these funds would need to be approved (you can’t just buy yourself stuff and the money should likely be spend inside the UK) and on failure, the fund absorbs all of the assets (accept in the case of bankruptcy). In the scenario that a business is successful, the grant is repaid after some threshold multiple times over in order to keep the fund going.
The overall intent would be to allow people to try out ideas that are high-risk with little to no risk to themselves, allowing people to experiment. It would for sure need some more guidelines to ensure that it’s well thought out, but I think this project could be quite cool.
Another idea is to provide tax-breaks for starting companies. Companies that are just starting are like small fires, if you smother them too much then they fail. There would of course need to be some guidelines around this too, but I think tax-breaks could help foster more small businesses in the UK.
The first idea in this space is to remove the money from campaigning, and by this I mean the private donations. You see this all the time and it’s corruption by other means, no doubt. For example, there is a scheme where people pay a lot of money and then get to spend time privately conversing with politicians. Nobody should be able to buy influence like this. The political parties should be entirely prevented from doing this.
The second idea is to remove the money from politicians, but increase their pay. Increasing the pay of politicians is somewhat controversial, but it’s one of the most important positions in the UK. If we don’t want these people to be corrupted, then they should be paid an amount that means they are happy to not be corrupted. I believe £100k would likely be a better number, rather than the £50k or less they are currently paid. This would entail the removal of cash-backs for purchases made, so this would personally incentivize them to limit unnecessary expenditure.
The third idea is that there should be a declaration of conflict of interest. External unbiased opinions must be found when there is a conflict of interest - for example if an MP owns private land, they should not be able to propose a law on private land, there would clearly be a conflict of interest there. The intention would be to reduce MP’s pushing for or proposing self-serving law. This would need to be better defined, but at the very least it should be declared for transparency.
The government should nationalize natural monopolies, which would include infrastructure like the railways. It’s not possible to run competing rail services, so whomever the government allows to use it ends up with a local monopoly. Despite the UK’s rail service being mostly government subsidized, prices barely compete with the cost of driving - which is quite frankly insane.
I still believe in not having a massive government, and therefore there should be some wiggle room to sub-contract management. But I believe the assets should be government owned and run for sure. This point of course would need more fleshing out, but I think there is something here.
The government is absolutely terrible at running massive projects - they always go over budget and take too long. I think the problem is that the entire contract is awarded irrespective of the progress made. One solution could be to break-down large projects into smaller deliverables and award funding based on completion of deliverables.
The massive NHS software upgrade project for example didn’t need to be implemented in one hit. It could have easily have been done in smaller backwards-compatible sections. It could have been seen much earlier that the project was going to entirely fail to deliver any kind of result.
Depending on how much the deliverables are met by, the contract could end up back on the market for bidding with the work done so far paid off at the agreed cost for that part. If they want to re-bid for the contract, they will need to explain why they failed to meet their previous promises.
These are just some ideas - I imagine I will have a few more in the future! This may end up as a several part series, let’s see! Not everything here is fully fleshed out, but I think there is some nice stuff to start working with here.