If you’ve followed me online for any length of time, you’ll know that I am a politics geek and have a fairly low opinion of most of the governments (and ministers) we’ve had during my lifetime. Recently I was thinking about what roles I would like, should Keir Starmer (or Wes Streeting) look around the Cabinet table and decide they need to recruit externally.
Prime Minister
Although people have joked about me having the top job on many occasions, I don’t think I would actually want to be Prime Minister. It’s incredibly stressful, you spend most of your time in meetings or flying around the world (I really dislike pointless meetings and flying), and anything that goes wrong ultimately gets blamed on you. I also like to get into the details of policy, and that’s very difficult to do as Prime Minister – you cannot take a hands-on approach and must delegate the vast majority of the work to ministers.
Railways
This would be a dream job for me as I’m also a massive train geek. For years we’ve concentrated too much on London commuters and flagship long-distance routes, at the expense of everything else. Top priorities would be:
- Filling in gaps by re-opening or rebuilding lines, such as SELRAP (Skipton to East Lancashire) or the route to Stockport via Reddish South. Some of these are relatively small (SELRAP is 18.5 km, a trivial distance in railway terms) but would open up additional routes for both scheduled services and diversions.
- Double-tracking to allow an increase in services, such as the Borders Railway in Scotland.
- Electrification – this not only reduces emissions but also allows for shorter journey times as electric trains tend to have superior acceleration.
The first two points in particular mean a rollback of the cuts imposed as a result of Dr Beeching’s incompetence in producing a report that failed to take into account the network effects (e.g. feeder lines may not look like much on their own, but if you cut them you lose traffic on the profitable main lines), followed by incompetent and short-sighted politicians closing lines and selling off the land. One thing that I think is often overlooked when planning railway spending is that improving the service by a small amount in a key area can result in a disproportionate increase in usage.
I would also consider reviving HS2, but I would give it a different name that focuses on connectivity rather than speed, and make it part of a wider improvement of the network so that everyone benefits (e.g. people in Culcheth don’t complain that they get a railway running through their town but with no service).
I am a big fan of light rail and think every major city should have a network. Leeds for example has been crying out for such a scheme for decades, but is unlikely to get one until the 2030s at the earliest. I would setup a separate entity to deliver this, staffed by representatives from the local area and from existing systems with a track record of success (e.g. Transport for Greater Manchester have delivered Metrolink extensions on time and budget).
Public health
We have had various positions that cover public health in the past, which have changed every few years – currently the UK position is Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health and Prevention.
I am as pro-vaccines as you can get and have been banging on for ages about how we should be taking a much wider view of the benefits of vaccination. For example, the JCVI judges COVID-19 vaccination against the need to reduce acute hospital admissions, which ignores chronic conditions such as Long Covid (and makes no sense to me, as chronic conditions tend to cost more in the long run). Instead of a single recommendation, I would ask the JCVI to consider three scenarios for each vaccine, and what we would need to do to achieve them:
- Reducing acute infections and impacts
- Reducing chronic infections and impacts
- Eradication
I would also be pushing for a model whereby public health can take a higher percentage from the overall health budget for schemes like vaccination which can demonstrate a return, i.e. the money spent on public health will save the NHS enough money that it won’t affect other care.
Other areas I would concentrate on include:
Smoking/vaping: Introduce a cut-off ‘year of birth’ for purchasing smoking and vaping products. This would force retailers to request proof of age for purchases, because they could no longer rely on ‘oh they look over 18’, and would mean that smoking and vaping would be gradually banned over time, without forcing existing users to quit. Knowingly or recklessly selling products to anyone born after the cut-off would result in your shop being nationalised without compensation.
Sexual health clinics: Properly fund these as part of the NHS, rather than contracting them out to private providers for profit. Every university in the UK would be required to have a clinic on-site.
Alcohol consumption: This is a tricky area because, unlike smoking, I don’t think the public argument has yet been won on the health harms of alcohol, especially that there is no safe level of consumption (as stated by the World Health Organisation).
Finally, I would push for more cross-departmental work on public health, because many health outcomes are heavily influenced by issues such as poverty, homelessness, domestic abuse etc. (and I consider ‘health’ to include physical and mental health – I don’t think splitting the two is helpful).