2024 is election year in the UK with most political commentators expecting a May election, although I suspect it will be during the autumn/winter. Labour is expected to win the election, potentially even doing so in such a convincing way that there is no hung parliament, although this might be optimistic.
Irrespective of who you vote for, your political ideology or the policies you champion, there are five major issues the next UK government will need to fix after the election.
Let’s discover the key challenges facing the next elected UK government.
Immigration Controls
Those on the right of the political spectrum have long been calling for tighter immigration controls and those on the left side of the aisle have largely been in favour of allowing immigration to the UK.
Currently the immigration system is broken on two fronts.
Legal Immigration/Genuine Asylum Seekers
There should always be a door open to genuine asylum seekers. I class a genuine asylum seeker as an individual or family who face genuine political persecution in their country of origin.
There does need to be an element of common sense applied though. In absolute terms, there is simply no way the UK could accommodate everyone who is facing political persecution. There are countless warzones and vulnerable groups globally from Palestinian civilians and Uighurs to Ukrainian refugees.
In this respect, there needs to be a priority system put in place that allows the UK to be a welcoming country to those who absolutely must seek asylum here. If they can seek asylum elsewhere such as a country in Europe, then they should do so first – why? Because the UK is an overpopulated island nation and other countries in Europe are vastly underpopulated in comparison.
I see no justification in someone seeking asylum in the UK when they could relocate to Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, France etc.
We also need to ensure that no one with a criminal record is permitted asylum unless it is a political crime such as dissent. There should be no reason at all to allow someone who has committed a violent crime enter the UK. Currently we have the highly publicised case of the Clapham Chemical attacker who should have been deported and most definitely should not have been granted asylum.
Finally, we need a transparent system. It should work as a single application. If you fail to get asylum you should be able to appeal that ruling. If that fails, on your bike. People should not be able to continually apply for asylum, waste taxpayer money and resources and there should be no intervention by the Church in any asylum proceedings – asylum should be dealt with on facts, and facts alone, not the good word or opinion of the clergy.
Illegal Immigration
If you enter a country illegally, you should be deported or removed from that country. If you can’t respect the basic law of the country not to break into it, then how can you be expected to respect any other law that country has.
Even if you sympathise with illegal immigrants, and I can understand why you would as some people have lived terrible lives, the broader picture around illegal immigration is bleak.
UK taxpayers are currently struggling to make ends meet, and even the wealthy have been impacted by the cost-of-living crisis (albeit to a lesser extent). The tax/social security system is already beyond breaking point and allowing illegal immigrants to remain exacerbates this significant problem further.
We have a lack of housing in the UK, a lack of healthcare provisions, and a lack of temporary housing for UK citizens who fall on hard times. The burden illegal immigration puts on the system is without question unsustainable.
The NHS
Unfortunately, both sides of the political aisle have no idea what to do with the NHS. It desperately needs two things; money, and restructuring.
The issue is the NHS has become a wasteful behemoth and restructuring the organisation will take radical policy making. For example, countless NHS trusts are responsible for financial oversight of NHS services, however, the money has difficulty leaving these trusts and filtering down to the lower tiers of the system. This is partly due to the way the system is set up and greed.
There are far too many fat cats in the NHS, taking home eye-watering salaries for doing practically nothing. Worse still, this mentality is prevalent across most areas of the NHS and GPs, dentists and doctors are now attempting to earn as much as possible with as little effort as possible.
In a private medical system, this wastage would not be allowed, and people would soon find they are dismissed. But when the fat cats at the top have no incentive to make changes because they earn the salary courtesy of the public purse regardless, you are left with a bloated mess of a system.
And who pays for it? The end user. Not only are we facing significant tax increases, but we are also facing lower care availability. Frontline services are being cut back and if you are to get seriously ill, the NHS will often not provide the comparable healthcare you would obtain in other first world countries.
For example, cancer survival rates are much better in the USA because if you get cancer, they give you the most effective treatment irrespective of the cost. In the UK, you get the cheapest proven treatment and if that fails, you are given the next cheapest treatment. By the time you reach the expensive treatments you are either too far gone with your illness, or it is simply not available on the NHS.
The incoming UK government will need to get a firm grip on how the NHS is structured and funded. If the government wishes to maintain a public healthcare system, they will need to rebuild the whole system from the ground up, cutting out waste and streamlining services. This is possible with the implementation of technology, for example, doctors available via the NHS app. The government will also need to implement meaningful wage caps on all jobs that fall within the NHS including how much a board member can earn from an NHS trust.
Otherwise, the NHS will collapse completely within the next two decades. If such radical changes can’t be made, the next government will need to consider privatisation – a bitter pill to swallow for many, but when we are talking about the healthcare of you and your loved ones, it is better to privatise than rely on the broken system we have today.
UK Government Debt and the Tax Burden
It is no secret that the tax burden in the UK is the highest it has been since the Second World War.
Again, whichever side of the political spectrum you fall, we must reduce this tax burden significantly. Why? Because eventually there is no more money to tax. You can theoretically keep increasing the tax rate until no one has any money left, and the system collapses, or you can have a sensible tax system that works for the foreseeable future.
System collapse when a tax burden is too high is not a pretty picture. Socialist countries demonstrate this best as they typically adopt the growing taxation model – pushing the amount they tax to breaking point. The fallout is starvation and death.
Unlike some projected catastrophes, we don’t need to rely on modelling to know this, we have plenty of working examples of this in action from the last 40 years.
How bad is the tax problem in the UK? Unbelievably bad, and here’s why. The government is currently receiving a higher amount of tax than they have in the last 70 years, and they are still borrowing money to cover shortfalls in public spending.
Government borrowing is only acceptable if you have the future tax revenue to repay the money. And that simply isn’t the case. Theoretically the government could pass some legal mechanism to cancel the debt, however this leads to hyper-inflation.
People in the UK were outraged about an inflation rate of 10%. I can’t imagine anyone would be happy with an inflation rate akin to Argentina’s 211%.
The incoming government will need to cut public spending significantly, reduce the tax burden to boost the incentive for people to go to work and earn more money to fuel the economy and begin clearing down debt with the savings they have made through public spending cuts. The Labour party realises this, and it is why they have now shied away from their green pledge of £24 billion a year toward greener infrastructure – it is without question unaffordable.
Expansion of the UK Armed Forces
It is all well and good talking about domestic policies but all those pale in comparison to living under a tyrannical regime.
Of course, there are always those on one side of the fence who maintain pacifism is best and live by the war is bad mantra. I agree about the latter, war is more than bad, it is terrible. But war is inevitable if there are human beings who have disagreements about how the world should work.
I have yet to meet anyone from that side of the fence who would voluntarily live in Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Kim’s North Korea, or under the Iranian Mullahs. With our islands vulnerable to occupation, we wouldn’t even benefit to the extent of those living in the main countries of those tyrannical states. We would become a vassal state in a larger bloc.
There is great news in respect of our armed forces – we are not in as bad shape as the analysts would have you believe. The UK has the best special forces in the world, the second-best naval force (although it is declining) and a highly competent army and air force. What we need now is a lot of heavy investment in military build up to protect our domestic and international interests.
Remember, when Nazi Germany invaded France and Denmark, it took a matter of days for them to capitulate and fall. We should not be using the resilience of Ukraine as an example of our ability to withstand an attack from the East.
What’s more, no one in the UK would want to hold territory in the way that Ukraine has been forced to. They are locked into a war of attrition with trenches dug and mass casualties on both sides. Every day in Ukraine, thousands of soldiers on both sides are slaughtered with neither side currently able to break the deadlock.
Unfortunately, Russia can break it at any time if they launch nuclear missiles, and as time goes by and Putin becomes more desperate to embark on his larger plans to expand into Europe, this becomes more likely.
The UK should be hoping for the best and preparing for the worst, which means building up our armed forces to the level we had during World War 2 – or better still, at the height of the British Empire. And that is at a minimum, because we now potentially face an enemy with more firepower, higher population levels to puts soldiers into the warzone and nothing to lose by going to war.
Local UK Government Reform
Over the last few years, local authorities have been failing. They claim it is due to underfunding, but the truth is, these councils are collapsing due to wasteful spending.
Local governments should not be able to implement changes on a local level without consent from the public. And I mean down to the most basic changes.
If a council wants to build houses, they should hold an online vote. If a council wants to implement a change to the way they collect rubbish, there should be an online vote. If a council wants to pay their staff members a £100,000+ salary, they should have that approved by the public by an online vote.
We should not be governed on a local level by elite centralised powers that can spend money frivolously and suffer the consequences no matter what. We should not have to face these local challenges and be told if you don’t like it change who you elect at the next election.
We are becoming acutely aware; politicians are all the same. Regardless of ideology, they represent their interests first and foremost. It does not matter who we vote for because political corruption is now a fundamental facet of our political system.
By enacting local governance through online voting, an elected politician simply becomes a tool to enact the will of the people and it will root out all the self-serving animals currently holding power overnight. Why? Because the balance of power will be moved back to the people.
A good example of why this is necessary is London. There is no way the population of London would have majority voted for the ULEZ charging system and there is no way that same population would be happy with the current policing levels with endemic knife crime.
Empowering the Private Sector
Finally, many private sector industries are put under undue pressure due to heavy bureaucratic regulation.
For example, British farmers get a raw deal with how they can farm, what they can do on their farm and the prices they can sell their products for – even for those growing organic for delivery boxes.
This regulation is anti-competitive, and it is little wonder private enterprise in the UK is failing. The government has far exceeded their remit and shackled British industries that desperately need to be allowed to trade in a free manner.
From pubs to airlines to manufacturers. The list is endless. The next government will need to start stripping back regulation or face a shrinking economy and increasingly harsher recessions. British businesses are chomping at the bit to grow and generate wealth by innovating with new services and products. All they need is all the red tape to be cut.
The Next UK Government
The government on a national and local level has far overstepped its bounds and the amount of control it exerts is suffocating our country. The next government will need to relinquish control, let the UK breathe again and champion a more prosperous future where individuals can have hope for the first time in a long time.