So far i've not seen anything on areas I think we'd do well to develop;
1. Green energy - it's the future, what are we doing at government level to make it easier for homeowners to use green energy and for the market to provide green energy cheaper than it's carbon based alternatives?
2. This might be the secret communist in me, but I do think we should work with the private sector to fund cheap pharmacuticals. The big companies like Astrozenica etc have no interest in making drugs cheap, they just want to make them available at the price governments will pay. The state should create it's own drug company, collaberate with smaller private companies on research and challenge big pharma in the open market. Long term we could reduce the NHS bill on pharmacuticals by half at least.
3. This leads neatly on to outsourcing, particularly in the NHS. It costs far too much money to hire temp staff from nurses to cleaners, to cooks and even the laundry. State owned companies need to be created to deal with this. I think about schools and the cost of stationary etc, i wonder if they could get it cheaper if local councils did all the buying in bulk and then distributed on to schools, rather than schools doing individual purchasing?
4. Defence. Lots of talk of Trident, but in reality it's not going to keep us safe, it'll be the last resort - if someone has the bottle to use it, and even then the response from the enemy will mean mutually assured destruction. Britain is a small country, it needs to focus on defensive arms, making it harder to hit Britain. Laser missile defence (more accurate than using a missile to shoot a missile), UCAV's (unmanned planes can pull more G's, carry more weapons and have more stealthy design), long range air defence system, investing more in eurofighters rather than trident. All this R&D will need investment and if we make the products before our allies, it'll generate customers too.
Sometimes I'd like to see politicians talk a bit more pragmatically about stuff like this!
