Strategies 1 and 2 of the 10 Strategies
1 Economic modelling of this proposed programme
2 A 20 year programme of redeploying wasted resources
3 Responding to climate change and tackling plastics
4 Establish a North/South divide and Southern restraint policy
5 Private sector investment
6 A 20 year programme of raising wages and incomes
7 A 20 year programme of reducing benefits
8 A 20 year programme to create a society where food and housing are paid from the income of each person and family, and pensions and social care in old age are paid from their savings
9 Public sector investment and day to day spending
10 Continuing to promote high tech etc
Strategy 1 Economic modelling
This is first because it is first priority.
It will be crucial to model the totality of the strategies. They must cohere in economic terms. A vision needs coherence. As the vision is heavily economic, it needs economists’ wisdom. That is vital before getting near any planning stage.
In particular the strategies need to work within overall national economic and monetary policies and plans. That does not mean current national plans, nor the fiscal rules, nor Neo-liberal economics which is the bedrock of the economic policies of all the political parties. But the aim should be to keep as close to any of these existing polices as possible. There is no point in upsetting them unnecessarily. I will say more about Neo-liberal economics at the conclusion of this paper.
In particular, the modelling must test whether or not a vision and strategies like this will produce economic growth; and if not, whether or not the vision can still be realised.
The modelling probably also needs to test the relative sizes of the private and public sectors. In principle I would hope that this vision would reduce the size of the public sector. It is certainly its aim.
The monetary and public finance components also need expert appraisal.
I cannot stress too strongly how critical this economic modelling is.
I will repeat. This is a Vision without a £ sign, but it is full of ‘resources’ signs. Whilst money and resources are necessarily the same thing for my family, for any employer, and for any organisation, they are by no means the same for economies or nations. Of course Britain has enough money to do what it wants domestically. But Britain has to organise its real resources of people, skills, materials and time to achieve them. We can’t leave that to money — to dots on computer screens, to bits of paper, nor even to chunks of gold.
Strategy 2 A 20 year programme of freeing up wasted resources
I intended to commence with exciting strategies to achieve great things. But then I realised that they would be regarded as wild ideas, if I didn’t first identify some of the resources to deliver them.
So the second strategy is devoted to identifying the masses of wasted resources in the UK.
Which of these following two jobs is most useful?
Firstly, the person working full time to change your broadband contract every two years or so—or your gas or car insurance or mortgage contract or to run nectar points etc etc?
Secondly, the person who is cleaning the rivers?
Which of these two jobs is more useful?
We all know there are thousands of useless jobs—jobs the financial wizards and economists call non-value-adding jobs. Jobs of no value. Jobs not giving us any extra goodies. Wasted jobs. Wasted time. Wasted lives.
I will start with the largest and most scandalous of these.
Banks and other financial institutions have committed huge numbers of misdemeanours which consume vast resources and a huge number of jobs. There is a list of over 100 of these. But it has not been updated for 10 years.
Here are some of the statistics: £200 billion++ spent when the Labour Party saved the banks etc in 2008. The banks have spent £50 billion in compensating customers over PPI, payment protection insurance; £30 billion compensation cost to banks etc over car finance (reduced by Rachel Reeves to help the banks and penalise the customers further); plus say £100 billion on the list of 100 other bank and financial frauds, and on employing lawyers, claims firms, wasted private and business time, even NHS time in dealing with stress, and other costs of dealing with these frauds over the last 20 years or so. Including the costs of perpetrating the frauds in the first place.
The government tells us that cleaning up the rivers will cost £100 billion. Instead, the banks etc have cost us all getting on for £500 billion or maybe even more.
These bank frauds and their incompetencies have also unnecessarily consumed vast amounts of workers’ time over 20 years—probably thousands of jobs. Some bank workers will have spent half their career working on their own bank’s fraud! It is very difficult to imagine these vast sums being engineered by the banks without any touch of incompetence, negligence, miss-selling, miss-selling for 10 year stretches, ripping off, deception, dishonesty, fraud, theft, criminal activity, crime.
Incidentally, no-one has gone to prison. No-one has been even taken to court. Well two were for 2008 fraud—but were let off as they could show it was the way banks normally did their business! This week half a dozen more were exonerated from fixing Libor rates. One of these bank employees was 24 at the time and spent 2 years in prison—scapegoated—and for obeying orders.
Only Fred the Shred to my knowledge in 2008 even lost his job—and no-one can even remember his name now!
No-one even talks about the bankers’ behaviour as criminal. Not even the BBC. No-one even talks about it as being immoral. The £10 billion car finance compensation bill is a scandal and the PPI bill is simply for miss-selling. Here’s what the Times said on 8 October 2026 p 37 re VW: “ The £9.1bn bill would make it Britain’s biggest consumer finance scandal since the £50 bn payment protection insurance miss-selling fiasco.” But we all do miss-selling all the time don’t we? It’s not a crime now, is it? It’s not even wrong now, is it? We all know Trump does it, but do the rest of you?
It is also clear that the major accounting firms are heavily involved in financial services scandals and frauds. It is likely that a number of major law firms are also, but they have largely evaded scrutiny. From the destruction of Arthur Anderson in the Enron frauds of 2001 and the unresolved conflicts of interest they exposed, to the collapse of banking etc in 2007-8, workers in the financial sector have abused the trust we put in them. Not only did they fail to protect shareholders and the rest of us in 2007-8 but they failed to avoid the banks having to spend £50 billion on compensation for PPI and another £30 billion on car finance (amount still to be agreed we now hear from The Times 8 October 2026 p 37 re VW). Progress on one of Deloittes’ failures or frauds was reported in the Times 9 October 2026 p 37, and another by the BBC Monday 12 October. Auditors did not stop the first attempted world football theft, nor the second world cup one, nor Manchester City, …nor this, nor that. They also missed the list of over 100 other financial services swindles.
Accounting and legal firms employ a lot of highly skilled workers who could be better employed, methinks, in cleaning rivers! (A few of them will probably even have relevant degrees!)
(I have already published proposals in this Blog to control abuse of power at the top of governments and big organisations including banks; and I will be tackling the huge and growing UK corruption in a later essay. It will not only cover financial services corruption, but large companies generally, politicians, elections, and the widespread idea that theft is justified whether from supermarkets, hotels or pubs—their bubbly in their glasses which were stolen from a pub as I watched in broad daylight, by a small tribe of girls in Winchester High Street early the other Saturday evening.)
Other so-called financial services, such as so-called equity funds (actually borrowing funds), hedge funds, derivatives, commodity trading, stock and money market trading are all carried out to huge excess. All these activities are necessary to an efficient financial system, to a system that works for public and private sectors alike. Adam Smith blessed them—if somewhat reluctantly. But excessive activity in these areas is parasitical. It diverts manpower and other resources from value-adding activity. Warren Buffet and the founder of the Vanguard tracker fund both took that view. We also have middle-men, such as investment platforms, whose use I cannot fathom for the life of me; but I can fathom what they charge me and the nonsense they send me. How many people waste their lives and the nation’s resources in these activities? And what excessive salaries and bonuses do they pick up, distorting a just distribution of income?
Waiters and chefs in restaurants serve us all well. They make our stomachs happy and life good! But what are all the restaurant apps doing for us? Just recently the nation’s gone appiness-mad. There must be 20 apps at least for buying railway tickets and another 20 for parking your car and 200 more for nail bars and 20 more for this and another lot for that. And what do people running nectar points do that is useful? Apps and nectar points certainly cost money, which puts up the cost of purchases, and which customers pay for. Ken Dodd had something much more positive to sing about appiness.
And changing your mortgage every 2 or 3 years. We had a 25 year mortgage. They still have that in the USA. No-one can say it cost us more—or less —than the current expensive and wasteful nonsense. There are a mass of these nonsenses: broadband, phones, gas, electricity, (where wise choice was conclusively explained years ago as beyond the wit of man), car finance, borrowing generally, choice of banks, pensions, savings, insurance, TV etc. Why are we everlastingly changing these? Can we all predict the future so well these days that we know a change will be beneficial? On even holidays and hotels, where choice cannot be avoided and indeed is part of the holiday pleasure, price and costs are a hazardous venture e.g. car hire. You cannot assume your loyalty will be rewarded. Barclays hasn’t a clue I’ve been a customer for over 60 years. (There’s no point in changing banks of course.) EE tell me they are upset that I regard them now as corrupt as the banks, after 40 years or so with BT (same outfit), which 10 or 20 years ago was not corrupt.
Besides this, there are a growing number of other parasitical businesses. Ticketing is one—which seems mainly to be a way of giving venues access to the digital world—at the cost of higher ticket prices to the customer. IT is supposed to save money, not put up prices. Fund-raising apps for charities is another. By all means supply a computer system for charity use. But what value do these businesses add?
And then there are the masses of delivery firms, when the post office would be cheaper. We also enjoy Deliveroo, thanks to Boris’s low wage, low productivity nation — demonstrated on bicycle daily before our very eyes. Deliveroo low wages and low productivity on bikes! High tech my foot! And Uber—super technology, but dirt wages, undercutting traditional taxi services which already pay too low wages. And on top we have supermarket delivery — only possible because of low wages.
Many of these businesses would disappear, because we can’t afford them, if we paid a reasonable wage. Instead, we exploit the poor and vulnerable, forcing them into underpaid jobs. How can anyone raise a family on their wages? Buy a house? Save for a pension? Even get training and experience to take on a better-paid job? These people are tomorrow’s welfare supplicants. They are not tomorrow’s retirees eating out in restaurants. Who will replace my generation of customers?
I suspect there are an excessive number of workers in IT. There are an excessive number of website designs, each like parking meters with its own difficulties for the user. But each is doing the same job. And websites of course always have their own point of failure e.g you can’t find the opening time, or you see 24 dishes, but only a photo of the bar inside the place. Everyone does it differently—and annoyingly differently. They have suddenly, I notice, gone mad at black or pink backgrounds—you know, the sort of thing that makes magazines like the Radio Times difficult to read. Websites would be efficient if they weren’t each unique like parking meters. They raise the question: are there too many workers in IT? Surely it could be much more efficient! (This is what everyone says about the public sector—where I worked—surely!—so you will surely all agree I am fully justified in using “surely” here! )
There are many businesses that make their money from advertising revenue: Youtube, Google , local newspapers, the many streaming and TV channels, social media, and many others. There must have been a vast exponential rise in advertising and advertising revenue, most of which cannot possibly be adding value to the customer, to the services he receives —- but it does add to the costs he pays for products and services. It adds to prices. And think how many people are doing value-adding jobs in it. Surely…..
There are four or five mobile phone companies which only cover 90% of the country, and do not even cover all of the big cities like London or taxis in Winchester. And 10% of the country remains without mobile phone coverage because supplying it would produce losses, not profits. Of course, 100% of the country could be covered at maybe only half or two-thirds of the cost, and with only half the workforce. Of course this would be a monopoly and so terribly inefficient and uncompetitive. But it is difficult to believe it could possibly be less efficient than the present set-up—with 4 or 5 organisations doing the same incomplete job, instead of only one delivering for the whole nation. Consequently not more than half the workers can be adding value to the economy or to people’s lives. And fibre-optic broadband seems to be a license to dig trenches, rip up streets, and deliver 5 times the necessary capacity —and years late as well.
Gambling is a bit like Covid, only there is no vaccine or cure. Whilst gambling on the number of dead in Ukraine or the speed of the Russian advance are for the minority, there are more than enough gambling opportunities for the masses. Gambling within reason is acceptable. Why not have a little flutter occasionally? But it is now a massive industry employing thousands of workers. Fortunately it is becoming more computerised and high street gambling shops for example are struggling and perhaps the number of workers being reduced. But there are still too many wasting Britain’s scarce resources and wasting their lives in this business
Cryptocurrency is a form of gambling and money laundering. I recently heard that as money, it is now seen as a means to make transfers more easily —but between two traditional bank accounts. Farage has demonstrated its use for his completely transparent and open financial transactions. But it is not money in the standard sense of the word. It is not a means of exchange, a store of value, nor a unit of account: simply an extra middle stage in the means of exchange. Its other purpose for gambling is also not money. Fortunately, it is not a big employer, just a huge waste of energy and a great climate warmer.
There are a large number of workers in marginal industries and services. They include not only delivery services but also art, craft and hobby workers, some of whom are prematurely retired or simply poorly paid. Other businesses like beauty, tea shops, many market traders, roadside eateries, and some parts of the entertainment business are probably marginal businesses: they would disappear if wages were higher, as they would not not earn enough from their sales. If their prices rose also and enough customers could afford them, then they could survive. Otherwise not. It will be sad to lose them.
Of course there are masses of firms and workers doing good for us all—adding value to our lives—but there is a very large minority who are parasites.
Those working in all these fields could instead be cleaning rivers.
How many workers are we talking about?
Answering this question is none too easy. But I think a fair stab at it can be made. I use the accountant’s normal method of estimating: do the task at least two ways and reconcile the estimates so far as is possible. This idea seems to elude non-accountants and is the bane of my life: any figure not produced by an accountant (or reputable economist) is dubious. I don’t mind mathematicians!
My conclusions are:
One method of calculation produces a figure of 1 million wasted workers jobs, 0.5 million NEET non-workers and no estimate at all for A.I surplus labour. : 1.5 million workers free to clean rivers.
A second method produces 650,000 wasted jobs plus 0.5 million NEET : 1.1 million free to clean rivers.
Besides this are say 100,000 surplus workers in a whole range of smaller sectors .
This produces a range of 1.2 million to 1.6 million respectively.
But even only 500,000 to clean up our rivers would be good!
And all plus surplus labour from A.I !! Anything from not many to 6 million???
The calculations are set out in the Appendix to this essay.
I have included NEETS and A.I so far, but have said little or nothing about them. Whilst they are both initially a problem so far as surplus labour is concerned, they also provide the resources to do some of the things we can’t do at the moment.
There are estimated to be 1 million workers categorised as NEETS.
They could be cleaning rivers.
Finally, what about the positive and national and world-scale impact of A.I? Given the hype and hypersonic vagueness of all I have ever heard about A.I (apart from X-rays and the Lady from Munich in the front of my friend’s new BMW ), I certainly haven’t a clue. Nor do I think anyone else has. And if they do, why not share the secret?
However few or many redundant workers are spawned by A.I, in the future, they could also be cleaning rivers!
How do we free up and redeploy workers?
Moving all this labour to value-adding work means moving people. The best way to move people is to get them to do this voluntarily, slowly, with support, over time, with incentives but also and critically with the prospect of a better life, or at worst as good a life, and with the added satisfaction of doing something for the nation, for other people, for the community.
This can be done, does happen, and is best seen perhaps in transport planning. New roads and increased congestion, both change people’s journeys. Amazingly people are motivated to change where they start their journeys and change where they end them. If the traffic is so bad, or the new road so good, I will eventually move house or change my job. But it happens slowly.
Likewise, employers will change locations or choose one location over another to expand or to contract. But that also takes a long time.
But the job changes here, require other powerful motivators and also, I fear, some compulsion.
The first is increasing the minimum wage. (This is discussed more fully in Strategy 6.) This will not only continue the aim of the UK being a rich high wage economy in which everyone in one of the richest nations on earth can afford at least to pay for the roof over their head, as well as for their food. Individual households in the poorest countries pay for their own house. How come we can’t? But it will make marginal jobs like Rickshaw-Tech Deliveroo go out of business.
Transactional taxes could be levied on financial asset transfers, not just stamp duty on housing or other property. So customer transfer between say two broadband suppliers would carry a significant levy adding to the administrative cost of the transfer and deterring it. This might take the form of stamp duty on contracts. It should apply to all changes in the fields of public utility, phone, house and car insurance, mortgage loans, apps, nectar points and many others. A difficulty will be to ensure that value-adding new entrants are not penalised in the process. Besides this, ticketing and other middle-men—entrepreneurial apps— could also be taxed.
The massive and excessive amount of commodity and financial trading should also carry a significant level of tax to reduce its volume. Trump’s war has allowed these firms to make a year’s profit in a couple of months—and as I write—this continues. It adds zero value to the world and merely redistributes what value there already is amongst a few rich and mainly super rich people. Workers waste their lives and the world’s resources doing this.
Taxation on vaping sounds a good target.
An advertising tax could be levied to reduce the size of the advertising industry which must now be massively expanded.
Regulation should be reintroduced, introduced and actually enforced, by spending money on turning some of the poachers into gamekeepers. Regulation on gambling should be greatly strengthened to reduce its abuse and at the same reduce the number of jobs wasted in that activity. Regulation should be used to control ticketing duplication and abuse, including by the privatised railways, eliminating the nonsense of split journeys, excessive mileage via London, etc.
In a separate essay, I have already suggested a major new way to control corruption in the financial sector—and to reduce the vast sums spent on it and the vast numbers of workers engaged on it. (Managing without due care and attention: Public Policy Conjectures policyconjectures.com ) But a range of regulations are desperately needed—and staff trained and in post to enforce them.
But what really makes this all happen is Vision, and shared vision at that. That’s what drives China at the moment. Every Chinese person knows China is on the way to becoming top nation again. Everyone is wildly enthusiastic about it. That is what is making it happen. And Emperor Xi and his repression can be forgotten, in the success of the mission.
So if Britain sees a Vision for the nation and embraces it, and it involves this type of redeployment of workers, then it can be done. But it has to be seen to be tailored to the needs of the mass of the population. What can inspire and can be achieved is set out in the following strategies. But sacrifice needs to clear; and rewards not only desirable, but practical and achievable.
Political and business leadership here requires imagination, belief, commitment and drive. And so does leadership wherever it is needed in the nation. But nothing will be achieved without the willingness and enthusiasm of the entire population—and over 20 years or so.
The Chinese Vision has been sold and embraced by everyone. We need a similarly compelling and convincing, if not so dramatic a vision.
© Philip Morgan 2026 Public Policy Conjectures All rights reserved
Appendix: Estimating surplus workers
I have made two alternative estimates and added a third much smaller estimate to each of them. I have looked at figures provided by the City of London and decided not to change these 3 estimates.
Estimate 1
Total work force in the UK
House of Commons Library Research Briefing 15 September 2026
Numbers employed : 34.28 million May to July 2026
However, a sector analysis from ONS is based on total workforce of 36.7 million June 2026
Workforce jobs by industry section (SIC 2007) – seasonally adjusted (June 2026)
| Great Britain (Level) | Great Britain (%) | United Kingdom (Level) | United Kingdom (%) | |
| Total | 35,756,000 | – | 36,734,000 | – |
| A : Agriculture, Forestry And Fishing | 345,000 | 1.0 | 372,000 | 1.0 |
| B : Mining And Quarrying | 52,000 | 0.1 | 54,000 | 0.1 |
| C : Manufacturing | 2,364,000 | 6.6 | 2,460,000 | 6.7 |
| D : Electricity, Gas, Steam And Air Conditioning | 145,000 | 0.4 | 147,000 | 0.4 |
| E : Water Supply; Sewerage, Waste Management | 239,000 | 0.7 | 247,000 | 0.7 |
| F : Construction | 2,231,000 | 6.2 | 2,293,000 | 6.2 |
| G : Wholesale And Retail Trade; Repair Of Vehicles | 4,448,000 | 12.4 | 4,597,000 | 12.5 |
| H : Transportation And Storage | 1,887,000 | 5.3 | 1,924,000 | 5.2 |
| I : Accommodation And Food Service Activities | 2,556,000 | 7.1 | 2,616,000 | 7.1 |
| J : Information And Communication | 1,577,000 | 4.4 | 1,606,000 | 4.4 |
| K : Financial And Insurance Activities | 1,104,000 | 3.1 | 1,124,000 | 3.1 |
| L : Real Estate Activities | 713,000 | 2.0 | 728,000 | 2.0 |
| M : Professional, Scientific And Technical Activities | 3,446,000 | 9.6 | 3,504,000 | 9.5 |
| N : Administrative And Support Service Activities | 2,915,000 | 8.2 | 2,971,000 | 8.1 |
| O : Public Administration And Defence | 1,736,000 | 4.9 | 1,802,000 | 4.9 |
| P : Education | 3,034,000 | 8.5 | 3,127,000 | 8.5 |
| Q : Human Health And Social Work Activities | 4,876,000 | 13.6 | 5,028,000 | 13.7 |
| R : Arts, Entertainment And Recreation | 1,078,000 | 3.0 | 1,098,000 | 3.0 |
| S : Other Service Activities | 951,000 | 2.7 | 976,000 | 2.7 |
| T : Activities Of Households As Employers;… | 59,000 | 0.2 | 59,000 | 0.2 |
Sectors selected by me as homes of wasted workers:
1.1 million were in financial and insurance services
3.5 million professional, scientific and technical
3 million administrative and support services
0.15 million in electricity and gas
1.6 million Information and communication
1.9 million Transportation and storage
Say 11.2 million
If I make some rough “churn”estimates—a term delighted in by the financial services……..Then let’s say 10% churn workers in all these sectors—that is unnecessary work, just renewing contracts for mortgages etc which used to run for 25 years and now run for 2-4 years.—and all the other short-term contracts
That produces roughly 1 million wasted jobs.
Estimate 2
Doing the sums slightly differently:
A churn calculation on only the first 4 sectors I have selected in Estimate 1, produces 450,000
Information and communication is more difficult as I am looking more to communication than information. But we could possibly reduce mobile phone and broadband services employment by say 50% by introducing national monopolies—actually serving the entire nation.
One source Google A.I quotes 87,000 on wired communication and 130,000 employed by BT plus Virgin media and presumably others .
50% on these two would produce 100,000 surplus jobs.
That sounds consistent with 1.6 million on information and communication—assuming no surplus jobs in the former which is an even wilder guess than all my calculations!
Transportation and storage
A Google A.I enquiry elicits 1.86 million workers (presumably the same figure as above) plus an additional 0.9 million in retail and manufacturing.
If we assume say 0.4 million wasted jobs in retail and postal services and assume much of this would disappear with the higher wages proposed later in this Vision, then maybe 100,000 jobs would be surplus before wage rises.
These three together produce 650,000 —well short of 1 million
Estimate 3
Other surplus workers
But there are other much smaller sectors not included in these figures: fraud, (a major employer both committing fraud and sorting it out, as the banks and bankers and their customers have found out) , cryptocurrency, gambling, vapes, excess online advertising, ticketing, apps, charity fund-raisers, nectar points, loyalty cards everywhere, parking charge systems (only one national one in the Netherlands for some years) and non-generic website facilities e.g. contact, search engines, format, layout, and the constant change of all websites which wastes employment and workers’ lives.
Let us allow 100,000 for these.
Conclusion
Allowing 100,000 in the third estimate would bring the first estimate to 1.1 million and the second estimate to 750,000.
I conclude that there could be a total range of redundant workers of 750,000 to 1.1 million.
Even 500,000 would be useful!
Addendum
City of London
Another source of figures comes from the City of London website. So I thought I ought to look at these. But my estimate of worthless jobs here is only 50,000 and is not large enough to warrant amending the estimates above. The details are below .
Source City of London 7 July 2026 report
676,000 are in financial and related services in City of London
Nationally, the City says:
1.1 million jobs in financial services
1.4 million in related professional services mainly outside London
15% of this national total of 2.5 million = 375,000 are in financial and related services in the City, which means 300,000 in the City are in support services e.g. cleaning, pubs and restaurants to arrive at a total of 676,000.
Of this 15% or 375,000 ,10% points i.e. 66% are finance and 33% in other professional services
So 250,000 are in finance and 125,000 in other professional services which with 300,000 support jobs, arrives at the same total of 676,000.
A later pie-chart states these figures I have calculated from the national numbers and City percentages as
225,000 financial services 33%
181,000 professional services 27%
And 39% for others which is 266,000
Total jobs 670,000
The total seems to be about the same, even if the breakdown is noticeably different. But the City is not reputed for accuracy: the bankers got things wrong in 2008 and their profits wrong by £50 billion over a few years over the costs of PPI compensation. The 21st century is famous for the City getting its figures wrong!
The figures also, I suspect, are evidence of the achievements of IT’s wonderful presentation, but dubious accuracy and usefulness of the information. The triumph of form over substance!
If the amount of trading in the City were to be halved, this might release 50,000 or more workers in finance and other professional services. Of course , much of London financial services are outside the City, still notably, in Docklands. So there is more potential for surplus labour.
But we could say this 50,000 is included in the total estimates above.
End of appendix
© Philip Morgan 2026 Public Policy Conjectures All rights reserved
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