If you had the chance to be the Roosevelt of our time what jobs would you provide?

I would make sure everybody had access to the best communication networks. Personally, my home internet and connections are superb and I never have problems with my TV connection, but I'm horrified when I visit people who can't get a signal on their phone, unless they go to the end of their garden (or somewhere) or have problems with their TV reception breaking up in summer. Everybody should have the same connections I do, even if they live out in the sticks.

Better connections would allow more efficient home working, relocation of businesses to more remote areas, better tele healthcare, less loneliness and provide thousands of jobs. People would end up with a skill, which would need to be updated but would never become redundant, as technology continues to evolve.

I would make sure every prisoner in the country was in full time education or in work.

The best rehabilitation is employment, learning new skills and education.

Before anyone mentions the expense, it would be hopefully much cheaper long term as the reoffending rate would go down.

Government has given LAs extra money for pothole repairs, so I wouldn’t make that a priority.

I’d concentrate on future proofing as much as possible against climate change, not only in the alternative power generation industry but in a faster programme of upgrading our old housing stock to cope with expected vicissitudes in weather (extreme heat, flooding etc).
As part of the upgrading I’d look to separate household sewage removal from grey water so that some could be reused.

As water is an increasingly precious resource I’d look to infrastructure upgrading, to eliminate water waste, to stop sewage discharges into rivers and seas and to improve drinking water purification times. Of course, we desperately need new reservoirs.

I think that those initiatives would provide a very wide spectrum of jobs and obvious benefits to local service economies.

MawsRosie

Consider yourself told off M0nica, clearly not the answer OP was wanting.

No, I am not told off. It is the natural exchange of views.

I think if we were to look for any scheme as worth reviving it might be an updated version of the YTS scheme introduced in the 1980s. That scheme certainly had its defects, but I think a scheme that was compulsory for NEATS and included elements of social skills and picking up educational problems, together with basic working skills.

I think any scheme will need to be local and deal with local needs. I would point out that repairing potholes, so that they stay repaired is a skilled jobs. There is more to it than shoving tarmac in a hole and packing it down.

I think a national scheme to sort out the potholes would be a good idea.

Potholing Repair Teams working round the country, paid for by the government, (taxpayers).

Plenty of never ending work, I think.

Consider yourself told off M0nica, clearly not the answer OP was wanting.

I hadn't suggested they were set up in the same way Monica; everything gets updated, particularly after so many years. I was hoping a little imagination might help with the heat!

I wouldn't. Things are very different now. People would not be willing to be rounded up into labour gangs and sent out to some remote part of the country to build roads, power plant etc. Apart from anything else these schemes are immensely complicated these days and reuires properly ualified engineers.

Also do you know anything about the conditions, the corruption and deaths that came out of these schemes?

I believe Bechtel still has active legal sanctions stopping anyone revealing exactly what happened on their projects. I hope we would never introduce into this country a scheme like Roosevelt's New Deal.

WE also do not have vast swathes of the country in need of rural electricity thousands of miles of basic dirt track.

Work camps were set up in this country between the two world wars. Here is an interesting link downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/making-history/able-bodies.pdf

This would not work now, times and attitudes have changed.