Best Of

More in Common this week sees the Tories catch Labour (changes from last week)

Ref 30 (-1)
Lab 22 (=)
Con 22 (+4)
LD 13 (-1)
Grn 6 (-1)

Big swing to the Tories there and with Reform and the LDs the main losers not Labour, perhaps a few Thatcherites coming home after Kemi's promise of Milei style spending cuts and looking to leave the ECHR?

Nobody is paying any attention to Tory policy yet.

Would be funny though if this trend continues - and in six months we have the Conservatives leading Reform, with Labour well adrift in a rubber dinghy in the middle of the Channel....

Staying on the pitch and trying to limit the damage in Wales/Scotland and try and find a win or two in London (Barnet or Westminster most likely) are the onky games in town for the blues right now. Throw everything at 6 Holyrood seats and keep their fingers crossed for the list, try and get as near to 15% as possible in Wales (and therefore as close to 15 or so seats as possible) and hope nobody notices them losing councils and councillors or notices them losing fewer than this year.
Policy can wait till conference 2027 and beyond
Would be my advice if they asked

VAT on schools:
1) It will cost the state more money than it raises
2) Most people don't care because they see this as fair
3) Schools are using VAT to cover all number of things

I can understand the frustration of parents affected - it is unfair. Then again there are so many things which are egregiously unfair and this isn't anywhere near the top of the unfairness chart. Carers losing their entire allowance for going £1 over the earnings cap? More unfair. And there's stacks of examples of things done by merciless ministers to make the lives of the poor and sick practically unliveable which are more unfair.

This explains point 2 above.

Process State meets populist policy.

Sure! But for many of the people in point 2, they here the people complaining and consider that they largely are the people who support all of the egregious merciless stuff which hurts people at an existential level.

I suspect with point 2 most people won’t care simply as it doesn’t affect them and most people probably won’t even know of the policy

I don’t think I’ve seen such relentless bad press for any other government. Of course not helped by the right wing media deciding that a lot of the problems caused mainly by the Tories is now to be owned by Labour alone . It’s pretty clear that had the Tories duped enough voters the country would still be in a mess .

Labour's problem is that, while it's entirely fair to blame the previous government for our present mess, they appear barely to have started thinking about how to address it.

The country's problem is that it's very far from clear that anyone other party has, either.

Good morning

So true and so depressing

I have no idea how any of the parties provide a solution and that includes the Lib Dems and Greens

However, it is fair to say Starmer is not PM material and Reeves certainly is not COE material either, and with huge tax increases on the horizon I cannot see how labour recovers, and that is without Magic Grandpa and Sultana getting their act together

My granddaughter, fresh with her degree from Leeds, has applied for 60 jobs with no success and is now on UC

How the next government will cope is for discussion but I would be amazed if labour were part of it

It's all very well saying Starmer and Reeves aren't up to the job. (I don't think the vacancy for Labour leader in 2020 was about being a PM in waiting, but there you go.) The real question is twofold;

1 Is there anyone else on the political scene who would be doing better? Badenoch is worse. Farage is worse. If you think (as I do) that Sunak and Hunt spent their final year laying traps for their successors, they are worse.

2 If the Prime Ministers we have had in recent decades have all been horribly flawed, maybe the problem is the role and our expectations, not the people who have done it.

Laying traps? Citation required.

I'd swap back Sunak and Hunt in a heartbeat for what replaced them. They were dealt the shittiest hand of any post-war Government, but at least looked like they knew what needed doing.

You mean apart from the almost completely full prisons, 2024 pay negotiations hidden under the mattress, wing-and-a-prayer NI cuts, councils collapsing under social care, the Afghan refugee scandal...

Yes, a fair few of the problems that the incoming govt faced were caused by the last govt salting the ground.

However you’d think the incoming govt would know this, know these are the challenges and have a plan to tackle them as a priority and, quite frankly, they should have simply said ‘no plans’ when challenged on tax rises.

Labour are offering nothing. The Tories at least ran the economy well, Labour have run it into the ground in a year and we've got four left.

I don’t think I’ve seen such relentless bad press for any other government. Of course not helped by the right wing media deciding that a lot of the problems caused mainly by the Tories is now to be owned by Labour alone . It’s pretty clear that had the Tories duped enough voters the country would still be in a mess .

Labour's problem is that, while it's entirely fair to blame the previous government for our present mess, they appear barely to have started thinking about how to address it.

The country's problem is that it's very far from clear that anyone other party has, either.

Good morning

So true and so depressing

I have no idea how any of the parties provide a solution and that includes the Lib Dems and Greens

However, it is fair to say Starmer is not PM material and Reeves certainly is not COE material either, and with huge tax increases on the horizon I cannot see how labour recovers, and that is without Magic Grandpa and Sultana getting their act together

My granddaughter, fresh with her degree from Leeds, has applied for 60 jobs with no success and is now on UC

How the next government will cope is for discussion but I would be amazed if labour were part of it

It's all very well saying Starmer and Reeves aren't up to the job. (I don't think the vacancy for Labour leader in 2020 was about being a PM in waiting, but there you go.) The real question is twofold;

1 Is there anyone else on the political scene who would be doing better? Badenoch is worse. Farage is worse. If you think (as I do) that Sunak and Hunt spent their final year laying traps for their successors, they are worse.

2 If the Prime Ministers we have had in recent decades have all been horribly flawed, maybe the problem is the role and our expectations, not the people who have done it.

Laying traps? Citation required.

I'd swap back Sunak and Hunt in a heartbeat for what replaced them. They were dealt the shittiest hand of any post-war Government, but at least looked like they knew what needed doing.

You mean apart from the almost completely full prisons, 2024 pay negotiations hidden under the mattress, wing-and-a-prayer NI cuts, councils collapsing under social care, the Afghan refugee scandal...

Yes, a fair few of the problems that the incoming govt faced were caused by the last govt salting the ground.

However you’d think the incoming govt would know this, know these are the challenges and have a plan to tackle them as a priority and, quite frankly, they should have simply said ‘no plans’ when challenged on tax rises.

Labour are offering nothing.

They’re offering tax increases, increases in the cost and bureaucracy of employing people and economic contraction.

Admittedly it’s not a great offer but it’s theirs

…

VAT on schools:
1) It will cost the state more money than it raises
2) Most people don't care because they see this as fair
3) Schools are using VAT to cover all number of things

I can understand the frustration of parents affected - it is unfair. Then again there are so many things which are egregiously unfair and this isn't anywhere near the top of the unfairness chart. Carers losing their entire allowance for going £1 over the earnings cap? More unfair. And there's stacks of examples of things done by merciless ministers to make the lives of the poor and sick practically unliveable which are more unfair.

This explains point 2 above.

Process State meets populist policy.

Sure! But for many of the people in point 2, they here the people complaining and consider that they largely are the people who support all of the egregious merciless stuff which hurts people at an existential level.

Sam Freedman (yes I know) was good on that in his piece on the anti-VAT campaign;

https://samf.substack.com/p/the-great-vat-panic

The TLDR is that campaigns against government policy work best when you have a back channel negotiation to come up with a mutually-acceptable deal. The Independent Schools Council went straight for berating the policy in the press, and only that, which was never going to work.

Yes, VAT on school fees is another version of "Do it to Julia"; accept that there needs to be pain to balance the books, but that pain should be experienced by other people. A lot of the anger was because people used to getting their way didn't.

(And whilst there will be some blowback from this policy, it will need a massive exodus to be a net negative for the government. There is no sign of that right now. In large part because British private schools are mostly fishing in the global elite market, which isn't very price-sensitive. Hard on those who have gone from just about affording school fees to not affording them, but they're a minority of a minority.)

Is that true? Would like to see some figures to back that up. My gut is that it’s true for the Public Schools and the London private schools but the vast majority of private schools aren’t them, they are private schools in towns and cities with good local reputations attracting the children of local professionals or they are the only alternative to failing state schools in an area where people decide to make a financial sacrifice to pay for their childrens’ education.

These are the schools that will suffer - the public schools with international or national reputation and big endowments alongside the London private day schools with a big global wealthy community to fill places who would never dream of sending their children off to board will largely be fine.

https://www.pepf.co.uk/fact-finder/facts-and-figures/ says

Excluding international schools, about 5% of private school pupils are non-British with parents living abroad. The largest group are from China (both mainland and Hong Kong).

Another 5% are non-British but with parents who live in Britain.

So British private schools really are not fishing in the global elite market and so are sensitive to price moves and not damaging a minority of a minority.

No they’re not. But government thinks that every private school is just like Eton.

Even Eton is only about 15% overseas students. I sometimes teach postgrad classes which are 100% overseas students.

Well, the immigration clampdown on student visas should fix that for you.

I'm sure there'll still be a strong domestic market for your teaching services.

I don’t think I’ve seen such relentless bad press for any other government. Of course not helped by the right wing media deciding that a lot of the problems caused mainly by the Tories is now to be owned by Labour alone . It’s pretty clear that had the Tories duped enough voters the country would still be in a mess .

Labour's problem is that, while it's entirely fair to blame the previous government for our present mess, they appear barely to have started thinking about how to address it.

The country's problem is that it's very far from clear that anyone other party has, either.

They had 14 years in opposition and came to power appearing clueless

Maybe all their thought & energy went into planning how to get elected, and they forgot to think about what to do when they were elected.

Considering that point WRT Reform is interesting and now is the time to be doing it. They have a route to election as government; very few are giving thought to how they will actually govern. (Such policies as they have don't help much with answering the question).