Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Edit: that last point concerns the amount of tax moneys effectively taken out of the Exchequer and diverted to the private purposes of this, or indeed, any donor.
Better he spends it on this than 5 star Holidays to the Caribbean and Maldives, Michelin starred meals etc which he easily could.
Voters who are ideologically opposed to private education generally don't vote Tory anyway
I'm not so sure. Simply buying luxury items, as opposed to deeply wounding the social cohesion of the country ... and as for your ignoring non-Tory voters as usual, their taxes are being used to buttress such donations in general.
If its a scholarship awarded to someone not able to afford an elite education, I feel that's a benefit to social mobility.
That's like saying the national lottery is an engine of social mobility. Sure, if you're the lucky winner.
You have £100k. What to do. Give it to Oxfam and see it fund their staff in Haiti for "certain activities" or the DEC, which would be a good home for it if you are a believer in aid. Or to a charity for the homeless - another good home imo. Or use it to fund bright underprivileged children who might otherwise not have the opportunity to benefit from this kind of education, yes thereby bestowing privilege upon them but privilege that they have earned. Also not a dreadful home for your money imo.
All the major public schools have such schemes and are very pro-active in recruiting non-"typical" ie poorer students with scholarships.
Optics absolutely dreadful, that said.
If the concentration of wealth, services and opportunities is a problem in this country (and it is) I would not think that donating to one of the DRIVERS of that inequality is the answer. In fact, it exacerbates the problem.
Scooping one lucky person out of the hole and depositing them onto the mound is objectively worse than not having the hole in the first place.
I agree but we are where we are and the Cons aren't about to include abolition of private schools in their manifesto.
We have public schools and we have the state system. Very sadly very often the state system is inferior in terms of outcomes to the public school system.
Within this iniquitous system Sunak is trying to achieve some small amount of crossover so that people from one system have the opportunity and the benefits of the other.
Of course we shouldn't have started from here but here is where we are.
I don't think we do agree, my point is that giving this money to an engine of social inequality propagates economic injustice. I'm saying Sunak is feeding the problem. I would literally prefer he sets fire to the money than donates it to a private school.
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
But it works because it's aspirational. The Tories are supposed to be the party of aspiration, not holding grudges against rich people.
Winchester College. Rrright.
Next he should give £30 million to the Duke of Westminster so he can lower rents on the Grosvenor Estate for his poorer tenants
The kids his money helped go to Winchester won't care and again, aspiration is what the Tory party are supposed to be in favour. I don't think this really hurts very much at all if they can frame it correctly. If this is an attack by team Boris they may have misjudged the party, which isn't surprising because Boris doesn't really get it.
Who actually gets these scholarships though? Is it ever a rat-catcher's spawn in hobnail boots and odd socks, or someone who would have traditionally forked out the fees had his ancestor not had to flog off the old manor house for Death Duties in 1965?
"Boys who are outstanding academically, who have been educated in the UK state system at primary level and who need financial assistance to attend Eton can be considered for the New Foundation Scholarship. Thanks to the generosity of a donor, this award provides means-tested financial support for up to four boys per year to attend Eton. These boys are identified by the school during the Admissions process. Where necessary, the scholarship will cover 100% fees and extras. We will help families identify the most appropriate pathway for their sons in Years 7 and 8. Boys should be registered in the normal way for 13+ entry by 30 June in UK school Year 5: please contact the Admissions Office if you have any queries."
'Up to' four boys a year! That's going to give underprivilege a good whacking, isn't it? Levelling up, indeed.
If Sunak was going to give money to a private school, he'd have been better off giving it to Ampleforth College, which is in his neighbouring constituency. It was inspected recently by Ofsted and found to be a) a den of iniquity, and b) inadequate. That's private schools for you - a heady mix of drugs, alcohol, sex and "monks of concern".
You don't get that sort of stuff in the state sector.
The Ofsted report was of course a load of rubbish. Academically Ampleforth still gets top grade average GCSEs and A levels and provides plenty of extra curricular activities.
The main concern from Ofsted is the monks live on site with the boys, as they have done for centuries. Yet supposedly this is a major safeguarding issue
How do you know it's rubbish?
Because God told him it was rubbish? Seems most logical answer.
Seriously. I'd like to know what a C of E, erm, supporter such as HYUFD knows about the inner workings of Ampleforth and why he knows the report is 'rubbish'. Divine inspiration is certainfly a logical answer which I hadn't consdiered, though.
The Ofsted report on Ampleforth won't be rubbish, it will be accurate. Because it's such a high profile school, it will have been pored over from the top to make sure that the evidence is secure. And, of course, Ampleforth could have lodged a complaint if they thought it inaccurate. They didn't.
Thanks, that's a good and constructive contribution. Was HYUFD correct in claiming Ofsted has no remit in private schools? Or is Ampleforth not a private school somehow?
No, he's wrong. It's complicated, but Ofsted has the power to inspect everything. There is a fairly toothless Independent Schools Inspectorate that carries out humdrum inspections, but Ofsted's elite squad (HMI) are called in to do any tricky private schools like Ampleforth.
Fun fact, in Hindi Rishi means 'Tone deaf PR skills' and Sunak means 'Indian heritage David Miliband but without the political nous'
What is more interesting is who has it in for him. This donation story is clearly a hit job, as it seems the vast bulk of the donation (if not all) was made before he was even a minister and dates back as far as 2014. I wonder who in government is trying to ensure he takes more incoming?
It's such a boring and obscure publication one tends to scan the landscape for other wykehamists and come up with that fat bloke who used to be Culture and Sport. Who are his allies?
Whittingdale.
Sky News can't even get basic COVID data right most of the time because they don't read the reports, the chances they have been carefully and proactively searching through obscure school magazine from several years ago and found this info on page 87 ....0.001%.
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
But it works because it's aspirational. The Tories are supposed to be the party of aspiration, not holding grudges against rich people.
Winchester College. Rrright.
Next he should give £30 million to the Duke of Westminster so he can lower rents on the Grosvenor Estate for his poorer tenants
The kids his money helped go to Winchester won't care and again, aspiration is what the Tory party are supposed to be in favour. I don't think this really hurts very much at all if they can frame it correctly. If this is an attack by team Boris they may have misjudged the party, which isn't surprising because Boris doesn't really get it.
Who actually gets these scholarships though? Is it ever a rat-catcher's spawn in hobnail boots and odd socks, or someone who would have traditionally forked out the fees had his ancestor not had to flog off the old manor house for Death Duties in 1965?
"Boys who are outstanding academically, who have been educated in the UK state system at primary level and who need financial assistance to attend Eton can be considered for the New Foundation Scholarship. Thanks to the generosity of a donor, this award provides means-tested financial support for up to four boys per year to attend Eton. These boys are identified by the school during the Admissions process. Where necessary, the scholarship will cover 100% fees and extras. We will help families identify the most appropriate pathway for their sons in Years 7 and 8. Boys should be registered in the normal way for 13+ entry by 30 June in UK school Year 5: please contact the Admissions Office if you have any queries."
'Up to' four boys a year! That's going to give underprivilege a good whacking, isn't it? Levelling up, indeed.
Loving your eyepopping claim that you don't get sex, drink or drugs in state schools, but it does rather torpedo your credibility on the subject of education.
Pupils at state schools tend to do it extramurally ... not being at boarding schools.
OK but these are more or less social activities, so presumably school is where they team up? I am not seeing any additional wickedness on the part of the private sector.
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
But it works because it's aspirational. The Tories are supposed to be the party of aspiration, not holding grudges against rich people.
Winchester College. Rrright.
Next he should give £30 million to the Duke of Westminster so he can lower rents on the Grosvenor Estate for his poorer tenants
The kids his money helped go to Winchester won't care and again, aspiration is what the Tory party are supposed to be in favour. I don't think this really hurts very much at all if they can frame it correctly. If this is an attack by team Boris they may have misjudged the party, which isn't surprising because Boris doesn't really get it.
Who actually gets these scholarships though? Is it ever a rat-catcher's spawn in hobnail boots and odd socks, or someone who would have traditionally forked out the fees had his ancestor not had to flog off the old manor house for Death Duties in 1965?
"Boys who are outstanding academically, who have been educated in the UK state system at primary level and who need financial assistance to attend Eton can be considered for the New Foundation Scholarship. Thanks to the generosity of a donor, this award provides means-tested financial support for up to four boys per year to attend Eton. These boys are identified by the school during the Admissions process. Where necessary, the scholarship will cover 100% fees and extras. We will help families identify the most appropriate pathway for their sons in Years 7 and 8. Boys should be registered in the normal way for 13+ entry by 30 June in UK school Year 5: please contact the Admissions Office if you have any queries."
'Up to' four boys a year! That's going to give underprivilege a good whacking, isn't it? Levelling up, indeed.
That should cover all of Bozo's output.
What on earth happened to girls? (The, presumably, Eton ones, I mean, not ...).
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
'aint gonna be any kind of peace deal any time soon...
Deborah Haynes @haynesdeborah · 1h Asked by @SkyNews how Ukraine could negotiate with Russia's Vladimir Putin given the atrocities allegedly committed by his forces, the Ukrainian interior minister said, speaking in English: “Go to hell.”
At some point there will have to be a peace deal with the difference between now and that some point being measured in deaths. I would not like to be the politician that has to determine when that time has arrived.
Yeah it's all jolly sending weapons but they essentially kill people and prolong things
It has been the paradigm of eg civil wars throughout history. At some point someone will win. Until that time then the deaths will mount up. As I said not a decision I would like to be in a position to make. And yes also historically arming the protagonists has extended the war.
It is not a civil war.
No indeed. I said eg civil wars. But this war has to end at some point. Will it be when Putin says it will end in which case Zelensky has no decision to make; or will it end when Zelensky decides to see if peace can be achieved by negotiation.
@williamglenn says the former; I am not sure which it is. If it is the latter then Zelensky has a decision to make.
Peace can only be achieved if and when Russia withdraws. Otherwise it's just a pause.
Zelensky has made clear Ukraine's bottom line; there can be no negotiation over territory with such an invader. I don't see how he can do any different, since accepting the occupation of captured territory would be abandoning his citizens to the sort of brutality witnessed in occupied Donbas over the last decade - and occupied towns over the last month.
The example of a civil war is an exceedingly poor one.
If Russia wanted to make some dubious moral case for increasing its territory, then it would have made Donbass a shining beacon of civilisation. Instead they turned it into a murderous criminal mafia statelet.
Why would anyone want to live in the situation the poor citizens of Donbass have been forced to live under? AIUI some separatist fighters are so disgusted with Russia they're now fighting with Ukraine (*)!
(*) AIUI mainly because they wanted independence, not to become part of Russia.
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
So you need to abolish the public schools.
Because your line would end all scholarships and then there would be even more polarisation of educational outcomes. It is surely a drop in the ocean but a non-trivial percentage of these schools' pupils are beneficiaries of such scholarships.
I don't know, Leon went to a comp and judging by his posts is not a huge fan of the great public schools.
I don't think he would go as far as closing them however
It would depend entirely upon the time of day in which this hypothetical decision was made, I guess?
Yep. I’m in the excellent Skybar of my Izmir hotel and have had one crisp, large gin and tonic. I am at the stage of taking away their charitable status. By 9pm (Turkey time) I expect to call for their total abolition, By 11pm I will demand that they are levelled to the ground with a first strike by the hitherto unknown Mebyon Kernow Force de Frappe, and the ground to be salted with the bottled sweat of six generations of tin miners. Six!! And also for my granny, who was a barefoot bal maiden, breaking rocks for tin aged 10 (true story)
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
But it works because it's aspirational. The Tories are supposed to be the party of aspiration, not holding grudges against rich people.
Winchester College. Rrright.
Next he should give £30 million to the Duke of Westminster so he can lower rents on the Grosvenor Estate for his poorer tenants
The kids his money helped go to Winchester won't care and again, aspiration is what the Tory party are supposed to be in favour. I don't think this really hurts very much at all if they can frame it correctly. If this is an attack by team Boris they may have misjudged the party, which isn't surprising because Boris doesn't really get it.
Who actually gets these scholarships though? Is it ever a rat-catcher's spawn in hobnail boots and odd socks, or someone who would have traditionally forked out the fees had his ancestor not had to flog off the old manor house for Death Duties in 1965?
"Boys who are outstanding academically, who have been educated in the UK state system at primary level and who need financial assistance to attend Eton can be considered for the New Foundation Scholarship. Thanks to the generosity of a donor, this award provides means-tested financial support for up to four boys per year to attend Eton. These boys are identified by the school during the Admissions process. Where necessary, the scholarship will cover 100% fees and extras. We will help families identify the most appropriate pathway for their sons in Years 7 and 8. Boys should be registered in the normal way for 13+ entry by 30 June in UK school Year 5: please contact the Admissions Office if you have any queries."
'Up to' four boys a year! That's going to give underprivilege a good whacking, isn't it? Levelling up, indeed.
Loving your eyepopping claim that you don't get sex, drink or drugs in state schools, but it does rather torpedo your credibility on the subject of education.
Pupils at state schools tend to do it extramurally ... not being at boarding schools.
OK but these are more or less social activities, so presumably school is where they team up? I am not seeing any additional wickedness on the part of the private sector.
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
But it works because it's aspirational. The Tories are supposed to be the party of aspiration, not holding grudges against rich people.
Winchester College. Rrright.
Next he should give £30 million to the Duke of Westminster so he can lower rents on the Grosvenor Estate for his poorer tenants
The kids his money helped go to Winchester won't care and again, aspiration is what the Tory party are supposed to be in favour. I don't think this really hurts very much at all if they can frame it correctly. If this is an attack by team Boris they may have misjudged the party, which isn't surprising because Boris doesn't really get it.
Who actually gets these scholarships though? Is it ever a rat-catcher's spawn in hobnail boots and odd socks, or someone who would have traditionally forked out the fees had his ancestor not had to flog off the old manor house for Death Duties in 1965?
"Boys who are outstanding academically, who have been educated in the UK state system at primary level and who need financial assistance to attend Eton can be considered for the New Foundation Scholarship. Thanks to the generosity of a donor, this award provides means-tested financial support for up to four boys per year to attend Eton. These boys are identified by the school during the Admissions process. Where necessary, the scholarship will cover 100% fees and extras. We will help families identify the most appropriate pathway for their sons in Years 7 and 8. Boys should be registered in the normal way for 13+ entry by 30 June in UK school Year 5: please contact the Admissions Office if you have any queries."
'Up to' four boys a year! That's going to give underprivilege a good whacking, isn't it? Levelling up, indeed.
Loving your eyepopping claim that you don't get sex, drink or drugs in state schools, but it does rather torpedo your credibility on the subject of education.
Pupils at state schools tend to do it extramurally ... not being at boarding schools.
OK but these are more or less social activities, so presumably school is where they team up? I am not seeing any additional wickedness on the part of the private sector.
Mphm. But they don't (usually) do much of it (whatever it is) on site, if only for timetabling reasons. In a boarding school, the little dears are on site most of the time and commit at least some of their little peccadilloes there. Moreover, the headperson and his staff are in loco parentis. So (a) much more scope for trouble, and that's even before we get to the staff also beign on site more of the time and (b) more formal responsibility for the school staff and management.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Edit: that last point concerns the amount of tax moneys effectively taken out of the Exchequer and diverted to the private purposes of this, or indeed, any donor.
Better he spends it on this than 5 star Holidays to the Caribbean and Maldives, Michelin starred meals etc which he easily could.
Voters who are ideologically opposed to private education generally don't vote Tory anyway
I'm not so sure. Simply buying luxury items, as opposed to deeply wounding the social cohesion of the country ... and as for your ignoring non-Tory voters as usual, their taxes are being used to buttress such donations in general.
If its a scholarship awarded to someone not able to afford an elite education, I feel that's a benefit to social mobility.
That's like saying the national lottery is an engine of social mobility. Sure, if you're the lucky winner.
And it would be true. Sunak could have helped a lot of children's charities that do great work, but none of them to the degree that a single recipient of their help might one day become Chancellor of the Exchequer. That's important.
And I say that as someone who thinks he's an empty vessel as a politician.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Sorry, but they do. You don't, I am not the first to point out, know what you are talking about.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
So he’s a political idiot. What gives. His leadership ambitions are finished
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
So he’s a political idiot. What gives. His leadership ambitions are finished
So you think in 2019 when he became chancellor he should go back through all the charity donations he made and inform them now they must cover up all his donations? Yeah that wouldn't stink if it ever came out. That is the equivalent of those trying to delete all their old tweets, somebody always finds them and you look as dodgy as hell.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
So he’s a political idiot. What gives. His leadership ambitions are finished
Looks like the Tories are going to need an Alan B'Stard..... To out-bastard Boris
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
But it works because it's aspirational. The Tories are supposed to be the party of aspiration, not holding grudges against rich people.
Winchester College. Rrright.
Next he should give £30 million to the Duke of Westminster so he can lower rents on the Grosvenor Estate for his poorer tenants
The kids his money helped go to Winchester won't care and again, aspiration is what the Tory party are supposed to be in favour. I don't think this really hurts very much at all if they can frame it correctly. If this is an attack by team Boris they may have misjudged the party, which isn't surprising because Boris doesn't really get it.
Who actually gets these scholarships though? Is it ever a rat-catcher's spawn in hobnail boots and odd socks, or someone who would have traditionally forked out the fees had his ancestor not had to flog off the old manor house for Death Duties in 1965?
"Boys who are outstanding academically, who have been educated in the UK state system at primary level and who need financial assistance to attend Eton can be considered for the New Foundation Scholarship. Thanks to the generosity of a donor, this award provides means-tested financial support for up to four boys per year to attend Eton. These boys are identified by the school during the Admissions process. Where necessary, the scholarship will cover 100% fees and extras. We will help families identify the most appropriate pathway for their sons in Years 7 and 8. Boys should be registered in the normal way for 13+ entry by 30 June in UK school Year 5: please contact the Admissions Office if you have any queries."
'Up to' four boys a year! That's going to give underprivilege a good whacking, isn't it? Levelling up, indeed.
Loving your eyepopping claim that you don't get sex, drink or drugs in state schools, but it does rather torpedo your credibility on the subject of education.
You could try, instead of sneering, reading the report I linked to. What went on at Ampleforth is a feature of boarding schools, which are rarely state.
If Sunak was going to give money to a private school, he'd have been better off giving it to Ampleforth College, which is in his neighbouring constituency. It was inspected recently by Ofsted and found to be a) a den of iniquity, and b) inadequate. That's private schools for you - a heady mix of drugs, alcohol, sex and "monks of concern".
You don't get that sort of stuff in the state sector.
The Ofsted report was of course a load of rubbish. Academically Ampleforth still gets top grade average GCSEs and A levels and provides plenty of extra curricular activities.
The main concern from Ofsted is the monks live on site with the boys, as they have done for centuries. Yet supposedly this is a major safeguarding issue
How do you know it's rubbish?
Because God told him it was rubbish? Seems most logical answer.
Seriously. I'd like to know what a C of E, erm, supporter such as HYUFD knows about the inner workings of Ampleforth and why he knows the report is 'rubbish'. Divine inspiration is certainfly a logical answer which I hadn't consdiered, though.
The Ofsted report on Ampleforth won't be rubbish, it will be accurate. Because it's such a high profile school, it will have been pored over from the top to make sure that the evidence is secure. And, of course, Ampleforth could have lodged a complaint if they thought it inaccurate. They didn't.
Thanks, that's a good and constructive contribution. Was HYUFD correct in claiming Ofsted has no remit in private schools? Or is Ampleforth not a private school somehow?
Ofsted inspects around half of independent schools; those which belong to Independent Schools Council associations are inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate, which is also regulated by the DfE. There are powers to order inspections of those, too: ...the DfE may commission Ofsted to carry out an inspection of an independent school that is normally inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/memorandum-of-understanding-independent-schools/memorandum-of-understanding-independent-schools
Looks like Oryx has got burned-out vehicle burn-out. The totals have barely moved today.
I wonder if it is a near exponentially-growing task. When you have five photos to compare to see if they're the same vehicle, it is easy. When you have 10,000 photos, plus tens of hours of videos, of thousands of potential vehicles, it becomes much harder.
Do they give any information on their process? Just logging and storing data must be difficult.
Looks like Oryx has got burned-out vehicle burn-out. The totals have barely moved today.
I wonder if it is a near exponentially-growing task. When you have five photos to compare to see if they're the same vehicle, it is easy. When you have 10,000 photos, plus tens of hours of videos, of thousands of potential vehicles, it becomes much harder.
Do they give any information on their process? Just logging and storing data must be difficult.
Must be a prime target for Russian hackers too. His efforts are V V Embarrassing for Motherfucker Russia.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
So you need to abolish the public schools.
Because your line would end all scholarships and then there would be even more polarisation of educational outcomes. It is surely a drop in the ocean but a non-trivial percentage of these schools' pupils are beneficiaries of such scholarships.
I don't know, Leon went to a comp and judging by his posts is not a huge fan of the great public schools.
I don't think he would go as far as closing them however
It would depend entirely upon the time of day in which this hypothetical decision was made, I guess?
Yep. I’m in the excellent Skybar of my Izmir hotel and have had one crisp, large gin and tonic. I am at the stage of taking away their charitable status. By 9pm (Turkey time) I expect to call for their total abolition, By 11pm I will demand that they are levelled to the ground with a first strike by the hitherto unknown Mebyon Kernow Force de Frappe, and the ground to be salted with the bottled sweat of six generations of tin miners. Six!! And also for my granny, who was a barefoot bal maiden, breaking rocks for tin aged 10 (true story)
I think you can allow yourself more than one crisp - you're not that overweight. You're on holiday after all!
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Edit: that last point concerns the amount of tax moneys effectively taken out of the Exchequer and diverted to the private purposes of this, or indeed, any donor.
Better he spends it on this than 5 star Holidays to the Caribbean and Maldives, Michelin starred meals etc which he easily could.
Voters who are ideologically opposed to private education generally don't vote Tory anyway
I'm not so sure. Simply buying luxury items, as opposed to deeply wounding the social cohesion of the country ... and as for your ignoring non-Tory voters as usual, their taxes are being used to buttress such donations in general.
If its a scholarship awarded to someone not able to afford an elite education, I feel that's a benefit to social mobility.
That's like saying the national lottery is an engine of social mobility. Sure, if you're the lucky winner.
And it would be true. Sunak could have helped a lot of children's charities that do great work, but none of them to the degree that a single recipient of their help might one day become Chancellor of the Exchequer. That's important.
And I say that as someone who thinks he's an empty vessel as a politician.
it's true but also totally misleading. Social mobility isn't about helping one random lucky person.
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
So you need to abolish the public schools.
Because your line would end all scholarships and then there would be even more polarisation of educational outcomes. It is surely a drop in the ocean but a non-trivial percentage of these schools' pupils are beneficiaries of such scholarships.
I don't know, Leon went to a comp and judging by his posts is not a huge fan of the great public schools.
I don't think he would go as far as closing them however
It would depend entirely upon the time of day in which this hypothetical decision was made, I guess?
Yep. I’m in the excellent Skybar of my Izmir hotel and have had one crisp, large gin and tonic. I am at the stage of taking away their charitable status. By 9pm (Turkey time) I expect to call for their total abolition, By 11pm I will demand that they are levelled to the ground with a first strike by the hitherto unknown Mebyon Kernow Force de Frappe, and the ground to be salted with the bottled sweat of six generations of tin miners. Six!! And also for my granny, who was a barefoot bal maiden, breaking rocks for tin aged 10 (true story)
Granny a bal maiden? Now that really is interesting. Hadn't realised they were still doing it that late; was reading about them during a Cornish visit (two actually). The costume is so revealing - not literally but in the sort of hem above the ankle and almost at the calf muscle which would instantly tell your average Victorian gent this was not a respectable middle class lady but one of the working classes who had to work for a living and keep her skirt from trailing in the muck and broken gossan and gangue and arsenic. Same with Scottish fisherwives and country farmworkers and Welsh countrywomen.
If Sunak was going to give money to a private school, he'd have been better off giving it to Ampleforth College, which is in his neighbouring constituency. It was inspected recently by Ofsted and found to be a) a den of iniquity, and b) inadequate. That's private schools for you - a heady mix of drugs, alcohol, sex and "monks of concern".
You don't get that sort of stuff in the state sector.
That is a strange report. The overall rating of Inadequate is due to failings in safeguarding, arising from an incident where kids got drunk at the end of term, and a SEND child had sex. Also, unvetted monks are allowed on the premises unsupervised. The other stuff done by the school is not really discussed, it is just described as good.
They have to be put on pretty severe notice to sort out the safeguarding issues, but it is not the only element of the school. The inadequate rating seems to be more a reflection on the priorities of the Inspectorate, than the school itself.
I've been looking at possible independent schooling for my son (albeit on the cheaper side), and read many similar reports - giving an enormous amount of weight and attention to safeguarding where the school has a boarding element.
It's not the inspectorate's priorities, it's successive governments, following on from the Soham School murders and other abuse cases.
If Ofsted find safeguarding to be inadequate, then leadership and management and the school as a whole has to be inadequate - because children are not safe. And children's lack of safety trumps the quality of education, which could still be good or even outstanding, in theory. You may not agree with this, but there is a logic to prioritising children's safety. The inadequate judgement also means that the school will be under regular surveillance, in an effort to keep children safe.
Whilst I appreciate your explanation; I still find it sad.
Much of the education system appears to be a performance, for the benefit of Ofsted.
Even in the 90s Ampleforth had something of reputation in a way that St Peter's or The Mount didn't.
Boarding schools have a whole raft of safeguarding issues non-boarding schools don't have. You're putting a few hundred young boys and young girls (for most schools are now coeducational) in an environment away from home, at a time when their bodies are changing and they're learning hard lessons about adulthood and life. I was only a day pupil, but there was a certain amount of sex going on, as well as some drugs (oddly, bodybuilding ones).
There is at state schools as well, but that mostly occurs outside school.
But a number of other international players have not been signed. David Warner, Aaron Finch, Chris Gayle and Babar Azam are among those to have missed out.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
So he’s a political idiot. What gives. His leadership ambitions are finished
Looks like the Tories are going to need an Alan B'Stard..... To out-bastard Boris
The good news is that the political fallout from the cost of living crisis, helped along by the government’s tax hike (for workers only), will hit Tory performance in the results we’ll all be reviewing in exactly a months’s time, and put the question as to whether our country being led by a dishonest clown is such a great idea, right back at the top of the agenda.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
And a decent interviewer would ask, "but how much extra did Winchester get from tax relief on donations?" The naive answer is 28K ripped out of the mouths of babes and the poor and comprehensives - but if one starts explaining why not, there's no answer that doesn't make it worse (e.g. not paying a penny of income tax at standard rate, if he gives enough to charity, or using the CGT route ...).
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Edit: that last point concerns the amount of tax moneys effectively taken out of the Exchequer and diverted to the private purposes of this, or indeed, any donor.
Better he spends it on this than 5 star Holidays to the Caribbean and Maldives, Michelin starred meals etc which he easily could.
Voters who are ideologically opposed to private education generally don't vote Tory anyway
I'm not so sure. Simply buying luxury items, as opposed to deeply wounding the social cohesion of the country ... and as for your ignoring non-Tory voters as usual, their taxes are being used to buttress such donations in general.
Case made, you are an ideological anti Tory voter who thinks private education is 'deeply wounding to the social cohesion of the country'.
Whereas Tories believe in parental choice
@HYUFD I am often more sympathetic to you than most, but this is idiotic from Sunak. Winchester College is already insanely wealthy. He should have just given the money straight to Prince Andrew, who does so much good work with impoverished young women
That’s about the level of crassness. A man so lacking in basic political judgement should never be allowed to lead
Go long on Truss or Mordaunt
Mordaunt - the one who not only organised the cringe-worthy (and technically law-breaking) ‘Leadsom for Leader’ March on Wesminster, but who actually came up with the idea in the first place?
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
Out of interest what do you think places like Winchester spend the income from their endowments on?
Here’s a little helper to get you going, it’s not on Super Yachts.
Maybe look in the direction of the crazy array of listed buildings which cost millions to upkeep each year. Now I’m sure if they are abolished the govt will happily spend the same money rather than lose those listed buildings but then everyone will be complaining that’s a waste of money I imagine.
Maybe look at the manuscripts such as Harmar’s work for the King James Bible which he did at Winchester which has to be preserved and insured as just one example.
Or do we seize these items from their legal owners - imagine the govt taking your manuscripts away from you…..
Please do explain though what it’s spent on because with 650 odd students paying around 45k a year it’s still not pissing the money up the wall on parties and gin.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
That charitable status helps them fund scholarships and bursaries and providing sports and arts facilities to share with the local community too
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
If Boris had a spare £100k like Rishi, you could be sure he wouldn't be giving it to Eton's scholarship fund but having a huge party of debauchery. Yet Rishi gets the flack
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
So you need to abolish the public schools.
Because your line would end all scholarships and then there would be even more polarisation of educational outcomes. It is surely a drop in the ocean but a non-trivial percentage of these schools' pupils are beneficiaries of such scholarships.
I don't know, Leon went to a comp and judging by his posts is not a huge fan of the great public schools.
I don't think he would go as far as closing them however
It would depend entirely upon the time of day in which this hypothetical decision was made, I guess?
Yep. I’m in the excellent Skybar of my Izmir hotel and have had one crisp, large gin and tonic. I am at the stage of taking away their charitable status. By 9pm (Turkey time) I expect to call for their total abolition, By 11pm I will demand that they are levelled to the ground with a first strike by the hitherto unknown Mebyon Kernow Force de Frappe, and the ground to be salted with the bottled sweat of six generations of tin miners. Six!! And also for my granny, who was a barefoot bal maiden, breaking rocks for tin aged 10 (true story)
Granny a bal maiden? Now that really is interesting. Hadn't realised they were still doing it that late; was reading about them during a Cornish visit (two actually). The costume is so revealing - not literally but in the sort of hem above the ankle and almost at the calf muscle which would instantly tell your average Victorian gent this was not a respectable middle class lady but one of the working classes who had to work for a living and keep her skirt from trailing in the muck and broken gossan and gangue and arsenic. Same with Scottish fisherwives and country farmworkers and Welsh countrywomen.
Yep, my mum’s mum, Annie
She was a bal maiden in St Agnes on the cliffs, Barefoot, breaking rocks, all weathers. Before WW1
One of the reasons (IIRC) it persisted so late in Cornwall is because the legislation against child labour in mines was specifically aimed at boys. The London legislators didn’t realise Cornish girls were pressed into toil up at grass, so the mine owners exploited the loophole
She escaped in her teens, got wed, had eight kids, and died in her early 60s, worn out by motherhood or the early slavery, or both. So I never met her
My lord, what would she think of me, her grandson, sitting in a bar in Izmir tapping out my twaddle on my iPad. What an unimaginable distance in human experience
Even in the 90s Ampleforth had something of reputation in a way that St Peter's or The Mount didn't.
I love the nuanced insiderdom of that post. I have no idea where or what those places are.
People I know who were at Ampleforth in the 70s did a lorra psychedelics there.
All greater York private school with boarding elements. I attended none of them.
Signed,
A Pleb.
The Mount is a Quaker operation. St Peter's, erm, claims to be "The fourth oldest school in the world, founded by St Paulinus of York in AD 627." At that sort of timing it sounds more of a question of whether St P's is a Monophysite or Nestorian establishment than a C of E or RC one ...
Rishi's star falls further as he donates £100, 000 to Winchester School
He has astonished me and Boris needs to move him on
So out of touch
"The donations fund bursaries for children whose parents would not otherwise be able to send them there."
I would have thought as a Conservative leaning voter you would be board with rich people donating so those fortunate can have access to top level education?
The problem is that it adds to the narrative that he ignored those in need in his widely criticised budget then gives £100,000 to a private school
TBH I suspect this was done by a flunky in his family office. It would have been on a list somewhere but I suspect he paid no attention to it.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
Out of interest what do you think places like Winchester spend the income from their endowments on?
Here’s a little helper to get you going, it’s not on Super Yachts.
Maybe look in the direction of the crazy array of listed buildings which cost millions to upkeep each year. Now I’m sure if they are abolished the govt will happily spend the same money rather than lose those listed buildings but then everyone will be complaining that’s a waste of money I imagine.
Maybe look at the manuscripts such as Harmar’s work for the King James Bible which he did at Winchester which has to be preserved and insured as just one example.
Or do we seize these items from their legal owners - imagine the govt taking your manuscripts away from you…..
Please do explain though what it’s spent on because with 650 odd students paying around 45k a year it’s still not pissing the money up the wall on parties and gin.
Well that's my mind changed, I don't know about others. Previously I naively thought these private schools were engines of inequality. But now I know that some of them own rare treasures... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVKKRzemX_w&t=50s
Have collected a curry from a local to my MIL's takeaway. They have done a big mail out of their menu with a money off voucher. For cash only transactions.
I was a wee bit suspicious. When collecting (and paying by card) the guy was quite happy to tell me why the discount is cash only.
Because if it's a card payment and they give the discount there isn't much left after they pay VAT. So they're not paying VAT on cash orders. Which means they're not putting them through the books. Not paying Corporation Tax.
Dumb bastards really shouldn't be telling their customers that, they have no idea who might want to shop them for tax evasion...
Even in the 90s Ampleforth had something of reputation in a way that St Peter's or The Mount didn't.
I love the nuanced insiderdom of that post. I have no idea where or what those places are.
People I know who were at Ampleforth in the 70s did a lorra psychedelics there.
All greater York private school with boarding elements. I attended none of them.
Signed,
A Pleb.
The Mount is a Quaker operation. St Peter's, erm, claims to be "The fourth oldest school in the world, founded by St Paulinus of York in AD 627." At that sort of timing it sounds more of a question of whether St P's is a Monophysite or Nestorian establishment than a C of E or RC one ...
St Peter's bigger claim to fame is it's links to Guy Fawkes.
Boris PR department has clearly had an upgrade (or perhaps they aren't constantly pissed). His COVID statements were nowhere near as good as this. He actually sounds like a world leader should.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
If Boris had a spare £100k like Rishi, you could be sure he wouldn't be giving it to Eton's scholarship fund but having a huge party of debauchery. Yet Rishi gets the flack
I suspect Boris does have quite a few spare £100k lying around despite his pleas of poverty, but simply prefers to get other people to pay for his many parties of debauchery.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
If Boris had a spare £100k like Rishi, you could be sure he wouldn't be giving it to Eton's scholarship fund but having a huge party of debauchery. Yet Rishi gets the flack
Because Sunak wanted the warm glow of praise that comes from publicly giving to charity, and now this has come back to haunt him
I believe there is a Biblical parable with some relevance here
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
That charitable status helps them fund scholarships and bursaries and providing sports and arts facilities to share with the local community too
I think you've put the cart before the horse there. As a retired teacher from the independent sector I was aware that the charitable status had been around for many years before the advent of large numbers of scholarships. The development of scholarships etc appeared as a way championed by ISI to justify and retain the charitable status already in place. The main reason for the charitable status was to be let off paying the rates, which was usually enormous. The school still had to pay VAT on the usual items.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
That charitable status helps them fund scholarships and bursaries and providing sports and arts facilities to share with the local community too
You've got it the wrong way round. They make those token efforts only because it gives them a fig leaf to help them ward off calls for their charitable status to be ended.
Although Sunak's £100k will have gone a long way to resurrecting the salience of the issue of the charitable status of public schools, so they might come to regret it in a couple of years or so.
Even in the 90s Ampleforth had something of reputation in a way that St Peter's or The Mount didn't.
I love the nuanced insiderdom of that post. I have no idea where or what those places are.
People I know who were at Ampleforth in the 70s did a lorra psychedelics there.
All greater York private school with boarding elements. I attended none of them.
Signed,
A Pleb.
The Mount is a Quaker operation. St Peter's, erm, claims to be "The fourth oldest school in the world, founded by St Paulinus of York in AD 627." At that sort of timing it sounds more of a question of whether St P's is a Monophysite or Nestorian establishment than a C of E or RC one ...
St Peter's bigger claim to fame is it's links to Guy Fawkes.
Have collected a curry from a local to my MIL's takeaway. They have done a big mail out of their menu with a money off voucher. For cash only transactions.
I was a wee bit suspicious. When collecting (and paying by card) the guy was quite happy to tell me why the discount is cash only.
Because if it's a card payment and they give the discount there isn't much left after they pay VAT. So they're not paying VAT on cash orders. Which means they're not putting them through the books. Not paying Corporation Tax.
Dumb bastards really shouldn't be telling their customers that, they have no idea who might want to shop them for tax evasion...
Boris PR department has clearly had an upgrade (or perhaps they aren't constantly pissed). His COVID statements were nowhere near as good as this. He actually sounds like a world leader should.
Also, the brilliant hit job on Sunak (this Winchester thing has to be the calculated blow of an assassin) suggests Boris has got someone in his team with a bit of the old Dom C mojo
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
So you need to abolish the public schools.
Because your line would end all scholarships and then there would be even more polarisation of educational outcomes. It is surely a drop in the ocean but a non-trivial percentage of these schools' pupils are beneficiaries of such scholarships.
I don't know, Leon went to a comp and judging by his posts is not a huge fan of the great public schools.
I don't think he would go as far as closing them however
It would depend entirely upon the time of day in which this hypothetical decision was made, I guess?
Yep. I’m in the excellent Skybar of my Izmir hotel and have had one crisp, large gin and tonic. I am at the stage of taking away their charitable status. By 9pm (Turkey time) I expect to call for their total abolition, By 11pm I will demand that they are levelled to the ground with a first strike by the hitherto unknown Mebyon Kernow Force de Frappe, and the ground to be salted with the bottled sweat of six generations of tin miners. Six!! And also for my granny, who was a barefoot bal maiden, breaking rocks for tin aged 10 (true story)
Granny a bal maiden? Now that really is interesting. Hadn't realised they were still doing it that late; was reading about them during a Cornish visit (two actually). The costume is so revealing - not literally but in the sort of hem above the ankle and almost at the calf muscle which would instantly tell your average Victorian gent this was not a respectable middle class lady but one of the working classes who had to work for a living and keep her skirt from trailing in the muck and broken gossan and gangue and arsenic. Same with Scottish fisherwives and country farmworkers and Welsh countrywomen.
Yep, my mum’s mum, Annie
She was a bal maiden in St Agnes on the cliffs, Barefoot, breaking rocks, all weathers. Before WW1
One of the reasons (IIRC) it persisted so late in Cornwall is because the legislation against child labour in mines was specifically aimed at boys. The London legislators didn’t realise Cornish girls were pressed into toil up at grass, so the mine owners exploited the loophole
She escaped in her teens, got wed, had eight kids, and died in her early 60s, worn out by motherhood or the early slavery, or both. So I never met her
My lord, what would she think of me, her grandson, sitting in a bar in Izmir tapping out my twaddle on my iPad. What an unimaginable distance in human experience
She’d wonder how the family had ever come to sink so far.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
If Boris had a spare £100k like Rishi, you could be sure he wouldn't be giving it to Eton's scholarship fund but having a huge party of debauchery. Yet Rishi gets the flack
Because he wanted the warm praise that comes from publicly giving to charity, and now this has come back to haunt him
I believe there is a Biblical parable with some relevance here
It was pretty low key giving. he doesn't even put MP after his name, and I challenge you to find a more obscure journal to publicise yourself in, it makes the Flint Knapper's Quarterly look like the News of the World. Not that I mind what happens to him, but this was pure bad luck compounded by pure malice.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
That charitable status helps them fund scholarships and bursaries and providing sports and arts facilities to share with the local community too
I think you've put the cart before the horse there. As a retired teacher from the independent sector I was aware that the charitable status had been around for many years before the advent of large numbers of scholarships. The development of scholarships etc appeared as a way championed by ISI to justify and retain the charitable status already in place. The main reason for the charitable status was to be let off paying the rates, which was usually enormous. The school still had to pay VAT on the usual items.
Rate relief has been abolished for private schools in Scotland - came into force this month AIUI. Now treated the same as state schools in that respect.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
If Boris had a spare £100k like Rishi, you could be sure he wouldn't be giving it to Eton's scholarship fund but having a huge party of debauchery. Yet Rishi gets the flack
Because Sunak wanted the warm glow of praise that comes from publicly giving to charity, and now this has come back to haunt him
I believe there is a Biblical parable with some relevance here
I presume you have never done anything that 10 years in the future having undergone a career change perhaps under changing global circumstances isn't perfect PR....
Via your logic nobody should donate to their old school or uni (or only do so in secret), just in case in 10 years time you might become CoE? In the US, you are a social pariah if you become wealthy and aren't seen to be donating to your alumni. I am constantly getting asked for donations from my former Oxbridge colleges, I presume all other major unis do the same...I suppose I should only donate via crypto that has been through a mixing service.
Have collected a curry from a local to my MIL's takeaway. They have done a big mail out of their menu with a money off voucher. For cash only transactions.
I was a wee bit suspicious. When collecting (and paying by card) the guy was quite happy to tell me why the discount is cash only.
Because if it's a card payment and they give the discount there isn't much left after they pay VAT. So they're not paying VAT on cash orders. Which means they're not putting them through the books. Not paying Corporation Tax.
Dumb bastards really shouldn't be telling their customers that, they have no idea who might want to shop them for tax evasion...
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
So you need to abolish the public schools.
Because your line would end all scholarships and then there would be even more polarisation of educational outcomes. It is surely a drop in the ocean but a non-trivial percentage of these schools' pupils are beneficiaries of such scholarships.
I don't know, Leon went to a comp and judging by his posts is not a huge fan of the great public schools.
I don't think he would go as far as closing them however
It would depend entirely upon the time of day in which this hypothetical decision was made, I guess?
Yep. I’m in the excellent Skybar of my Izmir hotel and have had one crisp, large gin and tonic. I am at the stage of taking away their charitable status. By 9pm (Turkey time) I expect to call for their total abolition, By 11pm I will demand that they are levelled to the ground with a first strike by the hitherto unknown Mebyon Kernow Force de Frappe, and the ground to be salted with the bottled sweat of six generations of tin miners. Six!! And also for my granny, who was a barefoot bal maiden, breaking rocks for tin aged 10 (true story)
Granny a bal maiden? Now that really is interesting. Hadn't realised they were still doing it that late; was reading about them during a Cornish visit (two actually). The costume is so revealing - not literally but in the sort of hem above the ankle and almost at the calf muscle which would instantly tell your average Victorian gent this was not a respectable middle class lady but one of the working classes who had to work for a living and keep her skirt from trailing in the muck and broken gossan and gangue and arsenic. Same with Scottish fisherwives and country farmworkers and Welsh countrywomen.
In Auchmithy , where my wife’s family came from for many generations, the women would hike up their skirts and carry their men to the boats so that they didn’t start the day with seawater in their boots. I suspect that you wouldn’t have a lot of problem in differentiating them from a gentle maiden either.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
If Boris had a spare £100k like Rishi, you could be sure he wouldn't be giving it to Eton's scholarship fund but having a huge party of debauchery. Yet Rishi gets the flack
Because Sunak wanted the warm glow of praise that comes from publicly giving to charity, and now this has come back to haunt him
I believe there is a Biblical parable with some relevance here
I presume you have never done anything that 10 years in the future having undergone a career change perhaps under changing global circumstances isn't perfect PR....
I presume nobody should donate to their old school or uni, just in case in 10 years time you might become CoE? In the US, you are a social pariah if you become wealthy and aren't seen to be donating to your alumni. I am constantly getting asked for donations from my former Oxbridge colleges, I presume all other major unis do the same.
Donating to alumni? They must do things differently in the USA. Friend of mine went to what HYUFD would call a top tier English "public" school and sent his children there. He once pointed out the standard notice in the old boys' mailing (this was the 1980s IIRC) which basically said "It is strictly understood that Old Boys don't use this to sting each other for loans".
To elaborate a bit more, in my life experience it has always been the case that the people who are militantly against private education went to excellent state schools, in middle class areas, with high house prices. The absolute classic example is the people that went to Peter Symonds College, which historically gets outstanding A level results and sends large numbers of people to Russell Group Universities, and has some of the highest house prices in the country (Winchester). They typically make a massive deal about how down to earth they are, but actually they just have wise and smart parents who made good decisions about where to bring their kids up.
In my own case, it was pretty similar - I went to a very good state school (comprehensive) and sixth form college, because my parents made similar decisions. I now live in an area where the schooling is ok, but there is a lot of crime, drugs, delinquency etc and what I see is that people on modest incomes, in modest houses, are paying circa £200k per child over 14 years to send them out independent school to try and avoid them getting sucked in to drugs, crime, gangs etc.
In the end the people that buy the houses in Winchester are doing better in nearly all respects, they get to boast about being classless etc, and they don't have to fork out £200k+ (£400k if there are 2 kids) of basically dead money, they just put it in to the mortgage payments on a nice house which is, at the end of the day, an appreciating asset. There is no real 'equality' in all of this, just private interests.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
That charitable status helps them fund scholarships and bursaries and providing sports and arts facilities to share with the local community too
I think you've put the cart before the horse there. As a retired teacher from the independent sector I was aware that the charitable status had been around for many years before the advent of large numbers of scholarships. The development of scholarships etc appeared as a way championed by ISI to justify and retain the charitable status already in place. The main reason for the charitable status was to be let off paying the rates, which was usually enormous. The school still had to pay VAT on the usual items.
Rate relief has been abolished for private schools in Scotland - came into force this month AIUI. Now treated the same as state schools in that respect.
And the private schools will thus offer fewer scholarships and become even more the preserve of the rich.
Have collected a curry from a local to my MIL's takeaway. They have done a big mail out of their menu with a money off voucher. For cash only transactions.
I was a wee bit suspicious. When collecting (and paying by card) the guy was quite happy to tell me why the discount is cash only.
Because if it's a card payment and they give the discount there isn't much left after they pay VAT. So they're not paying VAT on cash orders. Which means they're not putting them through the books. Not paying Corporation Tax.
Dumb bastards really shouldn't be telling their customers that, they have no idea who might want to shop them for tax evasion...
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
So you need to abolish the public schools.
Because your line would end all scholarships and then there would be even more polarisation of educational outcomes. It is surely a drop in the ocean but a non-trivial percentage of these schools' pupils are beneficiaries of such scholarships.
I don't know, Leon went to a comp and judging by his posts is not a huge fan of the great public schools.
I don't think he would go as far as closing them however
It would depend entirely upon the time of day in which this hypothetical decision was made, I guess?
Yep. I’m in the excellent Skybar of my Izmir hotel and have had one crisp, large gin and tonic. I am at the stage of taking away their charitable status. By 9pm (Turkey time) I expect to call for their total abolition, By 11pm I will demand that they are levelled to the ground with a first strike by the hitherto unknown Mebyon Kernow Force de Frappe, and the ground to be salted with the bottled sweat of six generations of tin miners. Six!! And also for my granny, who was a barefoot bal maiden, breaking rocks for tin aged 10 (true story)
Granny a bal maiden? Now that really is interesting. Hadn't realised they were still doing it that late; was reading about them during a Cornish visit (two actually). The costume is so revealing - not literally but in the sort of hem above the ankle and almost at the calf muscle which would instantly tell your average Victorian gent this was not a respectable middle class lady but one of the working classes who had to work for a living and keep her skirt from trailing in the muck and broken gossan and gangue and arsenic. Same with Scottish fisherwives and country farmworkers and Welsh countrywomen.
Yep, my mum’s mum, Annie
She was a bal maiden in St Agnes on the cliffs, Barefoot, breaking rocks, all weathers. Before WW1
One of the reasons (IIRC) it persisted so late in Cornwall is because the legislation against child labour in mines was specifically aimed at boys. The London legislators didn’t realise Cornish girls were pressed into toil up at grass, so the mine owners exploited the loophole
She escaped in her teens, got wed, had eight kids, and died in her early 60s, worn out by motherhood or the early slavery, or both. So I never met her
My lord, what would she think of me, her grandson, sitting in a bar in Izmir tapping out my twaddle on my iPad. What an unimaginable distance in human experience
She’d wonder how the family had ever come to sink so far.
Dunno. Think she liked a drop. As you would with that childhood and all those kids
I just found her on ancestry.co.uk
She must have been in the mines around 1908, is my guess, which makes total sense. The last bal maidens stopped working in 1921
What an extraordinary story. The noise of the stamps was so loud (the tin districts of Cornwall would have been deafeningly loud at the height of the mining boom) many bal maidens went partly deaf and had their own private sign language
Boris PR department has clearly had an upgrade (or perhaps they aren't constantly pissed). His COVID statements were nowhere near as good as this. He actually sounds like a world leader should.
Also, the brilliant hit job on Sunak (this Winchester thing has to be the calculated blow of an assassin) suggests Boris has got someone in his team with a bit of the old Dom C mojo
Yes. As HYUFD was often telling us, had Boris been deposed over PartyGate then Rishi would have been installed as Dom's puppet. This is probably more about Dom than Rishi - by wiping out the favourite son, mafia-like, Boris's team have rammed home where Dom now stands in the scheme of things.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Edit: that last point concerns the amount of tax moneys effectively taken out of the Exchequer and diverted to the private purposes of this, or indeed, any donor.
Wouldn't it have been better to donate money to the state school system. They need it more.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
If Boris had a spare £100k like Rishi, you could be sure he wouldn't be giving it to Eton's scholarship fund but having a huge party of debauchery. Yet Rishi gets the flack
Because Sunak wanted the warm glow of praise that comes from publicly giving to charity, and now this has come back to haunt him
I believe there is a Biblical parable with some relevance here
I presume you have never done anything that 10 years in the future having undergone a career change perhaps under changing global circumstances isn't perfect PR....
I presume nobody should donate to their old school or uni, just in case in 10 years time you might become CoE? In the US, you are a social pariah if you become wealthy and aren't seen to be donating to your alumni. I am constantly getting asked for donations from my former Oxbridge colleges, I presume all other major unis do the same.
Donating to alumni? They must do things differently in the USA. Friend of mine went to what HYUFD would call a top tier English "public" school and sent his children there. He once pointed out the standard notice in the old boys' mailing (this was the 1980s IIRC) which basically said "It is strictly understood that Old Boys don't use this to sting each other for loans".
I'm pretty sure they meant donating to the college/university, not others in their cohort.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
That charitable status helps them fund scholarships and bursaries and providing sports and arts facilities to share with the local community too
You've got it the wrong way round. They make those token efforts only because it gives them a fig leaf to help them ward off calls for their charitable status to be ended.
Although Sunak's £100k will have gone a long way to resurrecting the salience of the issue of the charitable status of public schools, so they might come to regret it in a couple of years or so.
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
So you need to abolish the public schools.
Because your line would end all scholarships and then there would be even more polarisation of educational outcomes. It is surely a drop in the ocean but a non-trivial percentage of these schools' pupils are beneficiaries of such scholarships.
I don't know, Leon went to a comp and judging by his posts is not a huge fan of the great public schools.
I don't think he would go as far as closing them however
It would depend entirely upon the time of day in which this hypothetical decision was made, I guess?
Yep. I’m in the excellent Skybar of my Izmir hotel and have had one crisp, large gin and tonic. I am at the stage of taking away their charitable status. By 9pm (Turkey time) I expect to call for their total abolition, By 11pm I will demand that they are levelled to the ground with a first strike by the hitherto unknown Mebyon Kernow Force de Frappe, and the ground to be salted with the bottled sweat of six generations of tin miners. Six!! And also for my granny, who was a barefoot bal maiden, breaking rocks for tin aged 10 (true story)
Granny a bal maiden? Now that really is interesting. Hadn't realised they were still doing it that late; was reading about them during a Cornish visit (two actually). The costume is so revealing - not literally but in the sort of hem above the ankle and almost at the calf muscle which would instantly tell your average Victorian gent this was not a respectable middle class lady but one of the working classes who had to work for a living and keep her skirt from trailing in the muck and broken gossan and gangue and arsenic. Same with Scottish fisherwives and country farmworkers and Welsh countrywomen.
In Auchmithy , where my wife’s family came from for many generations, the women would hike up their skirts and carry their men to the boats so that they didn’t start the day with seawater in their boots. I suspect that you wouldn’t have a lot of problem in differentiating them from a gentle maiden either.
I was being ironic about the Victorian attitude to respectability. But yes, wading, and also the mud and stour from tramping the roads carrying the creels of fish to their customers. As at Newhaven:
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
Out of interest what do you think places like Winchester spend the income from their endowments on?
Here’s a little helper to get you going, it’s not on Super Yachts.
Maybe look in the direction of the crazy array of listed buildings which cost millions to upkeep each year. Now I’m sure if they are abolished the govt will happily spend the same money rather than lose those listed buildings but then everyone will be complaining that’s a waste of money I imagine.
Maybe look at the manuscripts such as Harmar’s work for the King James Bible which he did at Winchester which has to be preserved and insured as just one example.
Or do we seize these items from their legal owners - imagine the govt taking your manuscripts away from you…..
Please do explain though what it’s spent on because with 650 odd students paying around 45k a year it’s still not pissing the money up the wall on parties and gin.
I don't actually doubt that Winchester will spend the money on matters that they consider worthy. The criticism is that it's a peculiar priority in our society to give them a large sum when there are so many other obvious needs at home and abroad.
Since it's his money, he is of course entitled to give it to anyone he likes, or indeed to spend it on riotous living. However, in his position he also has a responsibility to show leadership and set an example of reasonable priorities. That will apply even more if, in due course, he become Prime Minister.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
That charitable status helps them fund scholarships and bursaries and providing sports and arts facilities to share with the local community too
I think you've put the cart before the horse there. As a retired teacher from the independent sector I was aware that the charitable status had been around for many years before the advent of large numbers of scholarships. The development of scholarships etc appeared as a way championed by ISI to justify and retain the charitable status already in place. The main reason for the charitable status was to be let off paying the rates, which was usually enormous. The school still had to pay VAT on the usual items.
Rate relief has been abolished for private schools in Scotland - came into force this month AIUI. Now treated the same as state schools in that respect.
And the private schools will thus offer fewer scholarships and become even more the preserve of the rich.
Great job Sturgeon!
We don't all want to cater only for the Inner Party and the Outer Party. There are other people than Tories.
Have collected a curry from a local to my MIL's takeaway. They have done a big mail out of their menu with a money off voucher. For cash only transactions.
I was a wee bit suspicious. When collecting (and paying by card) the guy was quite happy to tell me why the discount is cash only.
Because if it's a card payment and they give the discount there isn't much left after they pay VAT. So they're not paying VAT on cash orders. Which means they're not putting them through the books. Not paying Corporation Tax.
Dumb bastards really shouldn't be telling their customers that, they have no idea who might want to shop them for tax evasion...
Shop them in. I'd do it.
Too bloody right I will
With most carry out shops the cash only demand is usually a sure sign that the VATman is sniffing about and a change of ownership is imminent.
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
So you need to abolish the public schools.
Because your line would end all scholarships and then there would be even more polarisation of educational outcomes. It is surely a drop in the ocean but a non-trivial percentage of these schools' pupils are beneficiaries of such scholarships.
I don't know, Leon went to a comp and judging by his posts is not a huge fan of the great public schools.
I don't think he would go as far as closing them however
It would depend entirely upon the time of day in which this hypothetical decision was made, I guess?
Yep. I’m in the excellent Skybar of my Izmir hotel and have had one crisp, large gin and tonic. I am at the stage of taking away their charitable status. By 9pm (Turkey time) I expect to call for their total abolition, By 11pm I will demand that they are levelled to the ground with a first strike by the hitherto unknown Mebyon Kernow Force de Frappe, and the ground to be salted with the bottled sweat of six generations of tin miners. Six!! And also for my granny, who was a barefoot bal maiden, breaking rocks for tin aged 10 (true story)
Granny a bal maiden? Now that really is interesting. Hadn't realised they were still doing it that late; was reading about them during a Cornish visit (two actually). The costume is so revealing - not literally but in the sort of hem above the ankle and almost at the calf muscle which would instantly tell your average Victorian gent this was not a respectable middle class lady but one of the working classes who had to work for a living and keep her skirt from trailing in the muck and broken gossan and gangue and arsenic. Same with Scottish fisherwives and country farmworkers and Welsh countrywomen.
Yep, my mum’s mum, Annie
She was a bal maiden in St Agnes on the cliffs, Barefoot, breaking rocks, all weathers. Before WW1
One of the reasons (IIRC) it persisted so late in Cornwall is because the legislation against child labour in mines was specifically aimed at boys. The London legislators didn’t realise Cornish girls were pressed into toil up at grass, so the mine owners exploited the loophole
She escaped in her teens, got wed, had eight kids, and died in her early 60s, worn out by motherhood or the early slavery, or both. So I never met her
My lord, what would she think of me, her grandson, sitting in a bar in Izmir tapping out my twaddle on my iPad. What an unimaginable distance in human experience
She’d wonder how the family had ever come to sink so far.
If one digs into one’s Family History one finds this sort of thing. My grandfather used to lament that he’d had to go down the mines at 12, although his grandfather had been a doctor. And we all said something like ‘poor old chap’. But he had been. Cleared off to London, left his girlfriend and their baby. Made a fortune.
Boris PR department has clearly had an upgrade (or perhaps they aren't constantly pissed). His COVID statements were nowhere near as good as this. He actually sounds like a world leader should.
Also, the brilliant hit job on Sunak (this Winchester thing has to be the calculated blow of an assassin) suggests Boris has got someone in his team with a bit of the old Dom C mojo
Yes. As HYUFD was often telling us, had Boris been deposed over PartyGate then Rishi would have been installed as Dom's puppet. This is probably more about Dom than Rishi - by wiping out the favourite son, mafia-like, Boris's team have rammed home where Dom now stands in the scheme of things.
There is something amusing about an Old Etonian trashing the former Head Boy of Winchester for being over privileged.
I went to school in Winchester 79-83, but at Comprehensives. I don't recall any charitable activities by the Winco boys, as we called them, just fairly routine verbal abuse while dossing around on the Buttercross or Cathedral grounds, where we oiks used to gather, drink and flirt.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
If Boris had a spare £100k like Rishi, you could be sure he wouldn't be giving it to Eton's scholarship fund but having a huge party of debauchery. Yet Rishi gets the flack
Because he wanted the warm praise that comes from publicly giving to charity, and now this has come back to haunt him
I believe there is a Biblical parable with some relevance here
It was pretty low key giving. he doesn't even put MP after his name, and I challenge you to find a more obscure journal to publicise yourself in, it makes the Flint Knapper's Quarterly look like the News of the World. Not that I mind what happens to him, but this was pure bad luck compounded by pure malice.
Like many - I suspect - I struggle to feel sorry for the *bad luck* of Rishi “£500 million” Sunak, as he is discovered giving £100,000 to struggling, desperate Winchester “£400 million” College (single sex pre sixth form)
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
That charitable status helps them fund scholarships and bursaries and providing sports and arts facilities to share with the local community too
I think you've put the cart before the horse there. As a retired teacher from the independent sector I was aware that the charitable status had been around for many years before the advent of large numbers of scholarships. The development of scholarships etc appeared as a way championed by ISI to justify and retain the charitable status already in place. The main reason for the charitable status was to be let off paying the rates, which was usually enormous. The school still had to pay VAT on the usual items.
Rate relief has been abolished for private schools in Scotland - came into force this month AIUI. Now treated the same as state schools in that respect.
And the private schools will thus offer fewer scholarships and become even more the preserve of the rich.
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
So you need to abolish the public schools.
Because your line would end all scholarships and then there would be even more polarisation of educational outcomes. It is surely a drop in the ocean but a non-trivial percentage of these schools' pupils are beneficiaries of such scholarships.
I don't know, Leon went to a comp and judging by his posts is not a huge fan of the great public schools.
I don't think he would go as far as closing them however
It would depend entirely upon the time of day in which this hypothetical decision was made, I guess?
Yep. I’m in the excellent Skybar of my Izmir hotel and have had one crisp, large gin and tonic. I am at the stage of taking away their charitable status. By 9pm (Turkey time) I expect to call for their total abolition, By 11pm I will demand that they are levelled to the ground with a first strike by the hitherto unknown Mebyon Kernow Force de Frappe, and the ground to be salted with the bottled sweat of six generations of tin miners. Six!! And also for my granny, who was a barefoot bal maiden, breaking rocks for tin aged 10 (true story)
Granny a bal maiden? Now that really is interesting. Hadn't realised they were still doing it that late; was reading about them during a Cornish visit (two actually). The costume is so revealing - not literally but in the sort of hem above the ankle and almost at the calf muscle which would instantly tell your average Victorian gent this was not a respectable middle class lady but one of the working classes who had to work for a living and keep her skirt from trailing in the muck and broken gossan and gangue and arsenic. Same with Scottish fisherwives and country farmworkers and Welsh countrywomen.
In Auchmithy , where my wife’s family came from for many generations, the women would hike up their skirts and carry their men to the boats so that they didn’t start the day with seawater in their boots. I suspect that you wouldn’t have a lot of problem in differentiating them from a gentle maiden either.
I was being ironic about the Victorian attitude to respectability. But yes, wading, and also the mud and stour from tramping the roads carrying the creels of fish to their customers. As at Newhaven:
These women were as hard as nails who held their families together in the toughest of times. Magnificent human beings. I am honoured to be married to one of their successors.
Have collected a curry from a local to my MIL's takeaway. They have done a big mail out of their menu with a money off voucher. For cash only transactions.
I was a wee bit suspicious. When collecting (and paying by card) the guy was quite happy to tell me why the discount is cash only.
Because if it's a card payment and they give the discount there isn't much left after they pay VAT. So they're not paying VAT on cash orders. Which means they're not putting them through the books. Not paying Corporation Tax.
Dumb bastards really shouldn't be telling their customers that, they have no idea who might want to shop them for tax evasion...
Shop them in. I'd do it.
Too bloody right I will
No bleeding heart liberal, I, however is it worth considering, instead of dobbing them in you send an anonymous note outlining what they are doing, it’s illegality and “imorality” and point out that they don’t know who you are and you will be sending in friends to check if they are still trying this on?
Give them a chance to stop rather than potential consequences to owner’s family, the local community etc?
I’m having an evening of trying to be nice so thought I would suggest it!
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
So you need to abolish the public schools.
Because your line would end all scholarships and then there would be even more polarisation of educational outcomes. It is surely a drop in the ocean but a non-trivial percentage of these schools' pupils are beneficiaries of such scholarships.
I don't know, Leon went to a comp and judging by his posts is not a huge fan of the great public schools.
I don't think he would go as far as closing them however
It would depend entirely upon the time of day in which this hypothetical decision was made, I guess?
Yep. I’m in the excellent Skybar of my Izmir hotel and have had one crisp, large gin and tonic. I am at the stage of taking away their charitable status. By 9pm (Turkey time) I expect to call for their total abolition, By 11pm I will demand that they are levelled to the ground with a first strike by the hitherto unknown Mebyon Kernow Force de Frappe, and the ground to be salted with the bottled sweat of six generations of tin miners. Six!! And also for my granny, who was a barefoot bal maiden, breaking rocks for tin aged 10 (true story)
Granny a bal maiden? Now that really is interesting. Hadn't realised they were still doing it that late; was reading about them during a Cornish visit (two actually). The costume is so revealing - not literally but in the sort of hem above the ankle and almost at the calf muscle which would instantly tell your average Victorian gent this was not a respectable middle class lady but one of the working classes who had to work for a living and keep her skirt from trailing in the muck and broken gossan and gangue and arsenic. Same with Scottish fisherwives and country farmworkers and Welsh countrywomen.
Yep, my mum’s mum, Annie
She was a bal maiden in St Agnes on the cliffs, Barefoot, breaking rocks, all weathers. Before WW1
One of the reasons (IIRC) it persisted so late in Cornwall is because the legislation against child labour in mines was specifically aimed at boys. The London legislators didn’t realise Cornish girls were pressed into toil up at grass, so the mine owners exploited the loophole
She escaped in her teens, got wed, had eight kids, and died in her early 60s, worn out by motherhood or the early slavery, or both. So I never met her
My lord, what would she think of me, her grandson, sitting in a bar in Izmir tapping out my twaddle on my iPad. What an unimaginable distance in human experience
She would have wished you had gained a scholarship to Winchester and became a respectable citizen.
Have collected a curry from a local to my MIL's takeaway. They have done a big mail out of their menu with a money off voucher. For cash only transactions.
I was a wee bit suspicious. When collecting (and paying by card) the guy was quite happy to tell me why the discount is cash only.
Because if it's a card payment and they give the discount there isn't much left after they pay VAT. So they're not paying VAT on cash orders. Which means they're not putting them through the books. Not paying Corporation Tax.
Dumb bastards really shouldn't be telling their customers that, they have no idea who might want to shop them for tax evasion...
Shop them in. I'd do it.
Too bloody right I will
No bleeding heart liberal, I, however is it worth considering, instead of dobbing them in you send an anonymous note outlining what they are doing, it’s illegality and “imorality” and point out that they don’t know who you are and you will be sending in friends to check if they are still trying this on?
Give them a chance to stop rather than potential consequences to owner’s family, the local community etc?
I’m having an evening of trying to be nice so thought I would suggest it!
The fact that they've cooked up a ruse to get more cash and fewer card payments means they already know what they're doing is illegal. And immorality doesn't really need the quotes. It's definitely wrong. They're pocketing the cash whilst you pay your taxes, so it's you they're stealing off. Fuck em.
Memo to massively wealthy Tory politicians, don’t give MORE money to already wildly wealthy and super elitist public schools
I’d give similar advice to Labour politicians of questionable patriotism: don’t support the IRA and hang out with Hamas
Nah, it's very easy to defend - "I had a brillliant education at Winchester and I've been donating to a scholarship fund to enable kids who weren't as fortunate as I was when growing up to enable them to get the same benefits I had and with our education plan we will ensure that all kids get the same kind of excellent education I was able to receive"
It doesn't need more than one line.
Lol. A totally garbled, implausible line as you try to fit so much bollocks into one line
But it works because it's aspirational. The Tories are supposed to be the party of aspiration, not holding grudges against rich people.
Objectively, it's commendable. Yet it is focussed very much on buttressing the private education system.
Subjectively, it's a disaster, as it reminds the rest of the UK just how much money the Chancellor has to spare. (And how much tax relief was involved, too?)
Objectively.. is it? Donating money to a cause depends on the worthiness of that cause. Private schools are engines for concentrating the quality of services and delivering them mostly to those who can pay.
Yes, I know that bursaries exist and the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in, but it's still a system of intentional and intense stratification that benefits the extremely wealthy. It obviously right up HYUFD's street but if you asked me (I know, I know) I could find much better things to do with a spare £100k.
"...the poor but brilliant gold ticket winner can get in..."
This is a modern version of the Distressed Gentlefolk* charity. Sure, in theory it's open to anybody but in reality only a very small subset of society, usually with the right connections, would ever have the wherewithal to apply, let alone be successful. It's a sham.
(*I am probably being unfair to that charity, now sensibly renamed 'Elizabeth Finn Care'.)
Not so. The recipients of these bursaries are not secret poshos down on their luck, they are the real deal. And quite often getting a shit time from everybody else for their failure to be posh, secretly or otherwise, but that's another story.
Just exactly how do Winchester, Eton, etc. publicise these bursaries in your average sink estate?
no idea. Talent scouts?
Let me help you: They don't.
Let me help you: you don’t know what you are talking about. Not only do they have very active outreach programmes helping schools and sharing resources they actively promote bursaries and scholarships around the country because funnily enough they actually do want to recruit very bright and able students as it benefits everyone at the school and, if cynical, the reputation of the school when these bright kids get access to places they wouldn’t otherwise and go on to do great things.
All the major public schools support inner city clubs - Winchester for example supports the Crown and Manor club in London where they arrange exchanges, tutorial help, resources, money and time for kids from some of the shittiest unfortunate backgrounds because funnily enough all public school people aren’t entitled wankers.
The people aren’t, the institutions are selfish greedy fucks. Winchester is worth 400 million. What the fuck, And they want to be charities? UGH
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
That charitable status helps them fund scholarships and bursaries and providing sports and arts facilities to share with the local community too
I think you've put the cart before the horse there. As a retired teacher from the independent sector I was aware that the charitable status had been around for many years before the advent of large numbers of scholarships. The development of scholarships etc appeared as a way championed by ISI to justify and retain the charitable status already in place. The main reason for the charitable status was to be let off paying the rates, which was usually enormous. The school still had to pay VAT on the usual items.
Rate relief has been abolished for private schools in Scotland - came into force this month AIUI. Now treated the same as state schools in that respect.
And the private schools will thus offer fewer scholarships and become even more the preserve of the rich.
Great job Sturgeon!
My kids former school is cutting back on teaching staff and places despite having a waiting list as a result.
We had a child or children at that school for 20 years. The change was remarkable. Originally dominated by old school money and inherited wealth it, over time it became dominated by people paying their fees from income in despair of the collapse of the state system. The ethos changed too. Originally a place you went to make friends of the clique that would see you alright and get a place for you it became focused on results. Those paying the fees from their hard earned want their kids in Russell group unis with a ticket to the professions.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is providing over a cost of living crisis that might see people actually go hungry, is worth £500 million, and decided that Winchester College really needed £100,000. Cause they can barely get by, what with being worth £100 million less than him and his wife
What’s more, he decided this donation was so crucial to Winchester College, which is barely scraping by with its £400 million in assets and £27 million in annual income, he should give this money PUBLICLY, so everyone can see his priorities
He has been giving this money over the course of 10 years (by 2014, he had given over £25k).....that is what ultra wealthy people do, they give money and get their names on plaques of buildings.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
If Boris had a spare £100k like Rishi, you could be sure he wouldn't be giving it to Eton's scholarship fund but having a huge party of debauchery. Yet Rishi gets the flack
Because he wanted the warm praise that comes from publicly giving to charity, and now this has come back to haunt him
I believe there is a Biblical parable with some relevance here
It was pretty low key giving. he doesn't even put MP after his name, and I challenge you to find a more obscure journal to publicise yourself in, it makes the Flint Knapper's Quarterly look like the News of the World. Not that I mind what happens to him, but this was pure bad luck compounded by pure malice.
Like many - I suspect - I struggle to feel sorry for the *bad luck* of Rishi “£500 million” Sunak, as he is discovered giving £100,000 to struggling, desperate Winchester “£400 million” College (single sex pre sixth form)
Sure. I am just exposing the skill with which this has been parlayed into a "Fuck you suckers" bit of post-Spring Statement ostentation when it is nothing of the kind.
This has prompted me to look at the records of my own school, and I am amazed at some of my contemps who have coughed up and want the alumniariat to know about it. On the vanishingly rare occasions I am overwhelmed by the need to give to charity I quite like paying for operations to cure African children of blindness. It seems a better use of the money.
Comments
I would literally prefer he sets fire to the money than donates it to a private school.
You can't turn a corner of London without some building, street, monument being named such because somebody once gave some money to charity....
Why would anyone want to live in the situation the poor citizens of Donbass have been forced to live under? AIUI some separatist fighters are so disgusted with Russia they're now fighting with Ukraine (*)!
(*) AIUI mainly because they wanted independence, not to become part of Russia.
And I say that as someone who thinks he's an empty vessel as a politician.
MPs have claimed £420,000 to heat their second homes since 2019
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/revealed-mps-claimed-420000-on-expenses-for-their-energy-bills/
There are powers to order inspections of those, too:
...the DfE may commission Ofsted to carry out an inspection of an independent school that is normally inspected by the Independent Schools Inspectorate...
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/memorandum-of-understanding-independent-schools/memorandum-of-understanding-independent-schools
Do they give any information on their process? Just logging and storing data must be difficult.
Take their charitable status away
Just one of the many stupidities of what Sunak has done is he has ensured - if this story gains traction (Ukraine might save him) - is that every Tory will now be asked to justify Sunak’s 100k to Winchester. Because he is CoE they will have to defend him, but it will be very awkward, and it will sound like MaxPB’s strangulated nonsense. They won’t thank him for this
I'm reminded slightly of this:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/median
not happy with da Tories
There is at state schools as well, but that mostly occurs outside school.
Here’s a little helper to get you going, it’s not on Super Yachts.
Maybe look in the direction of the crazy array of listed buildings which cost millions to upkeep each year. Now I’m sure if they are abolished the govt will happily spend the same money rather than lose those listed buildings but then everyone will be complaining that’s a waste of money I imagine.
Maybe look at the manuscripts such as Harmar’s work for the King James Bible which he did at Winchester which has to be preserved and insured as just one example.
Or do we seize these items from their legal owners - imagine the govt taking your manuscripts away from you…..
Please do explain though what it’s spent on because with 650 odd students paying around 45k a year it’s still not pissing the money up the wall on parties and gin.
People I know who were at Ampleforth in the 70s did a lorra psychedelics there.
Signed,
A Pleb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_language
She was a bal maiden in St Agnes on the cliffs, Barefoot, breaking rocks, all weathers. Before WW1
One of the reasons (IIRC) it persisted so late in Cornwall is because the legislation against child labour in mines was specifically aimed at boys. The London legislators didn’t realise Cornish girls were pressed into toil up at grass, so the mine owners exploited the loophole
She escaped in her teens, got wed, had eight kids, and died in her early 60s, worn out by motherhood or the early slavery, or both. So I never met her
My lord, what would she think of me, her grandson, sitting in a bar in Izmir tapping out my twaddle on my iPad. What an unimaginable distance in human experience
Previously I naively thought these private schools were engines of inequality. But now I know that some of them own rare treasures...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVKKRzemX_w&t=50s
I was a wee bit suspicious. When collecting (and paying by card) the guy was quite happy to tell me why the discount is cash only.
Because if it's a card payment and they give the discount there isn't much left after they pay VAT. So they're not paying VAT on cash orders. Which means they're not putting them through the books. Not paying Corporation Tax.
Dumb bastards really shouldn't be telling their customers that, they have no idea who might want to shop them for tax evasion...
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1511388515787055115?s=20&t=p7mm9OKrpkFYOfHaP1MIXA
Boris PR department has clearly had an upgrade (or perhaps they aren't constantly pissed). His COVID statements were nowhere near as good as this. He actually sounds like a world leader should.
I believe there is a Biblical parable with some relevance here
Although Sunak's £100k will have gone a long way to resurrecting the salience of the issue of the charitable status of public schools, so they might come to regret it in a couple of years or so.
Via your logic nobody should donate to their old school or uni (or only do so in secret), just in case in 10 years time you might become CoE? In the US, you are a social pariah if you become wealthy and aren't seen to be donating to your alumni. I am constantly getting asked for donations from my former Oxbridge colleges, I presume all other major unis do the same...I suppose I should only donate via crypto that has been through a mixing service.
I suspect that you wouldn’t have a lot of problem in differentiating them from a gentle maiden either.
In my own case, it was pretty similar - I went to a very good state school (comprehensive) and sixth form college, because my parents made similar decisions. I now live in an area where the schooling is ok, but there is a lot of crime, drugs, delinquency etc and what I see is that people on modest incomes, in modest houses, are paying circa £200k per child over 14 years to send them out independent school to try and avoid them getting sucked in to drugs, crime, gangs etc.
In the end the people that buy the houses in Winchester are doing better in nearly all respects, they get to boast about being classless etc, and they don't have to fork out £200k+ (£400k if there are 2 kids) of basically dead money, they just put it in to the mortgage payments on a nice house which is, at the end of the day, an appreciating asset. There is no real 'equality' in all of this, just private interests.
Great job Sturgeon!
I just found her on ancestry.co.uk
She must have been in the mines around 1908, is my guess, which makes total sense. The last bal maidens stopped working in 1921
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bal_maiden
What an extraordinary story. The noise of the stamps was so loud (the tin districts of Cornwall would have been deafeningly loud at the height of the mining boom) many bal maidens went partly deaf and had their own private sign language
https://digital.nls.uk/photographs/david_oct.html
Since it's his money, he is of course entitled to give it to anyone he likes, or indeed to spend it on riotous living. However, in his position he also has a responsibility to show leadership and set an example of reasonable priorities. That will apply even more if, in due course, he become Prime Minister.
But he had been. Cleared off to London, left his girlfriend and their baby. Made a fortune.
That fortune never got anywhere near ‘my’ Coles!
I went to school in Winchester 79-83, but at Comprehensives. I don't recall any charitable activities by the Winco boys, as we called them, just fairly routine verbal abuse while dossing around on the Buttercross or Cathedral grounds, where we oiks used to gather, drink and flirt.
Like many - I suspect - I struggle to feel sorry for the *bad luck* of Rishi “£500 million” Sunak, as he is discovered giving £100,000 to struggling, desperate Winchester “£400 million” College (single sex pre sixth form)
https://www.gov.scot/publications/report-barclay-review-non-domestic-rates/
Parents get more choice and bright children have more chance of getting into a highly academic state school
Give them a chance to stop rather than potential consequences to owner’s family, the local community etc?
I’m having an evening of trying to be nice so thought I would suggest it!
My one nation instinct would allow lower income parents to double up their vouchers.
Wealthier parents could also pay extra.
Free markets in actions would lead to every school being awesome.
And immorality doesn't really need the quotes. It's definitely wrong. They're pocketing the cash whilst you pay your taxes, so it's you they're stealing off. Fuck em.
We had a child or children at that school for 20 years. The change was remarkable. Originally dominated by old school money and inherited wealth it, over time it became dominated by people paying their fees from income in despair of the collapse of the state system.
The ethos changed too. Originally a place you went to make friends of the clique that would see you alright and get a place for you it became focused on results. Those paying the fees from their hard earned want their kids in Russell group unis with a ticket to the professions.
It would be sad if it slipped back.
This has prompted me to look at the records of my own school, and I am amazed at some of my contemps who have coughed up and want the alumniariat to know about it. On the vanishingly rare occasions I am overwhelmed
by the need to give to charity I quite like paying for operations to cure African children of blindness. It seems a better use of the money.