Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
Well, if it is a sandwich, yes.
If it's a three course meal with a glass of wine...
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
Are the lunches any good?
Dunno. I'll ask him. Being me, I'd look at it economically.
If the lunch is worth a tenner and you work an extra half hour in return for getting it free then you are costing your time out at only £20 per hour.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
Well, if it is a sandwich, yes.
If it's a three course meal with a glass of wine...
Exactly, which is why I want to know. If it's pie, chips and beans, or conversely a tofu and pak choi stir fry on a bed of quinoa and sultanas ...
Paul Johnson @PJTheEconomist · 3h Private school fees have risen 20% in real terms since 2010 and 55% since 2003. Numbers privately educated have been pretty constant that whole time. Removing tax exemptions likely to have only small effects on numbers. Net benefit to public finances likely to be £1.3-1.5bn p.a.
Paying an extra 20% tomorrow isn't quite the same as 20% more over 10 years. Also be interesting to know the shift in who is attending. Has it shifted to much more reliance on overseas students?
Short answer: yes.
Labour's proposed changes will have basically no effect on Eton and Harrow. It's the smaller, less selective private schools with specialisms (e.g. music or autism support) which are going to suffer. It's not really a very progressive policy at all.
If I wanted to target Eton, Harrow, Clifton, Winchester, Westminster, Cheltenham etc my policy would be to disendow all schools registered as charities that charged fees.
I think that would make a very substantial difference to their business models. Either lose your reserves, or pay business rates.
I suspect those ones would also be able to compensate by whacking up the overseas fees, so it wouldn’t make much difference in practice to them.
Requisition as accommodation for asylum seekers?
Well, if Johnson went there I suppose it was a sort of asylum.
Incidentally, its endowment fund went up every single year in the past decade, including during Covid. It was worth £568 million in August last year, and that's with the school running at a headline loss.
Now, of course if you disendowed Eton etc that wouldn't be (like VAT) something you should use as income, unless you're Thatcher and Lawson. But it could very easily be used to rebuild a largeish chunk of our collapsing school structures, for example. Which, if a bunch of sane architects rather than the ones for BSF were involved, would not only dramatically improve the environment children are in, and make it safer, but also cut future running costs substantially.
Plus Eton would then undoubtedly charge higher fees to cover all its costs, and as a result the rich would be paying more.
Or alternatively, they become businesses, and account for their profits to the taxman. And pay up.
Meanwhile the smaller private schools - e.g. those that take a largeish number of SEND that the local authority can't find places for in specialist schools because they've all been shut - can keep doing what they do, which is not without disadvantages but would cause more problems than it would solve if it stopped.
Making some sense here. And I do like the suitably painful sound of 'disendow'. Brutal perhaps but hardly unprovoked imo.
"Look, elitist British public schools, you've been fouling up the place for years, and we've had enough. Time to disendow you. Please prepare yourselves accordingly."
We really need differential approaches to the elite public schools which have become another global luxury good, like central London property, and the private day schools that mess around in the middle class selective market alongside grammar schools and postcode-based social cleansing.
Both have damaging impacts on British life but in very different ways. One gave us the likes of Boris and JRM but most of what it does is bring in export income. Perhaps we just ringfence the hyper-elite sector like we do Mayfair. Charge a luxury tax on it, a kind of poshness excise duty. The other is more of a serious market failing because its impact is more widespread.
Somehow if we could blur the line between state and private at the mid level we might be able to widen access to the facilities and skills in the independent sector and reduce social gaps in attainment. But don’t ask me how. If the answer was easy we’d have done it already.
ran across THIS delicious bit while consuming my morning coffee . . .
NYT ($) - DeSantis is No Trump, or Boebert, or . . . The Conversation: Gail Collins and Bret Stephens
Gail Collins: Bret, about Ron DeSantis. Last week I criticized him for weenie stuff like big book advances and questionable road repair materials. At the time, I definitely felt like I was carping.
Then his people shared an ad on L.G.B.T.Q issues that . . . wow.
Bret Stephens: "Wow" just about covers it.
Gail: It began with a clip of Donald Trump defending gay rights in days of yore, which was clearly supposed to make viewers . . . hate Trump. Followed by praise for Florida laws DeSantis signed that "literally threaten trans existence." Followed by a super-duper-weird montage showing men flexing muscles, Brad Pitt in Greek warrior garb and Governor Ron with lightening flashes coming out of his eyes.
Pete Buttigieg, who is President Biden's secretary of transportation and one of the best-known gay figures in politics, rightly pointed out "the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you between shirtless, oiled-up bodybuilders." [SSI - like Mad Vlad?]
Any thoughts?
Bret: I guess my main takeaway is that DeSantis isn't going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likeable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool.
Yes thank God the existence of slavery in North America had nothing to with the British.
It certainly had nothing to do with anyone born in Britain today, or do you believe in collective ethnic guilt?
“Nothing to do with” is an interesting phrase. I’m guessing you meant “wasn’t caused by anyone born in Britain today” and that is true. But does that literally mean it has nothing to do with us in the broader sense of those words? It is something that has impact on our lives today, it has shaped today’s world. There are those who are disadvantaged today because of it, those who are advantaged, and those who are affected in more complicated ways. I don’t see how you can understand modern British society without this important historical context.
Trying to analyse who is most advantaged by the legacy of a system that ceased to exist prior to mulitple cataclysmic world historical events is a futile exercise, and when the motivation is to legitimate present-day discrimination it is positively destructive.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
Are the lunches any good?
Dunno. I'll ask him. Being me, I'd look at it economically.
If the lunch is worth a tenner and you work an extra half hour in return for getting it free then you are costing your time out at only £20 per hour.
So, I'd keep my hour for lunch.
Mind, if it is a free lunch followed by 30 minutes back at your desk posting on PB, not so bad.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
Are the lunches any good?
Dunno. I'll ask him. Being me, I'd look at it economically.
If the lunch is worth a tenner and you work an extra half hour in return for getting it free then you are costing your time out at only £20 per hour.
So, I'd keep my hour for lunch.
That may not consider the tax situation. Normally the lunches would be free of any tax or NIC issue if they are given as a canteen to all staff.
BUT - they're not to all staff, but only those who "pay" in time. Wonder if this has been worked out properly?
Paul Johnson @PJTheEconomist · 3h Private school fees have risen 20% in real terms since 2010 and 55% since 2003. Numbers privately educated have been pretty constant that whole time. Removing tax exemptions likely to have only small effects on numbers. Net benefit to public finances likely to be £1.3-1.5bn p.a.
Paying an extra 20% tomorrow isn't quite the same as 20% more over 10 years. Also be interesting to know the shift in who is attending. Has it shifted to much more reliance on overseas students?
Short answer: yes.
Labour's proposed changes will have basically no effect on Eton and Harrow. It's the smaller, less selective private schools with specialisms (e.g. music or autism support) which are going to suffer. It's not really a very progressive policy at all.
If I wanted to target Eton, Harrow, Clifton, Winchester, Westminster, Cheltenham etc my policy would be to disendow all schools registered as charities that charged fees.
I think that would make a very substantial difference to their business models. Either lose your reserves, or pay business rates.
I suspect those ones would also be able to compensate by whacking up the overseas fees, so it wouldn’t make much difference in practice to them.
Requisition as accommodation for asylum seekers?
Well, if Johnson went there I suppose it was a sort of asylum.
Incidentally, its endowment fund went up every single year in the past decade, including during Covid. It was worth £568 million in August last year, and that's with the school running at a headline loss.
Now, of course if you disendowed Eton etc that wouldn't be (like VAT) something you should use as income, unless you're Thatcher and Lawson. But it could very easily be used to rebuild a largeish chunk of our collapsing school structures, for example. Which, if a bunch of sane architects rather than the ones for BSF were involved, would not only dramatically improve the environment children are in, and make it safer, but also cut future running costs substantially.
Plus Eton would then undoubtedly charge higher fees to cover all its costs, and as a result the rich would be paying more.
Or alternatively, they become businesses, and account for their profits to the taxman. And pay up.
Meanwhile the smaller private schools - e.g. those that take a largeish number of SEND that the local authority can't find places for in specialist schools because they've all been shut - can keep doing what they do, which is not without disadvantages but would cause more problems than it would solve if it stopped.
Making some sense here. And I do like the suitably painful sound of 'disendow'. Brutal perhaps but hardly unprovoked imo.
"Look, elitist British public schools, you've been fouling up the place for years, and we've had enough. Time to disendow you. Please prepare yourselves accordingly."
We really need differential approaches to the elite public schools which have become another global luxury good, like central London property, and the private day schools that mess around in the middle class selective market alongside grammar schools and postcode-based social cleansing.
Both have damaging impacts on British life but in very different ways. One gave us the likes of Boris and JRM but most of what it does is bring in export income. Perhaps we just ringfence the hyper-elite sector like we do Mayfair. Charge a luxury tax on it, a kind of poshness excise duty. The other is more of a serious market failing because its impact is more widespread.
Somehow if we could blur the line between state and private at the mid level we might be able to widen access to the facilities and skills in the independent sector and reduce social gaps in attainment. But don’t ask me how. If the answer was easy we’d have done it already.
The problem is not that the solution is difficult but that it is expensive.
Cut all classes in the state sector to a maximum of twenty and offer private schools the chance to become state at the same time, and almost all private schools would become state schools overnight.
Plus it would solve many other problems, including making behaviour management much easier.
But - nobody has ever found a way to pay for it, and it would not be cheap.
Never get overly attached to anything inanimate, it's not wrong, just pointless
Things are just things. Books are just books. Furniture, houses, cars, whatever, they can all be replaced and emotional time spent on them is largely wasted
When the plague hit and I thought I might never see my London flat as I fled for the sticks, I honestly appraised all the things that would really upset me if I never saw them again. I was brutal. In the end these things filled about half a shoebox
It's a good exercise. Imagine your house being nuked. What would REALLY distress you, if everything was fried forever?
This is even truer in an age when so much can be stored (esp photos) in the cloud, for eternity
I was with you until the last sentence. If you imagine your house being nuked in the literal sense, forget the cloud and any other way of remotely accessing digital files. If any photos are especially dear to you, put the prints into that shoebox.
ran across THIS delicious bit while consuming my morning coffee . . .
NYT ($) - DeSantis is No Trump, or Boebert, or . . . The Conversation: Gail Collins and Bret Stephens
Gail Collins: Bret, about Ron DeSantis. Last week I criticized him for weenie stuff like big book advances and questionable road repair materials. At the time, I definitely felt like I was carping.
Then his people shared an ad on L.G.B.T.Q issues that . . . wow.
Bret Stephens: "Wow" just about covers it.
Gail: It began with a clip of Donald Trump defending gay rights in days of yore, which was clearly supposed to make viewers . . . hate Trump. Followed by praise for Florida laws DeSantis signed that "literally threaten trans existence." Followed by a super-duper-weird montage showing men flexing muscles, Brad Pitt in Greek warrior garb and Governor Ron with lightening flashes coming out of his eyes.
Pete Buttigieg, who is President Biden's secretary of transportation and one of the best-known gay figures in politics, rightly pointed out "the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you between shirtless, oiled-up bodybuilders." [SSI - like Mad Vlad?]
Any thoughts?
Bret: I guess my main takeaway is that DeSantis isn't going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likeable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
Are the lunches any good?
Dunno. I'll ask him. Being me, I'd look at it economically.
If the lunch is worth a tenner and you work an extra half hour in return for getting it free then you are costing your time out at only £20 per hour.
So, I'd keep my hour for lunch.
Ah, but what are you going to be able to do with that extra half hour that is worth £10 to you?
If you can leave half an hour early, then that's a different matter...
Yes thank God the existence of slavery in North America had nothing to with the British.
It certainly had nothing to do with anyone born in Britain today, or do you believe in collective ethnic guilt?
“Nothing to do with” is an interesting phrase. I’m guessing you meant “wasn’t caused by anyone born in Britain today” and that is true. But does that literally mean it has nothing to do with us in the broader sense of those words? It is something that has impact on our lives today, it has shaped today’s world. There are those who are disadvantaged today because of it, those who are advantaged, and those who are affected in more complicated ways. I don’t see how you can understand modern British society without this important historical context.
2 things
- collective national ancestral guilt doesn’t make sense and I don’t like it, but anyone who wants to benefit from collective national ancestral pride is being hypocritical. Neither make any sense - Certain families made and retained wealth that is directly traceable to slavery or colonial exploitation, and that’s very distinct as a phenomenon from arguments that everyone in rich former colonial countries owes their wealth to historical bad deeds
Where has this phrase "20 year old child" come from? I've heard it a number of times now, including I think on Newsnight yesterday evening.
Child of the parents - "offspring" sounds silly, and they don't want to identify the sex. so not son or daughter.
Offspring is vaguer and includes grandchildren etc. Strange there isn't a better generic term for "son or daughter" than "child". I'm told the sex of the young person in this case has been mentioned a few times already in major media anyway.
"Begotten"
How about 'issue'.
"Scion"? "Progeny"?
Crotch goblin or crotch fruit is what I call my kids.
My ex wife told me to stop calling them broken condoms.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
Are the lunches any good?
Dunno. I'll ask him. Being me, I'd look at it economically.
If the lunch is worth a tenner and you work an extra half hour in return for getting it free then you are costing your time out at only £20 per hour.
So, I'd keep my hour for lunch.
Ah, but what are you going to be able to do with that extra half hour that is worth £10 to you?
If you can leave half an hour early, then that's a different matter...
Also, what are the lunch alternatives? Is the workplace in a peripheral trading estate in Daventry, or is it in the Square Mile?
Boris and Carrie Johnson have announced the birth of their third child together. Frank Alfred Odysseus Johnson was born last Wednesday.
That's kid number....counts on one hand...move to next hand...onto toes...lost count for Boris.
The nice thing about having a child is that it really convinces you that you are not the centre of the universe, and having someone else to care for forces you to adopt a more responsible attitude towards life more broadly, and to be a better person so that your child grows up with the right values. Maybe this Nth child will somehow have this effect on Boris Johnson.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
So eating their own sandwiches is a Benefit in Kind under HMRC rules?
Seems like classic SeanT to me: mostly right but in a way that seems calculated to piss off those of a leftish bent. It’s his signature style.
His observation about tipping can be extended to almost everything that seems weird about the USA: it will turn out that slavery is at the root more often than not. He’s also right that we should not be importing US culture wars into the UK: We have our own sins, including the legacy of British driven slavery, but they are not the same as those that bedevil the US & our solutions will be different, just as our culture & institutions are.
When you say 'right', you mean politically right, not actually correct, right?
last night ran across what may be THE world's greatest Letter to the Editor and screed.
Penned by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1890, in response to another letter by a Honolulu minister, Charles McEwen Hyde, published shortly after the death of Father (now Saint) Damien of Moloka'i, which alleged that he'd been "a coarse, dirty man," who contracted leprosy due to "carelessness" among other accusations.
Pith of RLS critique of the Rev. Dr. Hyde:
"If that world at all remember you, on the day when Damien of Molokai shall be named a Saint, it will be in virtue of one work: your letter . . ."
Paul Johnson @PJTheEconomist · 3h Private school fees have risen 20% in real terms since 2010 and 55% since 2003. Numbers privately educated have been pretty constant that whole time. Removing tax exemptions likely to have only small effects on numbers. Net benefit to public finances likely to be £1.3-1.5bn p.a.
Paying an extra 20% tomorrow isn't quite the same as 20% more over 10 years. Also be interesting to know the shift in who is attending. Has it shifted to much more reliance on overseas students?
Short answer: yes.
Labour's proposed changes will have basically no effect on Eton and Harrow. It's the smaller, less selective private schools with specialisms (e.g. music or autism support) which are going to suffer. It's not really a very progressive policy at all.
If I wanted to target Eton, Harrow, Clifton, Winchester, Westminster, Cheltenham etc my policy would be to disendow all schools registered as charities that charged fees.
I think that would make a very substantial difference to their business models. Either lose your reserves, or pay business rates.
I suspect those ones would also be able to compensate by whacking up the overseas fees, so it wouldn’t make much difference in practice to them.
I’m only a public school thicko but do I understand that you advocate the government stealing legally owned assets belonging to legally structured entities as a threat to make them pay business rates?
Surely you just, crazy idea, make it a law they have to pay business rates otherwise you have this issue where Britain doesn’t appear to be a very safe place to have any sort of charitable foundation as if you are doing something the government of the day doesn’t approve of for ideological reasons then they can blackmail you and you could lose your legally donated and generated assets.
Would this apply to a charity that provides abortions who charge a fee to those who can afford it but provides free abortions for those who can’t if we got a GOP type party in power?
Or you could argue, churches who charge fees for weddings. (Although the Church in Wales was of course partially disendowed on disestablishment.)
I think with those schools, the more pertinent question would be, are they actually charities or are they businesses? That's where it gets to be a grey area. What this would do is force clarity.
I think the problem with VAT is for all the claims to the contrary my view having worked in the private and state sectors is it would shut a large number of private schools, particularly in the Midlands and North, but not those that are hotbeds of wealth lefties love to hate. It might therefore actually entrench privilege and put more pressure on state schools while not raising any meaningful money.
By all means make an argument that these schools must pay business rates or VAT (although if we rejoin the EU then VAT cannot be charged on provision of education if I remember correctly) but talk of disendowment, or “theft” is ridiculous. The only people who would benefit would be the likes of the extended Fiennes (the Twistleton Wykeham ones) family amongst others and their lawyers who would suggest that if the school no longer is allowed the assets then they belong to the descendants of the donor’s family.
You would also have the tasty issue (ssee the Guardian demanding BP stop sponsoring the Arts then whining that there is no money for the Arts) where these schools are riddled with ancient listed buildings which cost millions each year to upkeep - and this is where a lots of the endowment money goes btw - which would then, if these places have to close, need someone to pay for their upkeep, obviously not BP. Unless of course whilst we have this cultural revolution we just knock them down as a symbol of evil elitism?
Ummm - the endowments that go *up* in value every year are being spent on maintaining buildings? If so, there must be quite a backlog.
And again, with the Church in Wales it wasn't difficult. They just declared the assets belonged to the nation.
If you ring-fenced any money raised to support education I doubt very much whether anyone would be able to lodge a claim.
Winchester has 94 listed buildings. If you don’t know it then think of New College Oxford so quads, chapels etc etc for starters. These require constant care, repair, protection which cannot be done cheaply because, they are listed and have to have work done a certain way by a limited number of specialists.
There isn’t a point where you say “we’ve fixed all the buildings let’s leave them for 50 years, it’s a constant ongoing process.
So who pays for this in the new glorious egalitarian age? It’s a struggle as it is for charities trying to get funds to save old buildings.
Again, the endowments that rose from £422 million in 2021 to £467 million in 2022 are needed for maintaining buildings?
In any case, I would point out you can get grants from a great many bodies for repairing listed buildings if you are a charity and have no money. I've done it for years for small impoverished churches.
Clearly we aren’t going to agree on this but just for an example the War Cloister is undergoing restoration work at a cost of £1m currently.
The school isn’t sitting on these endowments generating shitloads of cash to blow on hookers and coke for the Warden and Fellows, indeed it would have been nice if they had spent money on making dormitory windows fit the frames.
Turning this round, being forced to take a 1-hour lunch break is a PITA. Better to have the option to take 30 minutes and leave work 30 minutes earlier.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
So eating their own sandwiches is a Benefit in Kind under HMRC rules?
How are subsidised canteens treated tax wise? I've worked at a few places that had those.
Turning this round, being forced to take a 1-hour lunch break is a PITA. Better to have the option to take 30 minutes and leave work 30 minutes earlier.
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part I is very enjoyable.
Best car chase sequence ever.
Tom cruise did the motorbike off the cliff for reals....6.....times.....
My heartbeat went up a lot during that scene.
Wonder what his was like?
Maximum Thetan levels....
I am not sure we will see another Tom Cruise. With CGI, digital doubles and AI, finding a massive star who not only able to but actively want to do all the stunts, and the studios allow them, to seems increasingly unlikely.
Paul Johnson @PJTheEconomist · 3h Private school fees have risen 20% in real terms since 2010 and 55% since 2003. Numbers privately educated have been pretty constant that whole time. Removing tax exemptions likely to have only small effects on numbers. Net benefit to public finances likely to be £1.3-1.5bn p.a.
Paying an extra 20% tomorrow isn't quite the same as 20% more over 10 years. Also be interesting to know the shift in who is attending. Has it shifted to much more reliance on overseas students?
Short answer: yes.
Labour's proposed changes will have basically no effect on Eton and Harrow. It's the smaller, less selective private schools with specialisms (e.g. music or autism support) which are going to suffer. It's not really a very progressive policy at all.
If I wanted to target Eton, Harrow, Clifton, Winchester, Westminster, Cheltenham etc my policy would be to disendow all schools registered as charities that charged fees.
I think that would make a very substantial difference to their business models. Either lose your reserves, or pay business rates.
I suspect those ones would also be able to compensate by whacking up the overseas fees, so it wouldn’t make much difference in practice to them.
Requisition as accommodation for asylum seekers?
Well, if Johnson went there I suppose it was a sort of asylum.
Incidentally, its endowment fund went up every single year in the past decade, including during Covid. It was worth £568 million in August last year, and that's with the school running at a headline loss.
Now, of course if you disendowed Eton etc that wouldn't be (like VAT) something you should use as income, unless you're Thatcher and Lawson. But it could very easily be used to rebuild a largeish chunk of our collapsing school structures, for example. Which, if a bunch of sane architects rather than the ones for BSF were involved, would not only dramatically improve the environment children are in, and make it safer, but also cut future running costs substantially.
Plus Eton would then undoubtedly charge higher fees to cover all its costs, and as a result the rich would be paying more.
Or alternatively, they become businesses, and account for their profits to the taxman. And pay up.
Meanwhile the smaller private schools - e.g. those that take a largeish number of SEND that the local authority can't find places for in specialist schools because they've all been shut - can keep doing what they do, which is not without disadvantages but would cause more problems than it would solve if it stopped.
Making some sense here. And I do like the suitably painful sound of 'disendow'. Brutal perhaps but hardly unprovoked imo.
"Look, elitist British public schools, you've been fouling up the place for years, and we've had enough. Time to disendow you. Please prepare yourselves accordingly."
We really need differential approaches to the elite public schools which have become another global luxury good, like central London property, and the private day schools that mess around in the middle class selective market alongside grammar schools and postcode-based social cleansing.
Both have damaging impacts on British life but in very different ways. One gave us the likes of Boris and JRM but most of what it does is bring in export income. Perhaps we just ringfence the hyper-elite sector like we do Mayfair. Charge a luxury tax on it, a kind of poshness excise duty. The other is more of a serious market failing because its impact is more widespread.
Somehow if we could blur the line between state and private at the mid level we might be able to widen access to the facilities and skills in the independent sector and reduce social gaps in attainment. But don’t ask me how. If the answer was easy we’d have done it already.
The problem is not that the solution is difficult but that it is expensive.
Cut all classes in the state sector to a maximum of twenty and offer private schools the chance to become state at the same time, and almost all private schools would become state schools overnight.
Plus it would solve many other problems, including making behaviour management much easier.
But - nobody has ever found a way to pay for it, and it would not be cheap.
It would pay for itself over time by leading to improved educational outcomes and higher productivity. The fact we don't do it is another example of our aversion to investment in this country. Plus of course the fact that it would undermine the advantages that the rich and powerful are buying for their offspring.
Paul Johnson @PJTheEconomist · 3h Private school fees have risen 20% in real terms since 2010 and 55% since 2003. Numbers privately educated have been pretty constant that whole time. Removing tax exemptions likely to have only small effects on numbers. Net benefit to public finances likely to be £1.3-1.5bn p.a.
Paying an extra 20% tomorrow isn't quite the same as 20% more over 10 years. Also be interesting to know the shift in who is attending. Has it shifted to much more reliance on overseas students?
Short answer: yes.
Labour's proposed changes will have basically no effect on Eton and Harrow. It's the smaller, less selective private schools with specialisms (e.g. music or autism support) which are going to suffer. It's not really a very progressive policy at all.
If I wanted to target Eton, Harrow, Clifton, Winchester, Westminster, Cheltenham etc my policy would be to disendow all schools registered as charities that charged fees.
I think that would make a very substantial difference to their business models. Either lose your reserves, or pay business rates.
I suspect those ones would also be able to compensate by whacking up the overseas fees, so it wouldn’t make much difference in practice to them.
I’m only a public school thicko but do I understand that you advocate the government stealing legally owned assets belonging to legally structured entities as a threat to make them pay business rates?
Surely you just, crazy idea, make it a law they have to pay business rates otherwise you have this issue where Britain doesn’t appear to be a very safe place to have any sort of charitable foundation as if you are doing something the government of the day doesn’t approve of for ideological reasons then they can blackmail you and you could lose your legally donated and generated assets.
Would this apply to a charity that provides abortions who charge a fee to those who can afford it but provides free abortions for those who can’t if we got a GOP type party in power?
Or you could argue, churches who charge fees for weddings. (Although the Church in Wales was of course partially disendowed on disestablishment.)
I think with those schools, the more pertinent question would be, are they actually charities or are they businesses? That's where it gets to be a grey area. What this would do is force clarity.
I think the problem with VAT is for all the claims to the contrary my view having worked in the private and state sectors is it would shut a large number of private schools, particularly in the Midlands and North, but not those that are hotbeds of wealth lefties love to hate. It might therefore actually entrench privilege and put more pressure on state schools while not raising any meaningful money.
By all means make an argument that these schools must pay business rates or VAT (although if we rejoin the EU then VAT cannot be charged on provision of education if I remember correctly) but talk of disendowment, or “theft” is ridiculous. The only people who would benefit would be the likes of the extended Fiennes (the Twistleton Wykeham ones) family amongst others and their lawyers who would suggest that if the school no longer is allowed the assets then they belong to the descendants of the donor’s family.
You would also have the tasty issue (ssee the Guardian demanding BP stop sponsoring the Arts then whining that there is no money for the Arts) where these schools are riddled with ancient listed buildings which cost millions each year to upkeep - and this is where a lots of the endowment money goes btw - which would then, if these places have to close, need someone to pay for their upkeep, obviously not BP. Unless of course whilst we have this cultural revolution we just knock them down as a symbol of evil elitism?
Ummm - the endowments that go *up* in value every year are being spent on maintaining buildings? If so, there must be quite a backlog.
And again, with the Church in Wales it wasn't difficult. They just declared the assets belonged to the nation.
If you ring-fenced any money raised to support education I doubt very much whether anyone would be able to lodge a claim.
Winchester has 94 listed buildings. If you don’t know it then think of New College Oxford so quads, chapels etc etc for starters. These require constant care, repair, protection which cannot be done cheaply because, they are listed and have to have work done a certain way by a limited number of specialists.
There isn’t a point where you say “we’ve fixed all the buildings let’s leave them for 50 years, it’s a constant ongoing process.
So who pays for this in the new glorious egalitarian age? It’s a struggle as it is for charities trying to get funds to save old buildings.
Again, the endowments that rose from £422 million in 2021 to £467 million in 2022 are needed for maintaining buildings?
In any case, I would point out you can get grants from a great many bodies for repairing listed buildings if you are a charity and have no money. I've done it for years for small impoverished churches.
Clearly we aren’t going to agree on this but just for an example the War Cloister is undergoing restoration work at a cost of £1m currently.
The school isn’t sitting on these endowments generating shitloads of cash to blow on hookers and coke for the Warden and Fellows, indeed it would have been nice if they had spent money on making dormitory windows fit the frames.
The whole point is it *is* sitting on the endowments. Maybe it should be spending them on better windows but it isn't.
If they were to lose the money and need to do repairs there is nothing to stop them having a subsequent fundraising effort to go into a restricted fund, or applying for grants, or increasing fees.
Most state schools incidentally are in a far worse position with regard to the fabric of their buildings, and as they're not listed can't get help with them.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
So eating their own sandwiches is a Benefit in Kind under HMRC rules?
How are subsidised canteens treated tax wise? I've worked at a few places that had those.
I'm so old I had a job where they gave out luncheon vouchers.
Seems like classic SeanT to me: mostly right but in a way that seems calculated to piss off those of a leftish bent. It’s his signature style.
His observation about tipping can be extended to almost everything that seems weird about the USA: it will turn out that slavery is at the root more often than not. He’s also right that we should not be importing US culture wars into the UK: We have our own sins, including the legacy of British driven slavery, but they are not the same as those that bedevil the US & our solutions will be different, just as our culture & institutions are.
When you say 'right', you mean politically right, not actually correct, right?
Surprising as it may seem, he is in fact correct reasonably often imo. Unless he’s drunk: then all bets are off. He may be drunk more than half the time though, which rather undermines my thesis...
ran across THIS delicious bit while consuming my morning coffee . . .
NYT ($) - DeSantis is No Trump, or Boebert, or . . . The Conversation: Gail Collins and Bret Stephens
Gail Collins: Bret, about Ron DeSantis. Last week I criticized him for weenie stuff like big book advances and questionable road repair materials. At the time, I definitely felt like I was carping.
Then his people shared an ad on L.G.B.T.Q issues that . . . wow.
Bret Stephens: "Wow" just about covers it.
Gail: It began with a clip of Donald Trump defending gay rights in days of yore, which was clearly supposed to make viewers . . . hate Trump. Followed by praise for Florida laws DeSantis signed that "literally threaten trans existence." Followed by a super-duper-weird montage showing men flexing muscles, Brad Pitt in Greek warrior garb and Governor Ron with lightening flashes coming out of his eyes.
Pete Buttigieg, who is President Biden's secretary of transportation and one of the best-known gay figures in politics, rightly pointed out "the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you between shirtless, oiled-up bodybuilders." [SSI - like Mad Vlad?]
Any thoughts?
Bret: I guess my main takeaway is that DeSantis isn't going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likeable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool.
ran across THIS delicious bit while consuming my morning coffee . . .
NYT ($) - DeSantis is No Trump, or Boebert, or . . . The Conversation: Gail Collins and Bret Stephens
Gail Collins: Bret, about Ron DeSantis. Last week I criticized him for weenie stuff like big book advances and questionable road repair materials. At the time, I definitely felt like I was carping.
Then his people shared an ad on L.G.B.T.Q issues that . . . wow.
Bret Stephens: "Wow" just about covers it.
Gail: It began with a clip of Donald Trump defending gay rights in days of yore, which was clearly supposed to make viewers . . . hate Trump. Followed by praise for Florida laws DeSantis signed that "literally threaten trans existence." Followed by a super-duper-weird montage showing men flexing muscles, Brad Pitt in Greek warrior garb and Governor Ron with lightening flashes coming out of his eyes.
Pete Buttigieg, who is President Biden's secretary of transportation and one of the best-known gay figures in politics, rightly pointed out "the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you between shirtless, oiled-up bodybuilders." [SSI - like Mad Vlad?]
Any thoughts?
Bret: I guess my main takeaway is that DeSantis isn't going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likeable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool.
Ted Cruz seem likeable??
If you recall, Ted Cruz tried in 2016 to out-asshole Donald Trump. Truly Mission Impossible!
In lead-up to 2024, seems to me that Ron DeSantis is making a different yet similar error: trying to out-flank Trump from the wack-right.
Which may be theoretically possible, logically and ideologically. BUT which in actuality, is yet another MI, because for the mass of MAGA-maniacs it is totally unpersuasive, emotionally and psycho-politically.
Paul Johnson @PJTheEconomist · 3h Private school fees have risen 20% in real terms since 2010 and 55% since 2003. Numbers privately educated have been pretty constant that whole time. Removing tax exemptions likely to have only small effects on numbers. Net benefit to public finances likely to be £1.3-1.5bn p.a.
Paying an extra 20% tomorrow isn't quite the same as 20% more over 10 years. Also be interesting to know the shift in who is attending. Has it shifted to much more reliance on overseas students?
Short answer: yes.
Labour's proposed changes will have basically no effect on Eton and Harrow. It's the smaller, less selective private schools with specialisms (e.g. music or autism support) which are going to suffer. It's not really a very progressive policy at all.
If I wanted to target Eton, Harrow, Clifton, Winchester, Westminster, Cheltenham etc my policy would be to disendow all schools registered as charities that charged fees.
I think that would make a very substantial difference to their business models. Either lose your reserves, or pay business rates.
I suspect those ones would also be able to compensate by whacking up the overseas fees, so it wouldn’t make much difference in practice to them.
Requisition as accommodation for asylum seekers?
Well, if Johnson went there I suppose it was a sort of asylum.
Incidentally, its endowment fund went up every single year in the past decade, including during Covid. It was worth £568 million in August last year, and that's with the school running at a headline loss.
Now, of course if you disendowed Eton etc that wouldn't be (like VAT) something you should use as income, unless you're Thatcher and Lawson. But it could very easily be used to rebuild a largeish chunk of our collapsing school structures, for example. Which, if a bunch of sane architects rather than the ones for BSF were involved, would not only dramatically improve the environment children are in, and make it safer, but also cut future running costs substantially.
Plus Eton would then undoubtedly charge higher fees to cover all its costs, and as a result the rich would be paying more.
Or alternatively, they become businesses, and account for their profits to the taxman. And pay up.
Meanwhile the smaller private schools - e.g. those that take a largeish number of SEND that the local authority can't find places for in specialist schools because they've all been shut - can keep doing what they do, which is not without disadvantages but would cause more problems than it would solve if it stopped.
Making some sense here. And I do like the suitably painful sound of 'disendow'. Brutal perhaps but hardly unprovoked imo.
"Look, elitist British public schools, you've been fouling up the place for years, and we've had enough. Time to disendow you. Please prepare yourselves accordingly."
We really need differential approaches to the elite public schools which have become another global luxury good, like central London property, and the private day schools that mess around in the middle class selective market alongside grammar schools and postcode-based social cleansing.
Both have damaging impacts on British life but in very different ways. One gave us the likes of Boris and JRM but most of what it does is bring in export income. Perhaps we just ringfence the hyper-elite sector like we do Mayfair. Charge a luxury tax on it, a kind of poshness excise duty. The other is more of a serious market failing because its impact is more widespread.
Somehow if we could blur the line between state and private at the mid level we might be able to widen access to the facilities and skills in the independent sector and reduce social gaps in attainment. But don’t ask me how. If the answer was easy we’d have done it already.
The problem is not that the solution is difficult but that it is expensive.
Cut all classes in the state sector to a maximum of twenty and offer private schools the chance to become state at the same time, and almost all private schools would become state schools overnight.
Plus it would solve many other problems, including making behaviour management much easier.
But - nobody has ever found a way to pay for it, and it would not be cheap.
It would pay for itself over time by leading to improved educational outcomes and higher productivity. The fact we don't do it is another example of our aversion to investment in this country. Plus of course the fact that it would undermine the advantages that the rich and powerful are buying for their offspring.
Turning this round, being forced to take a 1-hour lunch break is a PITA. Better to have the option to take 30 minutes and leave work 30 minutes earlier.
Yes thank God the existence of slavery in North America had nothing to with the British.
It certainly had nothing to do with anyone born in Britain today, or do you believe in collective ethnic guilt?
“Nothing to do with” is an interesting phrase. I’m guessing you meant “wasn’t caused by anyone born in Britain today” and that is true. But does that literally mean it has nothing to do with us in the broader sense of those words? It is something that has impact on our lives today, it has shaped today’s world. There are those who are disadvantaged today because of it, those who are advantaged, and those who are affected in more complicated ways. I don’t see how you can understand modern British society without this important historical context.
Trying to analyse who is most advantaged by the legacy of a system that ceased to exist prior to mulitple cataclysmic world historical events is a futile exercise, and when the motivation is to legitimate present-day discrimination it is positively destructive.
I didn’t say anything about trying to analyse who is most advantaged.
There is a lot of discrimination today. One could even say it is structural. To undo this discrimination, it helps to understand how it arose, which is a complex process involving many things of course, but the transatlantic slave trade is part of the answer there.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
So eating their own sandwiches is a Benefit in Kind under HMRC rules?
How are subsidised canteens treated tax wise? I've worked at a few places that had those.
I'm so old I had a job where they gave out luncheon vouchers.
I guess they are long gone.
Very versatile as well as tax free - I recall reading that Mrs Payne the madam accepted them, so not just cafes and the like. Seriously, they could be used on family outings and the like if it wasn't convenient during the week.
They still exist, but much reduced, and not tax free I assume.
Seems like classic SeanT to me: mostly right but in a way that seems calculated to piss off those of a leftish bent. It’s his signature style.
His observation about tipping can be extended to almost everything that seems weird about the USA: it will turn out that slavery is at the root more often than not. He’s also right that we should not be importing US culture wars into the UK: We have our own sins, including the legacy of British driven slavery, but they are not the same as those that bedevil the US & our solutions will be different, just as our culture & institutions are.
When you say 'right', you mean politically right, not actually correct, right?
Surprising as it may seem, he is in fact correct reasonably often imo. Unless he’s drunk: then all bets are off.
Or reposting tweets. Or pontificating on cricket rules. Or when he plunges into the cold cold shallows of basic economics.
Still, I guess he's occasionally right about wild swimming.
Turning this round, being forced to take a 1-hour lunch break is a PITA. Better to have the option to take 30 minutes and leave work 30 minutes earlier.
What are these lunch breaks you talk of?
I suspect we all understand them as statutory PB breaks.
Seems like classic SeanT to me: mostly right but in a way that seems calculated to piss off those of a leftish bent. It’s his signature style.
His observation about tipping can be extended to almost everything that seems weird about the USA: it will turn out that slavery is at the root more often than not. He’s also right that we should not be importing US culture wars into the UK: We have our own sins, including the legacy of British driven slavery, but they are not the same as those that bedevil the US & our solutions will be different, just as our culture & institutions are.
When you say 'right', you mean politically right, not actually correct, right?
The US university admissions thing is all about history, when you dig into it.
College sports is used as a way to get more African Americans into university. Hence the bizarre support for a weird and very unfair system on the left.
Legacies are the way spaces are reserved for the Old Money rich. But increasingly they can’t afford them - legacy places aren’t free. They have to be paid for with a huge donation. As one relative put it - they offered his daughter a place at Harvard, if he gave them 5 times the cost of going to Harvard….
The quotas on “excessively successful” minorities is about stopping the remaining places all going to Asian Americans.
Seems like classic SeanT to me: mostly right but in a way that seems calculated to piss off those of a leftish bent. It’s his signature style.
His observation about tipping can be extended to almost everything that seems weird about the USA: it will turn out that slavery is at the root more often than not. He’s also right that we should not be importing US culture wars into the UK: We have our own sins, including the legacy of British driven slavery, but they are not the same as those that bedevil the US & our solutions will be different, just as our culture & institutions are.
When you say 'right', you mean politically right, not actually correct, right?
Surprising as it may seem, he is in fact correct reasonably often imo. Unless he’s drunk: then all bets are off.
Or reposting tweets. Or pontificating on cricket rules. Or when he plunges into the cold cold shallows of basic economics.
Still, I guess he's occasionally right about wild swimming.
Seems like classic SeanT to me: mostly right but in a way that seems calculated to piss off those of a leftish bent. It’s his signature style.
His observation about tipping can be extended to almost everything that seems weird about the USA: it will turn out that slavery is at the root more often than not. He’s also right that we should not be importing US culture wars into the UK: We have our own sins, including the legacy of British driven slavery, but they are not the same as those that bedevil the US & our solutions will be different, just as our culture & institutions are.
When you say 'right', you mean politically right, not actually correct, right?
Surprising as it may seem, he is in fact correct reasonably often imo. Unless he’s drunk: then all bets are off.
Or reposting tweets. Or pontificating on cricket rules. Or when he plunges into the cold cold shallows of basic economics.
Still, I guess he's occasionally right about wild swimming.
And hijacking threads with "edgy" theses about race. And he's not even bloody here.
Paul Johnson @PJTheEconomist · 3h Private school fees have risen 20% in real terms since 2010 and 55% since 2003. Numbers privately educated have been pretty constant that whole time. Removing tax exemptions likely to have only small effects on numbers. Net benefit to public finances likely to be £1.3-1.5bn p.a.
Paying an extra 20% tomorrow isn't quite the same as 20% more over 10 years. Also be interesting to know the shift in who is attending. Has it shifted to much more reliance on overseas students?
Short answer: yes.
Labour's proposed changes will have basically no effect on Eton and Harrow. It's the smaller, less selective private schools with specialisms (e.g. music or autism support) which are going to suffer. It's not really a very progressive policy at all.
If I wanted to target Eton, Harrow, Clifton, Winchester, Westminster, Cheltenham etc my policy would be to disendow all schools registered as charities that charged fees.
I think that would make a very substantial difference to their business models. Either lose your reserves, or pay business rates.
I suspect those ones would also be able to compensate by whacking up the overseas fees, so it wouldn’t make much difference in practice to them.
Requisition as accommodation for asylum seekers?
Well, if Johnson went there I suppose it was a sort of asylum.
Incidentally, its endowment fund went up every single year in the past decade, including during Covid. It was worth £568 million in August last year, and that's with the school running at a headline loss.
Now, of course if you disendowed Eton etc that wouldn't be (like VAT) something you should use as income, unless you're Thatcher and Lawson. But it could very easily be used to rebuild a largeish chunk of our collapsing school structures, for example. Which, if a bunch of sane architects rather than the ones for BSF were involved, would not only dramatically improve the environment children are in, and make it safer, but also cut future running costs substantially.
Plus Eton would then undoubtedly charge higher fees to cover all its costs, and as a result the rich would be paying more.
Or alternatively, they become businesses, and account for their profits to the taxman. And pay up.
Meanwhile the smaller private schools - e.g. those that take a largeish number of SEND that the local authority can't find places for in specialist schools because they've all been shut - can keep doing what they do, which is not without disadvantages but would cause more problems than it would solve if it stopped.
Making some sense here. And I do like the suitably painful sound of 'disendow'. Brutal perhaps but hardly unprovoked imo.
"Look, elitist British public schools, you've been fouling up the place for years, and we've had enough. Time to disendow you. Please prepare yourselves accordingly."
We really need differential approaches to the elite public schools which have become another global luxury good, like central London property, and the private day schools that mess around in the middle class selective market alongside grammar schools and postcode-based social cleansing.
Both have damaging impacts on British life but in very different ways. One gave us the likes of Boris and JRM but most of what it does is bring in export income. Perhaps we just ringfence the hyper-elite sector like we do Mayfair. Charge a luxury tax on it, a kind of poshness excise duty. The other is more of a serious market failing because its impact is more widespread.
Somehow if we could blur the line between state and private at the mid level we might be able to widen access to the facilities and skills in the independent sector and reduce social gaps in attainment. But don’t ask me how. If the answer was easy we’d have done it already.
The problem is not that the solution is difficult but that it is expensive.
Cut all classes in the state sector to a maximum of twenty and offer private schools the chance to become state at the same time, and almost all private schools would become state schools overnight.
Plus it would solve many other problems, including making behaviour management much easier.
But - nobody has ever found a way to pay for it, and it would not be cheap.
It would pay for itself over time by leading to improved educational outcomes and higher productivity. The fact we don't do it is another example of our aversion to investment in this country. Plus of course the fact that it would undermine the advantages that the rich and powerful are buying for their offspring.
I entirely agree. But it will still never happen.
Maybe, like with the idea of Brexit as shock therapy with a short term cost that would force us to adopt policies that paid off in the long term, we need to simply shut down all private schools and see what happens. It may be the only way to create a sufficiently powerful political constituency for adequately funded schools in the long run, even if in the short run it will make things worse.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
So eating their own sandwiches is a Benefit in Kind under HMRC rules?
How are subsidised canteens treated tax wise? I've worked at a few places that had those.
I'm so old I had a job where they gave out luncheon vouchers.
I guess they are long gone.
Nobody has said the word "luncheon" since 1761
Eastman's Deli Foods Proper Tasty Pork Luncheon Meat 250g. In your local Tesco right now.
Turning this round, being forced to take a 1-hour lunch break is a PITA. Better to have the option to take 30 minutes and leave work 30 minutes earlier.
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
Boris and Carrie Johnson have announced the birth of their third child together. Frank Alfred Odysseus Johnson was born last Wednesday.
That's kid number....counts on one hand...move to next hand...onto toes...lost count for Boris.
This seems a big thing for some people - 'its a disgrace that no-one knows how many kids Boris has...'
I don't know how many and I don't care. I also don't know how many Sunak or Starmer have either. And I don't care.
Why is this a light the blue touch paper for so many?
Boris, the BBC chap and the man who used to be 17. Prurience?
As a society we have moved away from being scandalised by sex outside marriage, and now divorce, blended families and so on is common. Yet Johnson, uniquely, seems to be held up for oprobium for this. I find it interesting.
Paul Johnson @PJTheEconomist · 3h Private school fees have risen 20% in real terms since 2010 and 55% since 2003. Numbers privately educated have been pretty constant that whole time. Removing tax exemptions likely to have only small effects on numbers. Net benefit to public finances likely to be £1.3-1.5bn p.a.
Paying an extra 20% tomorrow isn't quite the same as 20% more over 10 years. Also be interesting to know the shift in who is attending. Has it shifted to much more reliance on overseas students?
Short answer: yes.
Labour's proposed changes will have basically no effect on Eton and Harrow. It's the smaller, less selective private schools with specialisms (e.g. music or autism support) which are going to suffer. It's not really a very progressive policy at all.
If I wanted to target Eton, Harrow, Clifton, Winchester, Westminster, Cheltenham etc my policy would be to disendow all schools registered as charities that charged fees.
I think that would make a very substantial difference to their business models. Either lose your reserves, or pay business rates.
I suspect those ones would also be able to compensate by whacking up the overseas fees, so it wouldn’t make much difference in practice to them.
Requisition as accommodation for asylum seekers?
Well, if Johnson went there I suppose it was a sort of asylum.
Incidentally, its endowment fund went up every single year in the past decade, including during Covid. It was worth £568 million in August last year, and that's with the school running at a headline loss.
Now, of course if you disendowed Eton etc that wouldn't be (like VAT) something you should use as income, unless you're Thatcher and Lawson. But it could very easily be used to rebuild a largeish chunk of our collapsing school structures, for example. Which, if a bunch of sane architects rather than the ones for BSF were involved, would not only dramatically improve the environment children are in, and make it safer, but also cut future running costs substantially.
Plus Eton would then undoubtedly charge higher fees to cover all its costs, and as a result the rich would be paying more.
Or alternatively, they become businesses, and account for their profits to the taxman. And pay up.
Meanwhile the smaller private schools - e.g. those that take a largeish number of SEND that the local authority can't find places for in specialist schools because they've all been shut - can keep doing what they do, which is not without disadvantages but would cause more problems than it would solve if it stopped.
Making some sense here. And I do like the suitably painful sound of 'disendow'. Brutal perhaps but hardly unprovoked imo.
"Look, elitist British public schools, you've been fouling up the place for years, and we've had enough. Time to disendow you. Please prepare yourselves accordingly."
We really need differential approaches to the elite public schools which have become another global luxury good, like central London property, and the private day schools that mess around in the middle class selective market alongside grammar schools and postcode-based social cleansing.
Both have damaging impacts on British life but in very different ways. One gave us the likes of Boris and JRM but most of what it does is bring in export income. Perhaps we just ringfence the hyper-elite sector like we do Mayfair. Charge a luxury tax on it, a kind of poshness excise duty. The other is more of a serious market failing because its impact is more widespread.
Somehow if we could blur the line between state and private at the mid level we might be able to widen access to the facilities and skills in the independent sector and reduce social gaps in attainment. But don’t ask me how. If the answer was easy we’d have done it already.
The problem is not that the solution is difficult but that it is expensive.
Cut all classes in the state sector to a maximum of twenty and offer private schools the chance to become state at the same time, and almost all private schools would become state schools overnight.
Plus it would solve many other problems, including making behaviour management much easier.
But - nobody has ever found a way to pay for it, and it would not be cheap.
It would pay for itself over time by leading to improved educational outcomes and higher productivity. The fact we don't do it is another example of our aversion to investment in this country. Plus of course the fact that it would undermine the advantages that the rich and powerful are buying for their offspring.
I entirely agree. But it will still never happen.
Maybe, like with the idea of Brexit as shock therapy with a short term cost that would force us to adopt policies that paid off in the long term, we need to simply shut down all private schools and see what happens. It may be the only way to create a sufficiently powerful political constituency for adequately funded schools in the long run, even if in the short run it will make things worse.
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
So eating their own sandwiches is a Benefit in Kind under HMRC rules?
How are subsidised canteens treated tax wise? I've worked at a few places that had those.
I'm so old I had a job where they gave out luncheon vouchers.
I guess they are long gone.
Very versatile as well as tax free - I recall reading that Mrs Payne the madam accepted them, so not just cafes and the like. Seriously, they could be used on family outings and the like if it wasn't convenient during the week.
They still exist, but much reduced, and not tax free I assume.
I used to give my Luncheon Vouchers to the homeless woman below our office building, as a near cash equivalent, and was not alone in that. Almost everywhere in the City took them.
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
It's starting to feel inevitable. Newsom is clearly running an undeclared campaign and already picking up momentum.
I don't know about Newsom but there are even more vids popping up where Biden looks completely vacant, doddery, vague, and mentally incompetent, they are just SAD. No frigging way he should stand in 2024
It would surely kill him in the first year, for a start
Yes thank God the existence of slavery in North America had nothing to with the British.
It certainly had nothing to do with anyone born in Britain today, or do you believe in collective ethnic guilt?
I don't think guilt is a useful response at all but equally I think it would be absurd to pretend that North American slavery had nothing to do with us, or indeed to pretend that people alive now haven't benefited materially from its legacy.
My own view is that once a nation becomes independent, it becomes responsible for its own actions.
So if I come over to your house and steal all of your assets then let you go that's on you is it? We're both equal?
No. Why would anybody think that?
Quite. some of the 'analogies' people try on here are totally stupid.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
Well, if it is a sandwich, yes.
If it's a three course meal with a glass of wine...
Exactly, which is why I want to know. If it's pie, chips and beans, or conversely a tofu and pak choi stir fry on a bed of quinoa and sultanas ...
Do you have a daily choice? Can you choose the free half hour lunch when it’s pie, chips and beans day, but opt for the hour with no lunch when it’s tofu and pak choi day?
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
Let's hope the second part is definitely *not* true.
Yes, I think Newsom could lose to Trump.
But, if the Dems have the sense to drop Biden then the GOP might have the cullions to replace Trump. And finally America will get a duel between two not-mad, not octogenarian candidates
Yes thank God the existence of slavery in North America had nothing to with the British.
It certainly had nothing to do with anyone born in Britain today, or do you believe in collective ethnic guilt?
I don't think guilt is a useful response at all but equally I think it would be absurd to pretend that North American slavery had nothing to do with us, or indeed to pretend that people alive now haven't benefited materially from its legacy.
My own view is that once a nation becomes independent, it becomes responsible for its own actions.
So if I come over to your house and steal all of your assets then let you go that's on you is it? We're both equal?
No. Why would anybody think that?
Quite. some of the 'analogies' people try on here are totally stupid.
Although my one about stale donkey excrement was at least inventive.
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
It's starting to feel inevitable. Newsom is clearly running an undeclared campaign and already picking up momentum.
I don't know about Newsom but there are even more vids popping up where Biden looks completely vacant, doddery, vague, and mentally incompetent, they are just SAD. No frigging way he should stand in 2024
It would surely kill him in the first year, for a start
Biden at 80 is still preferable to many of the other possible presidential candidates, from both parties.
As a society we have moved away from being scandalised by sex outside marriage, and now divorce, blended families and so on is common. Yet Johnson, uniquely, seems to be held up for oprobium for this. I find it interesting.
As ever with BoZo, the issue is not that he had an affair (although he did) or that he got an unknown number of women pregnant (although he did). The issue, again, and always, is that he lied about it. And lied about the lies.
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
Let's hope the second part is definitely *not* true.
Yes, I think Newsom could lose to Trump.
But, if the Dems have the sense to drop Biden then the GOP might have the cullions to replace Trump. And finally America will get a duel between two not-mad, not octogenarian candidates
I think Newsom/DeSantis would be orders of magnitude worse.
Even if Biden is as doddery as you believe, he's at least sane.
If we could get a Whitmer/Haley match up it would be different.
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
Let's hope the second part is definitely *not* true.
Yes, I think Newsom could lose to Trump.
Newsom does seem typical of the kind of generic American politician who failed against Trump in the 2015/16 primaries so it would be interesting to see that dynamic repeated in the general election. It would be a different contest to the ones agaisnt Hillary and Biden.
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
So eating their own sandwiches is a Benefit in Kind under HMRC rules?
How are subsidised canteens treated tax wise? I've worked at a few places that had those.
I'm so old I had a job where they gave out luncheon vouchers.
I guess they are long gone.
Nobody has said the word "luncheon" since 1761
So your explanation of luncheon meat is? Sort of somewhat proves the statement wrong
"Anonymity might not be sustainable, former culture committee chair says
Earlier this afternoon, a former chair of the Commons digital, culture, media and sport select committee said questions remained about how the BBC handled the initial complaint in May about the unnamed presenter.
Conservative MP Damian Collins told BBC Radio 4: "There is a perception that not much was done... until it was reported in the press, and then there was a more active participation by BBC management.
"Why wasn't more done sooner, when the allegations were made?"
Collins said the BBC needed to look into what happens when a serious allegation comes in and how it's looked at.
Collins added it might not be "sustainable" for the presenter to remain anonymous if the person in question is off-air for a long time and everybody in the industry knows who it is."
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
Eh? Doesn't that apply to his family as well, and just about everyone else except the First Nations (and that's not going back before say 1000AD)?
It's interesting (to me anyway) from historical, social, cultural perspective, the American journey of the descendants of immigrants to USA circa turn of 19th>20th century.
Back in those days, for example, Italian immigrants were considered among the dregs of humanity by many if not most "old-stock" Americans, aka "Anglo-Saxons" which in US context meant NOT the fine folk who produced King Alfred and the Venerable Bede, but instead people of English, Scottish, Welsh, even (some) Irish PLUS Germans, Dutch and Nordics.
As in the once commonplace, now antique American acronym WASP = White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
In response, Italian Americans adopted several strategies, including both anglicizing names for some and heightened ethnic pride for others. Common thread being assimilation within a few decades, though note that Italians had one of the highest rates of returning to the "old country" of any US ethnic group. But that had minimal impact on assimilating those who remained in the US, and especially their American children and grandkids.
So in a century, have gone from Italians being targets of American nativism, to one being a political leader of anti-woke Wack "patriotism".
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
So eating their own sandwiches is a Benefit in Kind under HMRC rules?
How are subsidised canteens treated tax wise? I've worked at a few places that had those.
I'm so old I had a job where they gave out luncheon vouchers.
I guess they are long gone.
Nobody has said the word "luncheon" since 1761
Jacob Rees Mogg says hello and invites you for luncheon.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
So eating their own sandwiches is a Benefit in Kind under HMRC rules?
How are subsidised canteens treated tax wise? I've worked at a few places that had those.
I'm so old I had a job where they gave out luncheon vouchers.
I guess they are long gone.
Very versatile as well as tax free - I recall reading that Mrs Payne the madam accepted them, so not just cafes and the like. Seriously, they could be used on family outings and the like if it wasn't convenient during the week.
They still exist, but much reduced, and not tax free I assume.
I used to give my Luncheon Vouchers to the homeless woman below our office building, as a near cash equivalent, and was not alone in that. Almost everywhere in the City took them.
Weren't luncheon vouchers from memory party of a paid for sex scandal perpetrated by one mistress Payne who had brothels that accepted them as payment?
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
So eating their own sandwiches is a Benefit in Kind under HMRC rules?
How are subsidised canteens treated tax wise? I've worked at a few places that had those.
I'm so old I had a job where they gave out luncheon vouchers.
I guess they are long gone.
Nobody has said the word "luncheon" since 1761
So your explanation of luncheon meat is? Sort of somewhat proves the statement wrong
It was, like you, just a joke.
There you go looking in a mirror again and projecting
'Speaking to BBC News, the young person - who has no connection to the person at the centre of the Sun's story about payments for photos - said they had been scared by the power the presenter held.' Interewsting choice of words there. Hmmmmmmmm.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
So eating their own sandwiches is a Benefit in Kind under HMRC rules?
How are subsidised canteens treated tax wise? I've worked at a few places that had those.
I'm so old I had a job where they gave out luncheon vouchers.
I guess they are long gone.
Nobody has said the word "luncheon" since 1761
Jacob Rees Mogg says hello and invites you for luncheon.
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
Let's hope the second part is definitely *not* true.
Yes, I think Newsom could lose to Trump.
But, if the Dems have the sense to drop Biden then the GOP might have the cullions to replace Trump. And finally America will get a duel between two not-mad, not octogenarian candidates
'Speaking to BBC News, the young person - who has no connection to the person at the centre of the Sun's story about payments for photos - said they had been scared by the power the presenter held.' Interewsting choice of words there. Hmmmmmmmm.
Well if it does turn out that WH24 involves neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump, I really will be due some 'wtf that spooky kuntibula!' commentary on here.
Yes thank God the existence of slavery in North America had nothing to with the British.
It certainly had nothing to do with anyone born in Britain today, or do you believe in collective ethnic guilt?
I don't think guilt is a useful response at all but equally I think it would be absurd to pretend that North American slavery had nothing to do with us, or indeed to pretend that people alive now haven't benefited materially from its legacy.
My own view is that once a nation becomes independent, it becomes responsible for its own actions.
So if I come over to your house and steal all of your assets then let you go that's on you is it? We're both equal?
No. Why would anybody think that?
Quite. some of the 'analogies' people try on here are totally stupid.
Although my one about stale donkey excrement was at least inventive.
'Speaking to BBC News, the young person - who has no connection to the person at the centre of the Sun's story about payments for photos - said they had been scared by the power the presenter held.' Interewsting choice of words there. Hmmmmmmmm.
Brother-in-law started new job for a design company with 200 or so employees this week.
The company has a canteen where the lunches are free. But there is a catch.
If an employee wants the free lunch their one hour lunch break reduces to 30 minutes. If they don't want the lunch they get their hour. No pressure either way is applied by management.
No doubt I'm out of touch, but I've never heard of this before. Quite novel and brother-in-law says that most employees opt for the free lunch and reduced lunchbreak
So in return for lunch they have to work an extra 30 minutes for no extra pay?
Expensive sandwich.
So eating their own sandwiches is a Benefit in Kind under HMRC rules?
How are subsidised canteens treated tax wise? I've worked at a few places that had those.
I'm so old I had a job where they gave out luncheon vouchers.
I guess they are long gone.
Nobody has said the word "luncheon" since 1761
Jacob Rees Mogg says hello and invites you for luncheon.
US says ‘intends to move forward’ with transfer of F-16 jets to Turkey, hours after Erdogan relents on Sweden's Nato membership and holds meeting aimed at reheating EU ties https://twitter.com/HenryJFoy/status/1678675022997606400
Better inside the tent pissing out.
Contrast with how rewarding our own 'faithful retainer' approach has been over the decades.
We did get Polaris and Tridents out of it, and rumor has it that when they stiffed us over f-111s Wilson turned round and said "no" to US over Vietnam
"Anonymity might not be sustainable, former culture committee chair says
Earlier this afternoon, a former chair of the Commons digital, culture, media and sport select committee said questions remained about how the BBC handled the initial complaint in May about the unnamed presenter.
Conservative MP Damian Collins told BBC Radio 4: "There is a perception that not much was done... until it was reported in the press, and then there was a more active participation by BBC management.
"Why wasn't more done sooner, when the allegations were made?"
Collins said the BBC needed to look into what happens when a serious allegation comes in and how it's looked at.
Collins added it might not be "sustainable" for the presenter to remain anonymous if the person in question is off-air for a long time and everybody in the industry knows who it is."
'Speaking to BBC News, the young person - who has no connection to the person at the centre of the Sun's story about payments for photos - said they had been scared by the power the presenter held.' Interewsting choice of words there. Hmmmmmmmm.
This line is troublesome in the other direction: "When the young person hinted online they might name the presenter, they were sent abusive, expletive-filled messages."
Comments
If it's a three course meal with a glass of wine...
If the lunch is worth a tenner and you work an extra half hour in return for getting it free then you are costing your time out at only £20 per hour.
So, I'd keep my hour for lunch.
Both have damaging impacts on British life but in very different ways. One gave us the likes of Boris and JRM but most of what it does is bring in export income. Perhaps we just ringfence the hyper-elite sector like we do Mayfair. Charge a luxury tax on it, a kind of poshness excise duty. The other is more of a serious market failing because its impact is more widespread.
Somehow if we could blur the line between state and private at the mid level we might be able to widen access to the facilities and skills in the independent sector and reduce social gaps in attainment. But don’t ask me how. If the answer was easy we’d have done it already.
NYT ($) - DeSantis is No Trump, or Boebert, or . . . The Conversation: Gail Collins and Bret Stephens
Gail Collins: Bret, about Ron DeSantis. Last week I criticized him for weenie stuff like big book advances and questionable road repair materials. At the time, I definitely felt like I was carping.
Then his people shared an ad on L.G.B.T.Q issues that . . . wow.
Bret Stephens: "Wow" just about covers it.
Gail: It began with a clip of Donald Trump defending gay rights in days of yore, which was clearly supposed to make viewers . . . hate Trump. Followed by praise for Florida laws DeSantis signed that "literally threaten trans existence." Followed by a super-duper-weird montage showing men flexing muscles, Brad Pitt in Greek warrior garb and Governor Ron with lightening flashes coming out of his eyes.
Pete Buttigieg, who is President Biden's secretary of transportation and one of the best-known gay figures in politics, rightly pointed out "the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you between shirtless, oiled-up bodybuilders." [SSI - like Mad Vlad?]
Any thoughts?
Bret: I guess my main takeaway is that DeSantis isn't going to be the next president. He makes Trump seem tolerant, Ted Cruz seem likeable, Mitch McConnell seem moderate, Lauren Boebert seem mature and Rick Santorum seem cool.
BUT - they're not to all staff, but only those who "pay" in time. Wonder if this has been worked out properly?
Cut all classes in the state sector to a maximum of twenty and offer private schools the chance to become state at the same time, and almost all private schools would become state schools overnight.
Plus it would solve many other problems, including making behaviour management much easier.
But - nobody has ever found a way to pay for it, and it would not be cheap.
Tennis: Alcaraz to beat Novak in one of THE finals.
My money is on it specifically being the Gentlemen's Singles Final. Don't know why - just a hunch really.
If you can leave half an hour early, then that's a different matter...
- collective national ancestral guilt doesn’t make sense and I don’t like it, but anyone who wants to benefit from collective national ancestral pride is being hypocritical. Neither make any sense
- Certain families made and retained wealth that is directly traceable to slavery or colonial exploitation, and that’s very distinct as a phenomenon from arguments that everyone in rich former colonial countries owes their wealth to historical bad deeds
My ex wife told me to stop calling them broken condoms.
Best car chase sequence ever.
Penned by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1890, in response to another letter by a Honolulu minister, Charles McEwen Hyde, published shortly after the death of Father (now Saint) Damien of Moloka'i, which alleged that he'd been "a coarse, dirty man," who contracted leprosy due to "carelessness" among other accusations.
Pith of RLS critique of the Rev. Dr. Hyde:
"If that world at all remember you, on the day when Damien of Molokai shall be named a Saint, it will be in virtue of one work: your letter . . ."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Damien
Stevenson's letter (under "Father Damien")
https://books.google.com/books?id=iWY4AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_McEwen_Hyde
BTW, note that RLS wrote "Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde" several years BEFORE the Dr. Rev. Hyde wrote HIS letter.
The school isn’t sitting on these endowments generating shitloads of cash to blow on hookers and coke for the Warden and Fellows, indeed it would have been nice if they had spent money on making dormitory windows fit the frames.
Wonder what his was like?
I am not sure we will see another Tom Cruise. With CGI, digital doubles and AI, finding a massive star who not only able to but actively want to do all the stunts, and the studios allow them, to seems increasingly unlikely.
If they were to lose the money and need to do repairs there is nothing to stop them having a subsequent fundraising effort to go into a restricted fund, or applying for grants, or increasing fees.
Most state schools incidentally are in a far worse position with regard to the fabric of their buildings, and as they're not listed can't get help with them.
I guess they are long gone.
In lead-up to 2024, seems to me that Ron DeSantis is making a different yet similar error: trying to out-flank Trump from the wack-right.
Which may be theoretically possible, logically and ideologically. BUT which in actuality, is yet another MI, because for the mass of MAGA-maniacs it is totally unpersuasive, emotionally and psycho-politically.
I don't know how many and I don't care. I also don't know how many Sunak or Starmer have either. And I don't care.
Why is this a light the blue touch paper for so many?
There is a lot of discrimination today. One could even say it is structural. To undo this discrimination, it helps to understand how it arose, which is a complex process involving many things of course, but the transatlantic slave trade is part of the answer there.
They still exist, but much reduced, and not tax free I assume.
College sports is used as a way to get more African Americans into university. Hence the bizarre support for a weird and very unfair system on the left.
Legacies are the way spaces are reserved for the Old Money rich. But increasingly they can’t afford them - legacy places aren’t free. They have to be paid for with a huge donation. As one relative put it - they offered his daughter a place at Harvard, if he gave them 5 times the cost of going to Harvard….
The quotas on “excessively successful” minorities is about stopping the remaining places all going to Asian Americans.
It’s a fucked up system of quotas.
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/299955800
"Rumours circulating that President Biden is due to announce he won’t be contesting the 2024 Presidential election in a CNN interview this weekend. Newsom’s odds of being next President climbing on back of rumours."
https://twitter.com/toadmeister/status/1678745058642735106?s=20
It would surely kill him in the first year, for a start
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-66165766
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-66165766
BBC have verified messages sent from presenters phone. So we aren't talking about if the Sun story holds up or not now, its BBC in BBC.
If the presenter is hooking up on dating apps, there will be more.
Even if Biden is as doddery as you believe, he's at least sane.
If we could get a Whitmer/Haley match up it would be different.
Third century in consecutive first class innings, all at a strike rate north of 70.
The BBC are now vouching for threatening and abuse messages being sent to young person, that different from buying mucky pictures off Only Fans.
Earlier this afternoon, a former chair of the Commons digital, culture, media and sport select committee said questions remained about how the BBC handled the initial complaint in May about the unnamed presenter.
Conservative MP Damian Collins told BBC Radio 4: "There is a perception that not much was done... until it was reported in the press, and then there was a more active participation by BBC management.
"Why wasn't more done sooner, when the allegations were made?"
Collins said the BBC needed to look into what happens when a serious allegation comes in and how it's looked at.
Collins added it might not be "sustainable" for the presenter to remain anonymous if the person in question is off-air for a long time and everybody in the industry knows who it is."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-66159469
Back in those days, for example, Italian immigrants were considered among the dregs of humanity by many if not most "old-stock" Americans, aka "Anglo-Saxons" which in US context meant NOT the fine folk who produced King Alfred and the Venerable Bede, but instead people of English, Scottish, Welsh, even (some) Irish PLUS Germans, Dutch and Nordics.
As in the once commonplace, now antique American acronym WASP = White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
In response, Italian Americans adopted several strategies, including both anglicizing names for some and heightened ethnic pride for others. Common thread being assimilation within a few decades, though note that Italians had one of the highest rates of returning to the "old country" of any US ethnic group. But that had minimal impact on assimilating those who remained in the US, and especially their American children and grandkids.
So in a century, have gone from Italians being targets of American nativism, to one being a political leader of anti-woke Wack "patriotism".
Interewsting choice of words there. Hmmmmmmmm.