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Starmer is in tune with the nation – politicalbetting.com
Starmer is in tune with the nation – politicalbetting.com
Most private schools are registered charities, which allows them various tax breaks67% of Britons (including 61% of Tory voters) say that private schools should not continue to be allowed to register as charitieshttps://t.co/qm31nNB9cm pic.twitter.com/6odJSKK13k
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The Tory manifesto will also be lacking in anything interesting aside from a few mini culture wars items.
So the election will go on a mixture of pre existing public opinion and the credibility of the two front benches during the campaign.
We're the last people left it is okay to be prejudiced against.
*Easy to define - anyone earning twice the person you are talking to earns. Not uncommon to find people on £50K talking about how poor they are.
I did read a few weeks ago something like 30% of parents wouldn't be able to afford VAT being applied.
The question is whether I go ahead with the planned fortnight’s holiday to Georgia at the end of July, or give it up on the basis the ribs won’t be fully healed by then. A holiday with a lot going on so not a quiet city break or beach type of affair.
Those who know his identity can find published material in his background that relates to this. Jeremy Vine is absolutely right that it is in the presenter's own best interests for him to be publicly named.
But this doesn't mean it's only the presenter himself who wants his name kept quiet. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it isn't just him.
The mistake is to think this is the doing only of a group of mucky-minded Sun "journalists" after one of their late-morning farting, belching, or leering competitions. It's much more sophis.
So if he talks and says there have been dirty tricks against him, listen to what he says and try to divine who he may be pointing the finger at. Because it probably won't be only Victoria Newton.
https://news.sky.com/story/jeremy-vine-worried-about-bbc-presenters-state-of-mind-12919532
Rearranging will be dead annoying because I have about 7 different online hotel bookings, cars, restaurants and separately booked flights. Plus no easy opportunity to postpone because of limited school holidays.
A right bugger.
£15k a year for a day school, plus lunches and transport. You need to earn £25k per child, plus your mortgage, to do that now.
Woe betide the first senior Labour member to send *their* kids private though.
Same logic applies to high-end properties.
According to the ONS, the average salary in the UK in 2022 for all employees was £27,756, a 6.8% increase from 2021. For full-time workers, the average UK salary in 2022 was £33,000 exactly, a 5.7% increase YoY.
So I expect VAT on fees would actually raise income.
It's one of them that you basically can't do much about. It'll hurt till it's healed. I guess the question is whether you would be in the same amount of discomfort at home.
He started his news conference well - setting out the plans to bring Ukraine into NATO and the progress made generally in supporting them by other means.
But then why oh why did he go off the deeep end all about how wonderful the UK is - not least the comments about the UK giving more than another 20 NATO members. And then banging on about how wonderful our armed forces are. This may or may not all be true but it the sort of stuff you say to a domsetic audience back in the UK not to an international audience at a major NATO conference in Eastern Europe.
It just sounds like crass politicking and self serving glorification. Not the tone he should have been adopting in front of our allies.
Seriously though... we never had holidays. And I genuinely did live in a house with a broken pane of glass in my bedroom window covered with a bit of cardboard for 2 years that my parents literally couldn't afford to fix - that was fun in winter! (Not sure they were really wise about that, I suspect the heating bill savings could have paid for the glass, but they didn't see it that way at the time!)
In any case, the people who sacrifice everything for their kids and aspire for better for their offspring are not going to look kindly on Labour making their lives worse. Obviously with the current political climate, I don't suppose it'd swing an election, but morally wrong is morally wrong in my opinion.
A revealing anecdote: in the old days the younger children in each boarding house went off for a house weekend in the school outward bound base, in the hills somewhere, at least once in their time there. Not negotiable. Everyone had to try it at least once out in the heather and hills. Modern generation: one (female) house voted against going, simply because the shopping was crap, or rather completely nonexistent.
So that story doesn't wash.
Reality is a few middle class parents may not vote for Labour because of that policy but the flip side is that it will get some (possible a lot of) activists willing to do a bit more door knocking and that would probably more than offset the lost votes in that gets others out.
What political party is going to run with "We live beyond our means all our living standards have to fall so we are living within our means" and have a hope in hell of being elected.
Blade Runner. Five (I know, I know...) people who are not genetically male/female escape from their subcultures and attempt to fit into the normal world, co-opting the experiences of cisgender men and women to pass as normal. One of them who works as a stripper inflames a cop to the point that he kills her instead of deal with his attraction. After a murder spree he reconciles to his sexuality and rides off with one of his intended victims into the future.
The Swimmer. In a sincere but ill-advised attempt to live the American dream, a middle-aged white executive flits from job to job, pursuing success to the neglect of his wife and children. Realising his mistake he attempts to return but finds his happy home in a state of disrepair, with only himself to blame.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Two older gay men each fall in love with a younger man, who they use as a sexual lure to gain wealth. They argue and can no longer regain their happy relationship, and the resultant fight terminates their relationship. The older man takes the younger man away to build a new relationship but the younger man was injured by the conflict and dies, because it's the 1970s and Bury Your Gays. Chastened the older man, having lost his chances at happiness due to his lust and infidelity, is left alone.
Juggernaut.1970s Britain, having overspent and a shadow of its former self, is threatened by a bombing campaign. Its inhabitants desperately try to remain jolly whist grim faced men try to defuse the bombs.
Minority Report. One of the characters explicitly says that his prisoners are fed subconscious fantasies whilst imprisoned, just before the hero is imprisoned therein. The rest of the film is not the real events but his electronically induced lived fantasy.
The published figure for Eton's assets rose 37% between 2010 and 2015. Who've they got managing their money? The ghost of J M Keynes? [*]
* For those who don't get this joke: Keynes's lifelong day job was as bursar of King's College, Cambridge - which in the past was closely connected to Eton - where he didn't quite do as well as the bursar of Trinity (the Science Park, etc.), but he still did damned well and was known as a super-duper green-fingered stock picker.
Tories... in tune with Damian Lewis
But educational inequality is a symptom of wider societal inequality, albeit one that tends to reinforce and exacerbate it. Abolish the private schools and all their customers would instead divert their money into moving to the right catchment area.
To understand the scaling - back then, sending two kids to a good private school was kind of the cost of one of those hobbies - like sailing - that consumes all your spare cash and leaves it all a bit tight.
Not a salary, by itself, as now.
Truss got the problem right, she just hadn’t won the argument with either the electorate or the markets for her proposed solutions. Ways of fixing this will need to be much more incremental and thought through.
There's a story if this guy was paying a 17 year old, legally a child, for indecent pictures. There's a story if it is grooming or a power imbalance being abused. The power imbalance was certainly something that was core to the allegations against Pip.
If it is two consenting adults, which is where it seems to be heading, then I cannot see why it is such an issue.
Not only would scrapping tax relief and charitable status for private schools reduce parental choice therefore, it would also reduce scholarships in private schools, making them even more exclusive. Plus add to the taxpayer funds needed for additional state school pupils.
I would be furious if any Tory leader joined Starmer in such an un Conservative policy and would push for their removal immediately. Thankfully Rishi is not going down that route and fully supports charitable status for private schools as well as donating to his old alma mater of Winchester for bursaries and scholarships.
Note too a recent ISC Public First poll contradicts Yougov and found just 37% wanted to remove private schools tax relief. 48% wanted them to keep that tax relief, broken down by 30% for keeping it by increasing the amount done for public benefit eg sharing facilities and 18% wanting to keep the tax relief regardless.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/07/08/poll-labour-private-school-tax-breaks/
I am shocked TSE would consider backing such a class war policy. Without his private education and Cambridge degree he might not have ever become a senior compliance person writing PB headers!
Tories have no concept of the "overall quality of education" in the country. Labour figures need to say that into their faces and get them to answer on film, in the TV studios and in the Commons. This isn't difficult at all. If Labour was a real oppositional party they'd do this.
They also need to say we're going to hammer the sh*t out of the private schools on our first day in office. Something like disendowing them would work fine.
When you have x income you prioritize spending so it comes to no more than x.
The proportion of children attending private school is close to zero across the vast majority of the income distribution, and doesn’t rise above 10% of the cohort except among those with the top 5% of incomes. Only half of those in the top 1% send their kids to private school.
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/2021/02/08/housing-wealth-not-bursaries-explains-much-of-private-school-participation-for-those-without-high-income
Edit: the degree (no pun intended) to which it really is, and to which TSE actually needed either, are other matters, of course.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-more-can-apply-to-become-judges-under-plans-to-expand-diversity
Thousands more can apply to become judges under plans to expand diversity
The move will increase the number of judicial roles that legal professionals from under-represented groups can apply for – better reflecting modern, multi-cultural, twenty-first century Britain.
MMT people argue when you control your own currency you don't need income to control spending, and taxation is there to deal with inflation rather than balancing the books. I'm not a great economics understander, but at the end of the day individuals and corporations are making huge profits and they get to see the benefits, not average people - I'd prefer to see a world where it was the other way around. I don't think anyone needs a billion pounds, for example: 100% tax rate after that is fine by me. Hell, after half a billion. Either companies would have to invest it in other things, or the state will use it. We should also target wealth better rather than just income - land, dividends, stocks etc.
The assumed generosity of parents in paying private fees while also paying tax to educate the plebs is another interesting justification. My parents chose to run a car, paying VAT on the purchase price and tax on the fuel while simultaneously subsidising the rail travel of other people through their taxes. Surely that was horibly unjust and they should have got tax breaks on their car use for public-spiritedly avoiding the trains?
Sometimes there are just things you have to look at and decide whether they are justified. I'm put in mind of the former NHS funding of homeopathy. Pulling that funding may have cost us money - perhaps the patients access real, more expensive (although more cost effective) medicines instead. Perhaps they lived longer, with consequent higher overall healthcare costs. But using public money to fund homeopathy was still the wrong thing to do.
I don't really care either way about private schools. I've no hatred of them (a close family member is deputy head at one in London) but also little interest as I would never consider sending my children to a private school. Let them compete. Let the market operate. Let people decide whether or not to pay the full economic rate for private education. Subsidising charities with little charitable activity is bizarre - where there is a real charitable purpose, the case can be made and/or a charitable trust (preserving notable buildings, providing wide access sports facilities, providing scholarships to the gifted etc) can run with a sister business providing education for a fee.
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/tax-private-school-fees-and-state-school-spending
There's no good moral argument why private schools, which provide only very limited benefits to those who don't pay fees, should have charitable status.
I'm not sure what that says or what you can extrapolate from it. But it doesn't sell private education to me, even if we could afford it.