Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
A large number of parents at the top boarding schools are simply foreigners - they live abroad and aren’t moving to the U.K.
Is there somewhere online I can watch the Israeli and Croatian Eurovision entries live, without opening a Google or BBC account? I haven't got TV set. (I can download iPlayer stuff without an account, but I can't stream it.)
That song with the Lilith invoker (evoker?) dressed in bandages, performing in front of a big eye symbol, and declaring that she is still wet from the October rain hurricane interests me not a little.
She may change the words, perhaps back to how some of them were.
The Croatian entry is interesting too, with its ghostly images of cattle.
We're talking about an audience of 150m+.
Back at the beginning of 2009, during a previous Gaza massacre, a film called Defiance was advertised all over the place.
The mods really ought to revisit the picture settings. Currently they are stretched so they are too large for the screen, and also fuzzy with illegible text.
A picture ban would be a positive. Save it for Instagram.
I enjoy the pictures.
You have an unbelievably authoritarian mindset immediately reaching for a ban of things that you personally don’t like
Just so long as there’s a dog, or cat, included for scale.
Fascinating header. I wonder if we can extrapolate the guilt/shame idea out to whole groups or even nations.
If it extends to groups it would be as a metaphor. Groups as such don't have feelings or senses, only individuals can have those feelings.
Football fandom suggests quite different. Fans don't independently choose which of their rivals they "hate" the most, those feeelings often derive from reasons that occured before they were born.
Whilst ultimately it is individual, it is misleading to say there is not a very significant group impact that can be dominant in certain settings.
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
Because endowments are usually derived from donations made to further a specific charitable purpose and are not therefore private property. If they are not being used for that purpose they can be (and often are, actually) forfeited.
It has been done before on a grand scale, incidentally. Check out the disendowment of the Church in Wales in 1920.
Ah yes, the other thing I wanted to reply to was about SureStart. Oh yes, getting rid of SureStart was an absolutely catastrophic decision. Through being an adopter, sitting on the adoption panel, and being a councillor, I am aware of so many families whose lives were changed for the better by having this support in place - and so many children whose lives have been blighted and warped by the removal. The way @Cyclefree feels about Post Office management is pretty much how I feel about those who decided to kill SureStart..
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
Because endowments are usually derived from donations made to further a specific charitable purpose and are not therefore private property.
It has been done before, incidentally. Check out the disendowment of the Church in Wales in 1920.
Just because a trust was established by a donor for a specific purpose doesn’t mean that it isn’t private property. I’m not sure of your logic on that point - it’s to be used for a social purpose but that doesn’t mean that the ownership changes: it’s just an entailed asset
If you look at Eton, for example, it’s very broadly defined as being for the purposes of education. Clearly the school is part of that but there’s also a lot of broader educational work.
But the assets are owned by a trust. For the government to break the trust to take the assets would be theft.
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
Because endowments are usually derived from donations made to further a specific charitable purpose and are not therefore private property.
It has been done before, incidentally. Check out the disendowment of the Church in Wales in 1920.
If you look at Eton, for example, it’s very broadly defined as being for the purposes of education. Clearly the school is part of that but there’s also a lot of broader educational work.
But the assets are owned by a trust. For the government to break the trust to take the assets would be theft.
The mods really ought to revisit the picture settings. Currently they are stretched so they are too large for the screen, and also fuzzy with illegible text.
Tangentially a bit gutted that I didn’t try harder to see the aurora, but can those who did at least tell me that the photos are making it look far more impressive than the naked eye? Please!
Unless they are very bright and/or you are somewhere properly dark you can't see the colours very well. Your eyes only see in black and white in dull light.
Here it was bright enough to see some colour but the overall impression was of moving white mist.
Still very impressive though.
Might be visible again tonight but more likely to be the green glow on the northern horizon type which does need a camera and a dark location.
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
The policy is already working entirely as intended. Everyone knows it's a bad idea, in the sense that I did some quick calculations last year on elasticity of demand, based on how the private education sector shrank during the GFC and came up with the tax being a net loss to the government - costing the government more in terms of new pupils in the state sector than it would raise in tax. Plus secondary effects like housing market distortions and wealthy middle class parents gobbling up the places at good state schools that currently go to other less privileged kids.
But of course that isn't the point of the policy. It's pure red meat for Labour's activist base, a kind of reverse-clause-four. Everyone knows that Starmer has shifted Labour to the middle and is a heir-to-Blair type figure. This is the bit of red meat he has to throw his activist base to prove he's Tony Blair lite and not David Cameron lite. Much as foxhunting was for the Blair era. The difference was, of course, a ban on foxhunting was never going to cost the taxpayer a fortune and bugger up the education of thousands of children.
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
Because endowments are usually derived from donations made to further a specific charitable purpose and are not therefore private property. If they are not being used for that purpose they can be (and often are, actually) forfeited.
It has been done before on a grand scale, incidentally. Check out the disendowment of the Church in Wales in 1920.
Based on Wiki it doesn’t seem that the church of wales is helpful to you.
The main financial terms were that the Church no longer received tithe money (a land tax), but kept all its churches, properties and glebes. The Welsh Church Commissioners were set up by the Act to identify affected assets and oversee their transfer.
A compulsory tax to a non-worshipper is something the government can rightfully intervene on. Seizing of privately owned assets is not, which is why the properties were left with the church of wales
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
Because endowments are usually derived from donations made to further a specific charitable purpose and are not therefore private property.
It has been done before, incidentally. Check out the disendowment of the Church in Wales in 1920.
If you look at Eton, for example, it’s very broadly defined as being for the purposes of education. Clearly the school is part of that but there’s also a lot of broader educational work.
But the assets are owned by a trust. For the government to break the trust to take the assets would be theft.
Boo hoo
So you would be ok for the government to take possession of your house/car/personal possessions?
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
Because endowments are usually derived from donations made to further a specific charitable purpose and are not therefore private property.
It has been done before, incidentally. Check out the disendowment of the Church in Wales in 1920.
If you look at Eton, for example, it’s very broadly defined as being for the purposes of education. Clearly the school is part of that but there’s also a lot of broader educational work.
But the assets are owned by a trust. For the government to break the trust to take the assets would be theft.
Boo hoo
So you would be ok for the government to take possession of your house/car/personal possessions?
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
I can't bear these minor private schools, normally prefixed with "St". If they have to exist charge VAT, they are businesses not charities. If social climbing parents can't afford them, well oh dear, never mind.
“Privately owned assets” are seized on a daily basis. It’s called taxation.
No, there is a fundamental difference.
As a lawyer you should be smart enough to work through it from first principles and I don’t have time to spoon feed you
There’s not a fundamental difference. Whether the government seizes liquid assets or illiquid assets under threat of imprisonment or further financial punishment if you refuse is neither here not there.
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
The leading places were chartered by the state ostensibly to serve the public good, not to decide what the public good is. Nowadays it's supposed to be the electorate that decides that. Sure, the exclusionary principle is all about privation - you've got that dead right - but seriously the c***s who run these places aren't going to want to run around saying in public that their "private property" is being taken off them by a bunch of cheap-suited desk jockey wallahs in Whitehall.
"Private" is like a holy word for Tories and the British bourgeoisie generally. Best to just f***ing confiscate.
The mods really ought to revisit the picture settings. Currently they are stretched so they are too large for the screen, and also fuzzy with illegible text.
A picture ban would be a positive. Save it for Instagram.
I enjoy the pictures.
You have an unbelievably authoritarian mindset immediately reaching for a ban of things that you personally don’t like
I don't mind the odd one, but there is a persistent spammer who posts endless "look at me" photo drivel.
The mods really ought to revisit the picture settings. Currently they are stretched so they are too large for the screen, and also fuzzy with illegible text.
Tangentially a bit gutted that I didn’t try harder to see the aurora, but can those who did at least tell me that the photos are making it look far more impressive than the naked eye? Please!
Unless they are very bright and/or you are somewhere properly dark you can't see the colours very well. Your eyes only see in black and white in dull light.
Here it was bright enough to see some colour but the overall impression was of moving white mist.
Still very impressive though.
Might be visible again tonight but more likely to be the green glow on the northern horizon type which does need a camera and a dark location.
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
The leading places were chartered by the state ostensibly to serve the public good, not to decide what the public good is. Nowadays it's supposed to be the electorate that decides that. Sure, the exclusionary principle is all about privation - you've got that dead right - but seriously the c***s who run these places aren't going to want to run around saying in public that their "private property" is being taken off them by a bunch of cheap-suited desk jockey wallahs in Whitehall.
"Private" is like a holy word for Tories and the British bourgeoisie generally. Best to just f***ing confiscate.
I’d be surprised if they were “chartered”. Eton is actually the King Henry VI Foundation for example - a specific legal entity created for the purpose of educating the public and governed by various trustees.
The abuse of chartering was really a 17-19 century thing (the British South Africa Company, the Royal Niger Company, the Hudson Bay Company, the East India Company, the North Borneo Company, etc etc.)
“Privately owned assets” are seized on a daily basis. It’s called taxation.
No, there is a fundamental difference.
As a lawyer you should be smart enough to work through it from first principles and I don’t have time to spoon feed you
There’s not a fundamental difference. Whether the government seizes liquid assets or illiquid assets under threat of imprisonment or further financial punishment if you refuse is neither here not there.
See council tax. A tax for simply living.
Not at all.
Your world view appears to be that the government is the ultimate authority and anything we own and use privately is by their good graces
The alternative is that government is formed by the people to run certain common functions. Tax is a payment to facilitate that. But the remainder is whole and exclusively the purview of the private individual
The mods really ought to revisit the picture settings. Currently they are stretched so they are too large for the screen, and also fuzzy with illegible text.
Tangentially a bit gutted that I didn’t try harder to see the aurora, but can those who did at least tell me that the photos are making it look far more impressive than the naked eye? Please!
Unless they are very bright and/or you are somewhere properly dark you can't see the colours very well. Your eyes only see in black and white in dull light.
Here it was bright enough to see some colour but the overall impression was of moving white mist.
Still very impressive though.
Might be visible again tonight but more likely to be the green glow on the northern horizon type which does need a camera and a dark location.
Has anyone spotted the city hidden in it yet?
I definitely saw a phoenix / angel of death (depending on your mood).
A thought provoking header for a Saturday morning.
I like the idea of the difference between guilt and shame. The problem I see in the real world is that the vast majority of nasty/wicked/selfish deeds are never punished. The correlation therefore breaks down.
All too often in my job I see bewildered accused in the dock not really understanding what they have done wrong or why they are being held to account. Often, this is because this happened to them and they don't know any better. At least equally often, however, this is because they have never developed the moral or ethical compass that allows them to see that the consequences for their victims are as important or more important than the benefit for themselves.
Religious teaching used to fill this gap to some extent. The story of the Good Samaritan is one of Jesus's most important parables. He was teaching his followers to care. How do we teach this in a largely agnostic or atheist society? Like James, I think that the answer must come in the home from engaged, compassionate parents who understand what they are doing and what the real lessons are.
The sharp end of the criminal justice system does tend to rather wear down its workers into a very cynical view of humanity.
It isn't a very representative sample though, and there are also some very people coming out of very unpromising backgrounds and making things out of their lives. Angela Rayner is perhaps the best example, even if not everyone's cup of tea. Expressing her anger at social inequality first through Trade Union activity, then politics.
Anger is a powerful emotion, but it isn't a single emotion. There is the anger that drives violent retribution, but also righteous anger where someone is spurred to activism. Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers in the temple for example.
Yet imagine how Christ would be described on PB if he did that today.
Rishi Sunak would wheel his podium out, delcare him an enemy of British values and an extremist, and task Michael Gove with suppressing his speech, whilst his free-speech Czar grins inanely and does nothing.
“Privately owned assets” are seized on a daily basis. It’s called taxation.
No, there is a fundamental difference.
As a lawyer you should be smart enough to work through it from first principles and I don’t have time to spoon feed you
There’s not a fundamental difference. Whether the government seizes liquid assets or illiquid assets under threat of imprisonment or further financial punishment if you refuse is neither here not there.
See council tax. A tax for simply living.
Not at all.
Your world view appears to be that the government is the ultimate authority and anything we own and use privately is by their good graces
The alternative is that government is formed by the people to run certain common functions. Tax is a payment to facilitate that. But the remainder is whole and exclusively the purview of the private individual
Who decides the certain common functions and how the taxes are raised? The government, partially via the ballot box.
All taxation is confiscation of private property, not just taxes you think are somehow unfair.
Eurovision: Switzerland has been backed this morning and is vying for second favouritism with a drifting Israel. Croatia is odds-on (evens with Skybet). Any other country can be backed at 20s or more.
Switzerland is a great song , Israel in any other year would probably win.
The Israeli song is generic nothingness. I don’t see why it would win any year. Georgia’s “Firefighter” is in a similar style but does it better.
We don't know yet what happened at the rehearsal, but the Netherlands may well become the repository for pro-Palestinian votes if allowed to be shown in the final tonight. Looks value to me at 5.7 for top 5 and 50 the win on BFX. Its the best song too.
The order is problematic with Netherlands on immediately before Israel.
Bunch of sad losers because Israeli song is far better than their crap PS: luckily I have managed to avoid all the rubbish and not heard one note of any of the crap Eurovision mince.
If you haven't heard any of them how do you know that Europapa is crap?
The mods really ought to revisit the picture settings. Currently they are stretched so they are too large for the screen, and also fuzzy with illegible text.
Tangentially a bit gutted that I didn’t try harder to see the aurora, but can those who did at least tell me that the photos are making it look far more impressive than the naked eye? Please!
Unless they are very bright and/or you are somewhere properly dark you can't see the colours very well. Your eyes only see in black and white in dull light.
Here it was bright enough to see some colour but the overall impression was of moving white mist.
Still very impressive though.
Might be visible again tonight but more likely to be the green glow on the northern horizon type which does need a camera and a dark location.
Has anyone spotted the city hidden in it yet?
I definitely saw a phoenix / angel of death (depending on your mood).
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
The mods really ought to revisit the picture settings. Currently they are stretched so they are too large for the screen, and also fuzzy with illegible text.
Tangentially a bit gutted that I didn’t try harder to see the aurora, but can those who did at least tell me that the photos are making it look far more impressive than the naked eye? Please!
Unless they are very bright and/or you are somewhere properly dark you can't see the colours very well. Your eyes only see in black and white in dull light.
Here it was bright enough to see some colour but the overall impression was of moving white mist.
Still very impressive though.
Might be visible again tonight but more likely to be the green glow on the northern horizon type which does need a camera and a dark location.
Has anyone spotted the city hidden in it yet?
I definitely saw a phoenix / angel of death (depending on your mood).
Must have been scary as hell for the ancients...
You would think he could have waited till he was inside to touch up the wife
The mods really ought to revisit the picture settings. Currently they are stretched so they are too large for the screen, and also fuzzy with illegible text.
A picture ban would be a positive. Save it for Instagram.
I enjoy the pictures.
You have an unbelievably authoritarian mindset immediately reaching for a ban of things that you personally don’t like
I don't mind the odd one, but there is a persistent spammer who posts endless "look at me" photo drivel.
Ah yes, the other thing I wanted to reply to was about SureStart. Oh yes, getting rid of SureStart was an absolutely catastrophic decision. Through being an adopter, sitting on the adoption panel, and being a councillor, I am aware of so many families whose lives were changed for the better by having this support in place - and so many children whose lives have been blighted and warped by the removal. The way @Cyclefree feels about Post Office management is pretty much how I feel about those who decided to kill SureStart..
Eurovision: Switzerland has been backed this morning and is vying for second favouritism with a drifting Israel. Croatia is odds-on (evens with Skybet). Any other country can be backed at 20s or more.
Switzerland is a great song , Israel in any other year would probably win.
The Israeli song is generic nothingness. I don’t see why it would win any year. Georgia’s “Firefighter” is in a similar style but does it better.
We don't know yet what happened at the rehearsal, but the Netherlands may well become the repository for pro-Palestinian votes if allowed to be shown in the final tonight. Looks value to me at 5.7 for top 5 and 50 the win on BFX. Its the best song too.
The order is problematic with Netherlands on immediately before Israel.
Bunch of sad losers because Israeli song is far better than their crap PS: luckily I have managed to avoid all the rubbish and not heard one note of any of the crap Eurovision mince.
If you haven't heard any of them how do you know that Europapa is crap?
It is always crap
Correct and to the point Malcolm. Its a school talent show with added feather boas.
“Privately owned assets” are seized on a daily basis. It’s called taxation.
No, there is a fundamental difference.
As a lawyer you should be smart enough to work through it from first principles and I don’t have time to spoon feed you
There’s not a fundamental difference. Whether the government seizes liquid assets or illiquid assets under threat of imprisonment or further financial punishment if you refuse is neither here not there.
See council tax. A tax for simply living.
Not at all.
Your world view appears to be that the government is the ultimate authority and anything we own and use privately is by their good graces
The alternative is that government is formed by the people to run certain common functions. Tax is a payment to facilitate that. But the remainder is whole and exclusively the purview of the private individual
Well, in the business world, Limited Liability is purely a creation of government.
Is there somewhere online I can watch the Israeli and Croatian Eurovision entries live, without opening a Google or BBC account? I haven't got TV set. (I can download iPlayer stuff without an account, but I can't stream it.)
That song with the Lilith invoker (evoker?) dressed in bandages, performing in front of a big eye symbol, and declaring that she is still wet from the October rain hurricane interests me not a little.
She may change the words, perhaps back to how some of them were.
The Croatian entry is interesting too, with its ghostly images of cattle.
We're talking about an audience of 150m+.
Back at the beginning of 2009, during a previous Gaza massacre, a film called Defiance was advertised all over the place.
Their semifinal performances are on YouTube, but I don’t know about watching the final live.
Eurovision: Switzerland has been backed this morning and is vying for second favouritism with a drifting Israel. Croatia is odds-on (evens with Skybet). Any other country can be backed at 20s or more.
Switzerland is a great song , Israel in any other year would probably win.
The Israeli song is generic nothingness. I don’t see why it would win any year. Georgia’s “Firefighter” is in a similar style but does it better.
Joost Klein was pure Eurovision, but will he compete tonight?
He's being investigated by the Swedish police for threats of violence towards a, presumably Jewish, photographer
Beyond the fact VAT may or may not destroy private schools, why should you not pay VAT on it? I am slightly baffled at the logic.
My view is that we should be making state education so good private schools are irrelevant.
The hypothesis appears to be that these services are viable at 0% VAT, but unviable at 20% VAT. Personally, I am sure that is true for many potential businesses, but it is not for me a reason to cut VAT to 0% for all of them. The hypothesis of "net fiscal loss" is incomplete; parents could instead spend fees money on things that are taxed above 0%.
Ah yes, the other thing I wanted to reply to was about SureStart. Oh yes, getting rid of SureStart was an absolutely catastrophic decision. Through being an adopter, sitting on the adoption panel, and being a councillor, I am aware of so many families whose lives were changed for the better by having this support in place - and so many children whose lives have been blighted and warped by the removal. The way @Cyclefree feels about Post Office management is pretty much how I feel about those who decided to kill SureStart..
What has been the impact of the Pupil Premium?
There are two levels of PP - CLAs (Child Looked After, the current jargon for children in care or adopted) - get Pupil Premium Plus. The money is very useful, but as a parent you have to be very active in getting it allocated to support for your child; it goes straight to the school so the natural instinct for many is to subsume it into their general budget until pushed, because the guideance is woolly enough that can justify pretty much anything as supporting the child in question. A good school will be willing to use it for targeted TA support - two or three children in a class can provide enough funding for a TA to support them exclusively. With the general PP money, many of the parents of the eligible children won't be in a position to advocate for their child to get the funding, so it's down to the school being proactive and sympathetic.
Beyond the fact VAT may or may not destroy private schools, why should you not pay VAT on it? I am slightly baffled at the logic.
My view is that we should be making state education so good private schools are irrelevant.
To a very large extent, if we're talking about learning, it already is. Not universally, but to a very large extent. If we're talking learning per pound spent, that's even more so. A lot of what private schools can offer is polish, confidence and connections. They're valuable, natch, but there is a hefty Matthew Effect (to he who has shall be given more...) which probably isn't socially desirable.
As for private schools- they've generally pushed fees through the roof in the last few decades, mostly because they could. And if they want to know how to cut costs without cutting quality, there are plenty of state schools who would be happy to offer tips.
“Privately owned assets” are seized on a daily basis. It’s called taxation.
No, there is a fundamental difference.
As a lawyer you should be smart enough to work through it from first principles and I don’t have time to spoon feed you
There’s not a fundamental difference. Whether the government seizes liquid assets or illiquid assets under threat of imprisonment or further financial punishment if you refuse is neither here not there.
See council tax. A tax for simply living.
Not at all.
Your world view appears to be that the government is the ultimate authority and anything we own and use privately is by their good graces
The alternative is that government is formed by the people to run certain common functions. Tax is a payment to facilitate that. But the remainder is whole and exclusively the purview of the private individual
It’s not my “world view”. I have given no opinion on it other than “it is what it is” because it’s the reality.
Not sure what it has to do with politics but I'd bet on you as a father.
Agreed, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest that we occasionally have thread headers that have nothing to do with politics or betting. In fact it is part of the Site's charm that its scope is broad and unpredictable.
Oh and apropos of nothing multiple speed toothbrushes are the work of the devil.
That moment when you press the wrong button but can't take the toothbrush out of your mouth until it stops else toothpaste would be sprayed all over the walls.
After one night shift, I was cleaning my teeth in the works bathroom and thinking this two minutes was taking a long time, when I caught my reflection in the mirror and remembered it was a manual toothbrush so I just needed to stop moving my arm.
Fascinating header. I wonder if we can extrapolate the guilt/shame idea out to whole groups or even nations.
If it extends to groups it would be as a metaphor. Groups as such don't have feelings or senses, only individuals can have those feelings.
Your traditional torch waving, pitchfork wielding mob (a phenomenon that shows no signs of disappearing) could be said to be unified in a feeling, unattractive as it is.
Ok, many of them do perhaps feel individual anger or whatever from mutual contagion, so yes the individuals in the group experience a common emotion. But an "angry mob" is angry because many in that group feel like that. I don't think an angry mob can be comprised of calm and rational members.
One of the nastier experiences in my life was attending, with a school nurse, a meeting of mothers in a school where there been an outbreak of headlice. Two or three of the mothers decided that a ‘traveller’ family was to blame and very quickly indeed the mood of the meeting turned very hostile indeed towards the perceived culprit. The school nurse and I agreed that it was very lucky there wasn’t a duckpond immediately available. I don’t think, actually, that the perceived culprit was to blame!
ISTR being told, by a friend whose child caught them at school, that (a) they spread very fast, and (b) the lice actually prefer nice clean hair.
Ah yes, the other thing I wanted to reply to was about SureStart. Oh yes, getting rid of SureStart was an absolutely catastrophic decision. Through being an adopter, sitting on the adoption panel, and being a councillor, I am aware of so many families whose lives were changed for the better by having this support in place - and so many children whose lives have been blighted and warped by the removal. The way @Cyclefree feels about Post Office management is pretty much how I feel about those who decided to kill SureStart..
Some very interesting and well-informed comments today - including this one.
Ah yes, the other thing I wanted to reply to was about SureStart. Oh yes, getting rid of SureStart was an absolutely catastrophic decision. Through being an adopter, sitting on the adoption panel, and being a councillor, I am aware of so many families whose lives were changed for the better by having this support in place - and so many children whose lives have been blighted and warped by the removal. The way @Cyclefree feels about Post Office management is pretty much how I feel about those who decided to kill SureStart..
What has been the impact of the Pupil Premium?
There are two levels of PP - CLAs (Child Looked After, the current jargon for children in care or adopted) - get Pupil Premium Plus. The money is very useful, but as a parent you have to be very active in getting it allocated to support for your child; it goes straight to the school so the natural instinct for many is to subsume it into their general budget until pushed, because the guideance is woolly enough that can justify pretty much anything as supporting the child in question. A good school will be willing to use it for targeted TA support - two or three children in a class can provide enough funding for a TA to support them exclusively. With the general PP money, many of the parents of the eligible children won't be in a position to advocate for their child to get the funding, so it's down to the school being proactive and sympathetic.
An important caveat. A TA covers a multitude. Some are amazing. But, being minimum wage, there's no guarantee that they will be literate or numerate. Let alone skilled in dealing with trauma.
Beyond the fact VAT may or may not destroy private schools, why should you not pay VAT on it? I am slightly baffled at the logic.
My view is that we should be making state education so good private schools are irrelevant.
To a very large extent, if we're talking about learning, it already is. Not universally, but to a very large extent. If we're talking learning per pound spent, that's even more so. A lot of what private schools can offer is polish, confidence and connections. They're valuable, natch, but there is a hefty Matthew Effect (to he who has shall be given more...) which probably isn't socially desirable.
As for private schools- they've generally pushed fees through the roof in the last few decades, mostly because they could. And if they want to know how to cut costs without cutting quality, there are plenty of state schools who would be happy to offer tips.
A lot of what private schools spend the money on is teachers, which means class sizes are smaller than in the state system, and also smaller than in the independent sector of the 20th Century. Similarly sized state and private schools might have five maths teachers versus 15, for instance. State schools have teaching assistants in an attempt to flub the staff/pupil ratio.
Ah yes, the other thing I wanted to reply to was about SureStart. Oh yes, getting rid of SureStart was an absolutely catastrophic decision. Through being an adopter, sitting on the adoption panel, and being a councillor, I am aware of so many families whose lives were changed for the better by having this support in place - and so many children whose lives have been blighted and warped by the removal. The way @Cyclefree feels about Post Office management is pretty much how I feel about those who decided to kill SureStart..
What has been the impact of the Pupil Premium?
There are two levels of PP - CLAs (Child Looked After, the current jargon for children in care or adopted) - get Pupil Premium Plus. The money is very useful, but as a parent you have to be very active in getting it allocated to support for your child; it goes straight to the school so the natural instinct for many is to subsume it into their general budget until pushed, because the guideance is woolly enough that can justify pretty much anything as supporting the child in question. A good school will be willing to use it for targeted TA support - two or three children in a class can provide enough funding for a TA to support them exclusively. With the general PP money, many of the parents of the eligible children won't be in a position to advocate for their child to get the funding, so it's down to the school being proactive and sympathetic.
An important caveat. A TA covers a multitude. Some are amazing. But, being minimum wage, there's no guarantee that they will be literate or numerate. Let alone skilled in dealing with trauma.
It varies. When my younger child was in primary school, the TA she had had been sent by the school for training on attachment, autistic spectrum behaviours and several other things, and she was awesome. I think targeted TAs like that often have higher skill levels, but it is true that many don't.
Beyond the fact VAT may or may not destroy private schools, why should you not pay VAT on it? I am slightly baffled at the logic.
My view is that we should be making state education so good private schools are irrelevant.
Why do we not pay VAT on university fees? Why do we encourage certain behaviours through taxation and discourage others? Parents who educate their children privately are paying for other kids to be educated via the state, reducing the burden on the state, and paying to educate their kids (usually to a higher standard, a net good for the country) at the same time. The downside is the class based stigma, privilege and the way it turns some professions into a closed shop. Then again, the same could be said for Oxford and Cambridge. In which case, why not add VAT to studying there, but not to other universities?
Fascinating header. I wonder if we can extrapolate the guilt/shame idea out to whole groups or even nations.
If it extends to groups it would be as a metaphor. Groups as such don't have feelings or senses, only individuals can have those feelings.
Your traditional torch waving, pitchfork wielding mob (a phenomenon that shows no signs of disappearing) could be said to be unified in a feeling, unattractive as it is.
Ok, many of them do perhaps feel individual anger or whatever from mutual contagion, so yes the individuals in the group experience a common emotion. But an "angry mob" is angry because many in that group feel like that. I don't think an angry mob can be comprised of calm and rational members.
One of the nastier experiences in my life was attending, with a school nurse, a meeting of mothers in a school where there been an outbreak of headlice. Two or three of the mothers decided that a ‘traveller’ family was to blame and very quickly indeed the mood of the meeting turned very hostile indeed towards the perceived culprit. The school nurse and I agreed that it was very lucky there wasn’t a duckpond immediately available. I don’t think, actually, that the perceived culprit was to blame!
ISTR being told, by a friend whose child caught them at school, that (a) they spread very fast, and (b) the lice actually prefer nice clean hair.
Perfectly true. ‘Difficult’ concept to put across to an angry crowd though, especially when the members are feeling insulted as a result of ‘something dirty’ happening to their children and having an identifiable minority to blame.
Fascinating header. I wonder if we can extrapolate the guilt/shame idea out to whole groups or even nations.
If it extends to groups it would be as a metaphor. Groups as such don't have feelings or senses, only individuals can have those feelings.
Your traditional torch waving, pitchfork wielding mob (a phenomenon that shows no signs of disappearing) could be said to be unified in a feeling, unattractive as it is.
Ok, many of them do perhaps feel individual anger or whatever from mutual contagion, so yes the individuals in the group experience a common emotion. But an "angry mob" is angry because many in that group feel like that. I don't think an angry mob can be comprised of calm and rational members.
One of the nastier experiences in my life was attending, with a school nurse, a meeting of mothers in a school where there been an outbreak of headlice. Two or three of the mothers decided that a ‘traveller’ family was to blame and very quickly indeed the mood of the meeting turned very hostile indeed towards the perceived culprit. The school nurse and I agreed that it was very lucky there wasn’t a duckpond immediately available. I don’t think, actually, that the perceived culprit was to blame!
ISTR being told, by a friend whose child caught them at school, that (a) they spread very fast, and (b) the lice actually prefer nice clean hair.
I think b is a myth actually - put about to make 'nice' families feel that they're not immune! (Or to lessen the stigma.) Basically, they're not fussy.
When her [Natalie Elphicke's] husband was convicted of sexual assault, she called his victim a liar. Is this the sort of person who shares Labour values?'
'I'm delighted to welcome Natalie Elphicke to the Labour party.'
Ah yes, the other thing I wanted to reply to was about SureStart. Oh yes, getting rid of SureStart was an absolutely catastrophic decision. Through being an adopter, sitting on the adoption panel, and being a councillor, I am aware of so many families whose lives were changed for the better by having this support in place - and so many children whose lives have been blighted and warped by the removal. The way @Cyclefree feels about Post Office management is pretty much how I feel about those who decided to kill SureStart..
A very interesting and thoughtful header. Thank you @jamesdoyle.
I feel pretty murderous about the way the government is basically ignoring the recommendations of the IICSA reports which deal with the harm to and neglect of some of the most vulnerable children in our society. The government has basically waved 2 finger at it. Professor Alexis Jay has criticised it severely for its response. To no avail.
Nor is there any sign that Labour will do anything.
So yet another report, yet more recommendations shelved.
To me - how we deal with our children is the most important thing we can do in our lives and as a society. Our children are our offering to the future.
My 3 are the most important beings in my life. If I have achieved anything it will be leaving behind 3 wonderful human beings.
We should be ashamed of how we neglect them and how we ignore their interests when it clashes with ours. Shame is - or ought to be - a bloody useful tool to make sure that people change their behaviour for the better.
When her [Natalie Elphicke's] husband was convicted of sexual assault, she called his victim a liar. Is this the sort of person who shares Labour values?'
'I'm delighted to welcome Natalie Elphicke to the Labour party.'
People often go into denial and can’t accept that their partner isn’t what he seems. I don’t have any time for Elphicke and she shouldn’t have been accepted by Starmer but people and emotions are complicated .
“Privately owned assets” are seized on a daily basis. It’s called taxation.
No, there is a fundamental difference.
As a lawyer you should be smart enough to work through it from first principles and I don’t have time to spoon feed you
There’s not a fundamental difference. Whether the government seizes liquid assets or illiquid assets under threat of imprisonment or further financial punishment if you refuse is neither here not there.
See council tax. A tax for simply living.
Not at all.
Your world view appears to be that the government is the ultimate authority and anything we own and use privately is by their good graces
The alternative is that government is formed by the people to run certain common functions. Tax is a payment to facilitate that. But the remainder is whole and exclusively the purview of the private individual
Who decides the certain common functions and how the taxes are raised? The government, partially via the ballot box.
All taxation is confiscation of private property, not just taxes you think are somehow unfair.
The government decides yes, but their authority to do so comes from the demos.
For the government to declare that all private property is owned by the state - or only the property owned by certain undesirable groups or bodies - is a fundamental reshaping of the relative power of the state vs. the people.
Beyond the fact VAT may or may not destroy private schools, why should you not pay VAT on it? I am slightly baffled at the logic.
My view is that we should be making state education so good private schools are irrelevant.
On your first paragraph, the argument is that education is a public good / charitable activity and - like all charitable activities - is exempt from VAT.
When her [Natalie Elphicke's] husband was convicted of sexual assault, she called his victim a liar. Is this the sort of person who shares Labour values?'
'I'm delighted to welcome Natalie Elphicke to the Labour party.'
People often go into denial and can’t accept that their partner isn’t what he seems. I don’t have any time for Elphicke and she shouldn’t have been accepted by Starmer but people and emotions are complicated .
It’s more that Sir Keir appears to have a combination of Gordon Brown’s effortless charm & Theresa May’s relaxed manner when answering the question
“Privately owned assets” are seized on a daily basis. It’s called taxation.
No, there is a fundamental difference.
As a lawyer you should be smart enough to work through it from first principles and I don’t have time to spoon feed you
There’s not a fundamental difference. Whether the government seizes liquid assets or illiquid assets under threat of imprisonment or further financial punishment if you refuse is neither here not there.
See council tax. A tax for simply living.
Not at all.
Your world view appears to be that the government is the ultimate authority and anything we own and use privately is by their good graces
The alternative is that government is formed by the people to run certain common functions. Tax is a payment to facilitate that. But the remainder is whole and exclusively the purview of the private individual
Who decides the certain common functions and how the taxes are raised? The government, partially via the ballot box.
All taxation is confiscation of private property, not just taxes you think are somehow unfair.
The government decides yes, but their authority to do so comes from the demos.
For the government to declare that all private property is owned by the state - or only the property owned by certain undesirable groups or bodies - is a fundamental reshaping of the relative power of the state vs. the people.
It is not that all private property is owned by the state but that the state can choose how to confiscate private property by enacting tax laws, whether on income, property, education or windows.
Ah yes, the other thing I wanted to reply to was about SureStart. Oh yes, getting rid of SureStart was an absolutely catastrophic decision. Through being an adopter, sitting on the adoption panel, and being a councillor, I am aware of so many families whose lives were changed for the better by having this support in place - and so many children whose lives have been blighted and warped by the removal. The way @Cyclefree feels about Post Office management is pretty much how I feel about those who decided to kill SureStart..
A very interesting and thoughtful header. Thank you @jamesdoyle.
I feel pretty murderous about the way the government is basically ignoring the recommendations of the IICSA reports which deal with the harm to and neglect of some of the most vulnerable children in our society. The government has basically waved 2 finger at it. Professor Alexis Jay has criticised it severely for its response. To no avail.
Nor is there any sign that Labour will do anything.
So yet another report, yet more recommendations shelved.
To me - how we deal with our children is the most important thing we can do in our lives and as a society. Our children are our offering to the future.
My 3 are the most important beings in my life. If I have achieved anything it will be leaving behind 3 wonderful human beings.
We should be ashamed of how we neglect them and how we ignore their interests when it clashes with ours. Shame is - or ought to be - a bloody useful tool to make sure that people change their behaviour for the better.
Eldest grandson is a primary school teacher in a ‘difficult’ area of Basildon. Some of the stories he tells are very, very sad. Talk about starting behind square one!
“Privately owned assets” are seized on a daily basis. It’s called taxation.
No, there is a fundamental difference.
As a lawyer you should be smart enough to work through it from first principles and I don’t have time to spoon feed you
There’s not a fundamental difference. Whether the government seizes liquid assets or illiquid assets under threat of imprisonment or further financial punishment if you refuse is neither here not there.
See council tax. A tax for simply living.
Not at all.
Your world view appears to be that the government is the ultimate authority and anything we own and use privately is by their good graces
The alternative is that government is formed by the people to run certain common functions. Tax is a payment to facilitate that. But the remainder is whole and exclusively the purview of the private individual
Well, in the business world, Limited Liability is purely a creation of government.
And originally those were charters…
There are two mechanisms that get confused. A company or corporation is a group of people that can act in combination. They can do this in various forms - an association, a partnership or a company or corporation being the most common. The government simply says that if they comply with certain administrative requirements they can create an entity that is recognised as having a separate legal identity. That is an administrative function of the government - it is not creating anything new that does not flow from the people.
Similarly limited liability is essentially saying that society/the government will not hold individuals financially responsible for their actions provided that they comply with certain regulations. There is nothing to say that a company needs to have limited liability - and liability can be limited for other forms of individual cooperation (eg LLPs).
Essentially both companies and limited liability are the government saying that it will limit its own powers, so creating more space for individuals to operate.
“Privately owned assets” are seized on a daily basis. It’s called taxation.
No, there is a fundamental difference.
As a lawyer you should be smart enough to work through it from first principles and I don’t have time to spoon feed you
There’s not a fundamental difference. Whether the government seizes liquid assets or illiquid assets under threat of imprisonment or further financial punishment if you refuse is neither here not there.
See council tax. A tax for simply living.
Not at all.
Your world view appears to be that the government is the ultimate authority and anything we own and use privately is by their good graces
The alternative is that government is formed by the people to run certain common functions. Tax is a payment to facilitate that. But the remainder is whole and exclusively the purview of the private individual
It’s not my “world view”. I have given no opinion on it other than “it is what it is” because it’s the reality.
Beyond the fact VAT may or may not destroy private schools, why should you not pay VAT on it? I am slightly baffled at the logic.
My view is that we should be making state education so good private schools are irrelevant.
To a very large extent, if we're talking about learning, it already is. Not universally, but to a very large extent. If we're talking learning per pound spent, that's even more so. A lot of what private schools can offer is polish, confidence and connections. They're valuable, natch, but there is a hefty Matthew Effect (to he who has shall be given more...) which probably isn't socially desirable.
As for private schools- they've generally pushed fees through the roof in the last few decades, mostly because they could. And if they want to know how to cut costs without cutting quality, there are plenty of state schools who would be happy to offer tips.
A lot of what private schools spend the money on is teachers, which means class sizes are smaller than in the state system, and also smaller than in the independent sector of the 20th Century. Similarly sized state and private schools might have five maths teachers versus 15, for instance. State schools have teaching assistants in an attempt to flub the staff/pupil ratio.
FWIW, I spoke to the Eton STAR team the other day. They estimate that it would take about £4k per pupil in addition to the pupil premium to give state school kids the full educational benefit of somewhere like Eton (which is where they came up with the £1m annual contribution Eton is making to the Eton STAR academy schools they are opening)
Ah yes, the other thing I wanted to reply to was about SureStart. Oh yes, getting rid of SureStart was an absolutely catastrophic decision. Through being an adopter, sitting on the adoption panel, and being a councillor, I am aware of so many families whose lives were changed for the better by having this support in place - and so many children whose lives have been blighted and warped by the removal. The way @Cyclefree feels about Post Office management is pretty much how I feel about those who decided to kill SureStart..
A very interesting and thoughtful header. Thank you @jamesdoyle.
I feel pretty murderous about the way the government is basically ignoring the recommendations of the IICSA reports which deal with the harm to and neglect of some of the most vulnerable children in our society. The government has basically waved 2 finger at it. Professor Alexis Jay has criticised it severely for its response. To no avail.
Nor is there any sign that Labour will do anything.
So yet another report, yet more recommendations shelved.
To me - how we deal with our children is the most important thing we can do in our lives and as a society. Our children are our offering to the future.
My 3 are the most important beings in my life. If I have achieved anything it will be leaving behind 3 wonderful human beings.
We should be ashamed of how we neglect them and how we ignore their interests when it clashes with ours. Shame is - or ought to be - a bloody useful tool to make sure that people change their behaviour for the better.
Eldest grandson is a primary school teacher in a ‘difficult’ area of Basildon. Some of the stories he tells are very, very sad. Talk about starting behind square one!
My very first legal work was volunteering at the North Ken Law Centre helping young black boys charged with mugging. They were only a few years younger than me. They were stuck in B&B's with no real family and a social worker. They weren't irredeemably bad just not given the structures to keep them on the right path so they hung around with gangs in lieu of a family. Individually they could be quite charming. My job was going round to where they lived and getting them out of bed for court appearances and case conferences etc., I remember having to tell one that, no, he could not bring his ghetto blaster to court and, no, wearing a whole load of gold jewellery round his neck when he was accused of theft was not a good idea. Basically, I was busy being their mother.
It occurred to me that there but for the grace of God etc.,..... I had parents and a family who bloody well made sure I knew the difference between right and wrong and when I went wrong and I did - a lot - when I was younger I was told so and made to put things right. I still feel ashamed at some of the things I did.
But the most important thing to remember is that we will make mistakes but when we do we say sorry, mean it, try to put things right and try to learn. And that applies our entire life. Though it is so much harder to learn that if you don't learn it when young.
This is rather a pragmatic response to the U.S. auto industry completely failing to recognise what was coming, and invest in it. (A blindness pretty common on PB over the last decade, too.)
The devil will be in the detail; if it allows Chinese manufacturers to partner with US ones to build EVs in the US, everyone will benefit.
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
Because endowments are usually derived from donations made to further a specific charitable purpose and are not therefore private property. If they are not being used for that purpose they can be (and often are, actually) forfeited.
It has been done before on a grand scale, incidentally. Check out the disendowment of the Church in Wales in 1920.
Based on Wiki it doesn’t seem that the church of wales is helpful to you.
The main financial terms were that the Church no longer received tithe money (a land tax), but kept all its churches, properties and glebes. The Welsh Church Commissioners were set up by the Act to identify affected assets and oversee their transfer.
A compulsory tax to a non-worshipper is something the government can rightfully intervene on. Seizing of privately owned assets is not, which is why the properties were left with the church of wales
Wikipedia is wrong, as are you.
The Church in Wales was stripped of all assets acquired before or derived from assets acquired before 1660, except the parish churches themselves.
And having been a charity secretary on and off for twenty years, I know what the law is and isn’t on the use of funds, thanks, so I’m not going to be lectured or patronised by somebody who may be well connected but is clearly pretty ignorant and not willing to learn from those who do.
You may not like the solution, but if we’re to actually deal with the genuine problem of a lot of private schools turning out complete idiots who effortlessly float to the top and fuck everything up, it’s the obvious one to press for.
Telegraph Associate Editor tells Cummings to do one:
"Oddly, no one, including the “genius” that is Dominic Cummings, thought to model [lockdown economics] at the time. Before he attempts to fix Britain, Barnard Castle’s own tinpot authoritarian might perhaps want to consider owning up to being part of the reason why the country is in such a mess."
Thanks for kind comments, and glad I could provoke some thoughts.
On a couple of things:
yes, absolutely this applies beyond children who have been in care. There are lots of people out there whohave suffered neglect or abuse during their early years, which forms their personallity and worldview. Some manage their issues, others can't, but they do exist.
I am strongly of the view that it's very, very common among people who get caught up in crime - the demographic data on prisoners shows a strong correlation with the same factors found in neglected/abused children, so it would be a surprise if it didn't. As such, using this as a way to model likely behaviour and reactions, and to plan how to work wihth prisoners to improve their oppounrtieis and behvaiour, would be a great way forward.
Interestingly, my niece was for a few years recently head of education for a group of high security prisons in London, and she had independently arrived at a similar conclusion, and it helped her enormously in reaching out to the prisoners and getting good results. Sadly she left because the minister responsible didn't like her working methods, and thought that prison was for punishment, not rehabilitation.
Hmm. There was another point someone made that I was going to respond to, but I've forgotten it. Need to go back and check!
A great header, James, which accords entirely with my understanding (and more limited experience), and expresses it more clearly than I could.
"Tough on crime" is entirely counterproductive when it actively sabotages the possibility of rehabilitation.
Your point about prompt consequences being essential suggests that the sometimes multi-year delays in the criminal justice system also makes things worse.
Eurovision: Switzerland has been backed this morning and is vying for second favouritism with a drifting Israel. Croatia is odds-on (evens with Skybet). Any other country can be backed at 20s or more.
Switzerland is a great song , Israel in any other year would probably win.
The Israeli song is generic nothingness. I don’t see why it would win any year. Georgia’s “Firefighter” is in a similar style but does it better.
Joost Klein was pure Eurovision, but will he compete tonight?
He's being investigated by the Swedish police for threats of violence towards a, presumably Jewish, photographer
"Pure Eurovision" at its finest..
It sounds like he failed to learn the lesson that two wrongs don't make a right.
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
Because endowments are usually derived from donations made to further a specific charitable purpose and are not therefore private property. If they are not being used for that purpose they can be (and often are, actually) forfeited.
It has been done before on a grand scale, incidentally. Check out the disendowment of the Church in Wales in 1920.
Based on Wiki it doesn’t seem that the church of wales is helpful to you.
The main financial terms were that the Church no longer received tithe money (a land tax), but kept all its churches, properties and glebes. The Welsh Church Commissioners were set up by the Act to identify affected assets and oversee their transfer.
A compulsory tax to a non-worshipper is something the government can rightfully intervene on. Seizing of privately owned assets is not, which is why the properties were left with the church of wales
According charitable status to institutions with such massive endowments, which they don't then significantly use for charitable purposes is perhaps also something government can legitimately intervene on ?
Eurovision: Switzerland has been backed this morning and is vying for second favouritism with a drifting Israel. Croatia is odds-on (evens with Skybet). Any other country can be backed at 20s or more.
Switzerland is a great song , Israel in any other year would probably win.
The Israeli song is generic nothingness. I don’t see why it would win any year. Georgia’s “Firefighter” is in a similar style but does it better.
Joost Klein was pure Eurovision, but will he compete tonight?
He's being investigated by the Swedish police for threats of violence towards a, presumably Jewish, photographer
"Pure Eurovision" at its finest..
It sounds like he failed to learn the lesson that two wrongs don't make a right.
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
Because endowments are usually derived from donations made to further a specific charitable purpose and are not therefore private property. If they are not being used for that purpose they can be (and often are, actually) forfeited.
It has been done before on a grand scale, incidentally. Check out the disendowment of the Church in Wales in 1920.
Based on Wiki it doesn’t seem that the church of wales is helpful to you.
The main financial terms were that the Church no longer received tithe money (a land tax), but kept all its churches, properties and glebes. The Welsh Church Commissioners were set up by the Act to identify affected assets and oversee their transfer.
A compulsory tax to a non-worshipper is something the government can rightfully intervene on. Seizing of privately owned assets is not, which is why the properties were left with the church of wales
Wikipedia is wrong, as are you.
The Church in Wales was stripped of all assets acquired before or derived from assets acquired before 1660, except the parish churches themselves.
And having been a charity secretary on and off for twenty years, I know what the law is and isn’t on the use of funds, thanks, so I’m not going to be lectured or patronised by somebody who may be well connected but is clearly pretty ignorant and not willing to learn from those who do.
You may not like the solution, but if we’re to actually deal with the genuine problem of a lot of private schools turning out complete idiots who effortlessly float to the top and fuck everything up, it’s the obvious one to press for.
I’ve never looked at the disestablishment of the church of wales. You, being Welsh, an organ player and a historian probably have more interest in that.
I do find it strange that you need to accuse me of ignorance or unwillingness to learn. Playing the man rather than making a reasoned argument.
As always my argument is not “can” but “should”. Parliament can do many things.
Your basic argument is that a money given for a purpose is not a “private good” and that therefore the government has both the right and the ability to seize it. My argument is that a charitable trust exists and has legal rights in and of itself - as a legal person to seize its assets is no different to seizing the assets of an individual.
So back to my original question which you have avoided answering in your aggressive desire to be right:
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
Eurovision: Switzerland has been backed this morning and is vying for second favouritism with a drifting Israel. Croatia is odds-on (evens with Skybet). Any other country can be backed at 20s or more.
Switzerland is a great song , Israel in any other year would probably win.
The Israeli song is generic nothingness. I don’t see why it would win any year. Georgia’s “Firefighter” is in a similar style but does it better.
Joost Klein was pure Eurovision, but will he compete tonight?
He's being investigated by the Swedish police for threats of violence towards a, presumably Jewish, photographer
"Pure Eurovision" at its finest..
"We would like to make it clear that, contrary to some media reports and social media speculation, this incident did not involve any other performer or delegation member." - the EBU.
Telegraph Associate Editor tells Cummings to do one:
"Oddly, no one, including the “genius” that is Dominic Cummings, thought to model [lockdown economics] at the time. Before he attempts to fix Britain, Barnard Castle’s own tinpot authoritarian might perhaps want to consider owning up to being part of the reason why the country is in such a mess."
Curious. In the wake of Brexit, the brilliance of Cummings was universally accepted and proclaimed across the British Right. What went wrong? Have they just forgotten about Brexit? Are they still smarting from the Boris stuff?
Fascinating header. I wonder if we can extrapolate the guilt/shame idea out to whole groups or even nations.
If it extends to groups it would be as a metaphor. Groups as such don't have feelings or senses, only individuals can have those feelings.
Your traditional torch waving, pitchfork wielding mob (a phenomenon that shows no signs of disappearing) could be said to be unified in a feeling, unattractive as it is.
Ok, many of them do perhaps feel individual anger or whatever from mutual contagion, so yes the individuals in the group experience a common emotion. But an "angry mob" is angry because many in that group feel like that. I don't think an angry mob can be comprised of calm and rational members.
One of the nastier experiences in my life was attending, with a school nurse, a meeting of mothers in a school where there been an outbreak of headlice. Two or three of the mothers decided that a ‘traveller’ family was to blame and very quickly indeed the mood of the meeting turned very hostile indeed towards the perceived culprit. The school nurse and I agreed that it was very lucky there wasn’t a duckpond immediately available. I don’t think, actually, that the perceived culprit was to blame!
ISTR being told, by a friend whose child caught them at school, that (a) they spread very fast, and (b) the lice actually prefer nice clean hair.
Perfectly true. ‘Difficult’ concept to put across to an angry crowd though, especially when the members are feeling insulted as a result of ‘something dirty’ happening to their children and having an identifiable minority to blame.
Though actually pretty easy to get rid of, with the use of copious hair conditioner and a very close and finely toothed comb.
Yep. It will be interesting to see how other artists and the audience react.
It seems that it wasn’t due to anything with the Israelis but was something he is accused of doing to a female member of the production crew so maybe the other artists can criticise him for being a twat and not attack the Israeli entry and generally just get on with the show.
Fascinating header. I wonder if we can extrapolate the guilt/shame idea out to whole groups or even nations.
If it extends to groups it would be as a metaphor. Groups as such don't have feelings or senses, only individuals can have those feelings.
Groups have a culture and can act as one, whether football crowds or mobs, for example, or corporations.
They can also have a centre which can direct and guide, a character, even some sort of vision which produces values, and then courses of action and practices.
Consider the notion of the soul of a company:
The soul of a company is the unique qualities that make it distinct, such as its character traits. It's also the promise that purpose makes to people, or the cause the business is fighting for. Every company has a soul, and it's built on values such as innovation, quality, value, freedom, price, and choice. For example, Apple is described as innovative, design-conscious, iconic, and secretive, which are qualities that reflect its soul.
(This imo rather leaves out human and ethical values.)
Or the culture of an army - the UK tries to train it's soldiers to act legally and morally, and trains them in international law and the rules of war. That's not to say it always works, nor to ignore a darker history, but that is the aspiration.
Compare that to the Russian Army where there are few guard rails - domination by the use of sexual crime / exploitation on women, or use of violence and torture on prisoners, is an expression of power, and a part of the culture which was there in 1944-5 and is still there now in Ukraine. That assault is on the 'soul' and culture of Ukraine, with the aim of poisoning or destroying it.
There was a good exploration of some of these aspects in the Telegraph Ukraine, the Latest podcast yesterday.
Eurovision: Switzerland has been backed this morning and is vying for second favouritism with a drifting Israel. Croatia is odds-on (evens with Skybet). Any other country can be backed at 20s or more.
Switzerland is a great song , Israel in any other year would probably win.
The Israeli song is generic nothingness. I don’t see why it would win any year. Georgia’s “Firefighter” is in a similar style but does it better.
Joost Klein was pure Eurovision, but will he compete tonight?
He's being investigated by the Swedish police for threats of violence towards a, presumably Jewish, photographer
Beyond the fact VAT may or may not destroy private schools, why should you not pay VAT on it? I am slightly baffled at the logic.
My view is that we should be making state education so good private schools are irrelevant.
Why do we not pay VAT on university fees? Why do we encourage certain behaviours through taxation and discourage others? Parents who educate their children privately are paying for other kids to be educated via the state, reducing the burden on the state, and paying to educate their kids (usually to a higher standard, a net good for the country) at the same time. The downside is the class based stigma, privilege and the way it turns some professions into a closed shop. Then again, the same could be said for Oxford and Cambridge. In which case, why not add VAT to studying there, but not to other universities?
The logic of VAT as it is currently is flawed and should be decomplicated. At the moment it seriously matters whether a Jaffa cake is a cake (no VAT) or a biscuit (VAT applies). That's just an introduction to the absurdities.
VAT should apply, at a much lower rate, to everything. There is no good reason for complex exemptions. All it does is distort markets, gives a lever to politicians to court favour, and make a living for accountants and lawyers while making smaller businesses a bit more complicated.
A higher rate could apply to pearls, diamonds, private jets and yachts.
Ah yes, the other thing I wanted to reply to was about SureStart. Oh yes, getting rid of SureStart was an absolutely catastrophic decision. Through being an adopter, sitting on the adoption panel, and being a councillor, I am aware of so many families whose lives were changed for the better by having this support in place - and so many children whose lives have been blighted and warped by the removal. The way @Cyclefree feels about Post Office management is pretty much how I feel about those who decided to kill SureStart..
A very interesting and thoughtful header. Thank you @jamesdoyle.
I feel pretty murderous about the way the government is basically ignoring the recommendations of the IICSA reports which deal with the harm to and neglect of some of the most vulnerable children in our society. The government has basically waved 2 finger at it. Professor Alexis Jay has criticised it severely for its response. To no avail.
Nor is there any sign that Labour will do anything.
So yet another report, yet more recommendations shelved.
To me - how we deal with our children is the most important thing we can do in our lives and as a society. Our children are our offering to the future.
My 3 are the most important beings in my life. If I have achieved anything it will be leaving behind 3 wonderful human beings.
We should be ashamed of how we neglect them and how we ignore their interests when it clashes with ours. Shame is - or ought to be - a bloody useful tool to make sure that people change their behaviour for the better.
Eldest grandson is a primary school teacher in a ‘difficult’ area of Basildon. Some of the stories he tells are very, very sad. Talk about starting behind square one!
My very first legal work was volunteering at the North Ken Law Centre helping young black boys charged with mugging. They were only a few years younger than me. They were stuck in B&B's with no real family and a social worker. They weren't irredeemably bad just not given the structures to keep them on the right path so they hung around with gangs in lieu of a family. Individually they could be quite charming. My job was going round to where they lived and getting them out of bed for court appearances and case conferences etc., I remember having to tell one that, no, he could not bring his ghetto blaster to court and, no, wearing a whole load of gold jewellery round his neck when he was accused of theft was not a good idea. Basically, I was busy being their mother.
It occurred to me that there but for the grace of God etc.,..... I had parents and a family who bloody well made sure I knew the difference between right and wrong and when I went wrong and I did - a lot - when I was younger I was told so and made to put things right. I still feel ashamed at some of the things I did.
But the most important thing to remember is that we will make mistakes but when we do we say sorry, mean it, try to put things right and try to learn. And that applies our entire life. Though it is so much harder to learn that if you don't learn it when young.
It's also difficult to say sorry when you are fatalistically convinced that that's who you are - a bad person. Why say sorry? You now you're going to do it again, and deserve the punishment. It's just confirmation.
Beyond the fact VAT may or may not destroy private schools, why should you not pay VAT on it? I am slightly baffled at the logic.
My view is that we should be making state education so good private schools are irrelevant.
Indeed, Starmer’s priority in education should be levelling up, rather than levelling down by attacking private schools.
Applying a tax (VAT) that applies to a disabled pensioner on benefits buying a Kit Kat to much wealthier people is not an attack, it's a policy. Is VAT on Kit Kats an 'attack' on disabled pensioners on benefits?
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
The leading places were chartered by the state ostensibly to serve the public good, not to decide what the public good is. Nowadays it's supposed to be the electorate that decides that. Sure, the exclusionary principle is all about privation - you've got that dead right - but seriously the c***s who run these places aren't going to want to run around saying in public that their "private property" is being taken off them by a bunch of cheap-suited desk jockey wallahs in Whitehall.
"Private" is like a holy word for Tories and the British bourgeoisie generally. Best to just f***ing confiscate.
If you thought the effect of Truss was fun…. Confiscation of private assets would essentially stop all those dirty furriners buying government bonds. At least at rates of interest that are less than eye watering.
Which would then require either a cut in government spending of double digits or hilarious inflation from printing money.
Beyond the fact VAT may or may not destroy private schools, why should you not pay VAT on it? I am slightly baffled at the logic.
My view is that we should be making state education so good private schools are irrelevant.
Indeed, Starmer’s priority in education should be levelling up, rather than levelling down by attacking private schools.
Applying a tax (VAT) that applies to a disabled pensioner on benefits buying a Kit Kat to much wealthier people is not an attack, it's a policy. Is VAT on Kit Kats an 'attack' on disabled pensioners on benefits?
I'd get rid of VAT on disabled pensioner Kit Kats. It is time for them to take a tax break.
This is rather a pragmatic response to the U.S. auto industry completely failing to recognise what was coming, and invest in it. (A blindness pretty common on PB over the last decade, too.)
The devil will be in the detail; if it allows Chinese manufacturers to partner with US ones to build EVs in the US, everyone will benefit.
@megasaur you have accused me of racism (with no evidence), anti semitism (with no evidence ), homophobia (with no evidence) and other discriminations. I repeatedly asked you to look at my past posts so you could see how wrong you were and obviously you did not do so. You even posted you knew nothing about me, but still made a series of inaccurate and offensive comments. If you did know about me you would have known I am probably one of the most liberal regular posters on PB with a long history of liberal causes, as others here will attest.
You made some very offensive posts without checking out the facts. You also made incorrect assumptions about the post I made (eg assuming the girls were prostitutes).
I assume you are familiar with the famous Cook and Moore Tarzan sketch. It is still very funny today. It is not offensive to the disabled. It is funny because it is absurd. There is a difference. Ricky Gervais is rather good at explaining this stuff.
On the strip are significant numbers of girls with feather headdresses imitating showgirls, Elvis look alikes and topless muscle bound men with cowboy hats. You can have your photo taken with them and they earn an income for doing so. I posted jokingly about two of these girls and an Elvis impersonator who were together and completely deficient in the normal qualities needed for the roles they were playing. A bit like the Tarsan sketch. All credit to them doing what they were doing and I would never make fun of them to their face, but the combination of the 3 of them together looked ridiculous and I posted 'Only in Vegas'. I was not laughing at the roles they were playing but their inappropriateness for the roles eg like me applying to be a Chippendale. There is an important difference as it relates to discrimination.
May I suggest that in future instead of posting that you know nothing about a poster, you check them out before commenting accordingly.
I think others here would be willing to attest you have got me wrong. I have literally spent years campaigning against discrimination which you could have easily found out but you didn't.
Labour’s VAT plans blamed for fall in private school entries
Enrolments are expected to drop even further this September as parents are deterred by higher fees, which could rise by up to 20%
The number of children joining private schools has dropped by the largest proportion in more than a decade, new figures reveal.
Enrolments at independent schools this academic year have fallen by 2.7 per cent, according to a report by the Independent Schools Council (ISC), the largest annual drop since it began collecting data on new starters in 2011.
The body, which represents almost 1,400 private schools, said Labour’s pledge to remove the VAT exemption for fees deterred parents from committing to private education this year and predicted numbers would drop further this autumn. Experts say the policy could lead some schools to close.
1) Quite a number of private schools are *already* hiking fees in anticipation of a VAT/business rate increase to build up a war chest to cushion future shocks;
2) They are also hiking fees to deal with rapidly increasing costs, particularly fuel but also staffing and insurance, especially vehicle insurance;
3) They are also not immune to the collapsing numbers of children actually being born. Indeed, as those demographics where the birth rate is declining most slowly tend also to be the poorest, they're being hit harder than anyone else.
However, on the specifics of VAT and business rates for those schools (actually a minority, but including most private schools that have secondary aged children) there are some key issues.
It doesn't affect Eton, Winchester, Wellington, Roedean, CLC, Clifton, Westminster etc. Their parents are (a) rich enough to afford VAT and (b) mostly live overseas anyway and you would be surprised* at the tricks overseas owners can get up to to avoid taxes and charges. There is one private school in Staffs that hasn't paid a penny of tax in ten years despite making vast profits because its owners in Shanghai never actually send the fees over from China. They also have a wider pool of recruits to draw on. Finally, they have literally billions in endowments (ironically, several are so rich they have no need to charge fees if they don't wish to).
So extra taxes and charges will do no harm to those parts that not only entrench inequality but turn out students brilliant at passing exams and utterly convinced of their own intellectual superiority but actually rather intellectually lazy, bad at understanding complex problems and too full of themselves to learn new stuff.
But it will be a killer for small private day schools, which are actually by far the most useful and least damaging of the private school sector. I am dubious as to how many will survive the next five years even with the skyrocketing number of EHCPs which the state sector simply can't cope with.
This, therefore, is a policy set to do the opposite of what is intended. I therefore suggest it is a bad policy.
*apart from TSE obviously as it's his job.
Hunch: it'll be 5% VAT, with a claim it will eventually be 20%, but it won't.
Well, that would help mitigate some of the worst effects.
But if we really want to sort out the issues with Eton, Roedean etc, disendowment is going to be needed.
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
The leading places were chartered by the state ostensibly to serve the public good, not to decide what the public good is. Nowadays it's supposed to be the electorate that decides that. Sure, the exclusionary principle is all about privation - you've got that dead right - but seriously the c***s who run these places aren't going to want to run around saying in public that their "private property" is being taken off them by a bunch of cheap-suited desk jockey wallahs in Whitehall.
"Private" is like a holy word for Tories and the British bourgeoisie generally. Best to just f***ing confiscate.
If you thought the effect of Truss was fun…. Confiscation of private assets would essentially stop all those dirty furriners buying government bonds. At least at rates of interest that are less than eye watering.
Which would then require either a cut in government spending of double digits or hilarious inflation from printing money.
Argentina, here we come….
I’m aware of a specific situation where a US company majority owned by a private sector Chinese company decided not to invest $300-400m in the US following a comment by Trump that he intended to confiscate Chinese owned assets in the US.
I tried to persuade them that the US government couldn’t just expropriate assets without due process (I know, 1917 and all that) but they explained to me that that wasn’t their “lived experience” of governments…
Eurovision: Switzerland has been backed this morning and is vying for second favouritism with a drifting Israel. Croatia is odds-on (evens with Skybet). Any other country can be backed at 20s or more.
Switzerland is a great song , Israel in any other year would probably win.
The Israeli song is generic nothingness. I don’t see why it would win any year. Georgia’s “Firefighter” is in a similar style but does it better.
Joost Klein was pure Eurovision, but will he compete tonight?
He's being investigated by the Swedish police for threats of violence towards a, presumably Jewish, photographer
"Pure Eurovision" at its finest..
It sounds like he failed to learn the lesson that two wrongs don't make a right.
The suggestion that this involves a Jewish photographer is purely speculation, as far as I can see. That’s not been reported. It has been reported that the incident did NOT involve the Israeli entrant. Eurovision say he verbally threatened a female production worker (no indication that she was a photographer).
Beyond the fact VAT may or may not destroy private schools, why should you not pay VAT on it? I am slightly baffled at the logic.
My view is that we should be making state education so good private schools are irrelevant.
Why do we not pay VAT on university fees? Why do we encourage certain behaviours through taxation and discourage others? Parents who educate their children privately are paying for other kids to be educated via the state, reducing the burden on the state, and paying to educate their kids (usually to a higher standard, a net good for the country) at the same time. The downside is the class based stigma, privilege and the way it turns some professions into a closed shop. Then again, the same could be said for Oxford and Cambridge. In which case, why not add VAT to studying there, but not to other universities?
The logic of VAT as it is currently is flawed and should be decomplicated. At the moment it seriously matters whether a Jaffa cake is a cake (no VAT) or a biscuit (VAT applies). That's just an introduction to the absurdities.
VAT should apply, at a much lower rate, to everything. There is no good reason for complex exemptions. All it does is distort markets, gives a lever to politicians to court favour, and make a living for accountants and lawyers while making smaller businesses a bit more complicated.
A higher rate could apply to pearls, diamonds, private jets and yachts.
Chocolate biscuit, not just any biscuit, is I believe what matters to the VAT rules.
Ah yes, the other thing I wanted to reply to was about SureStart. Oh yes, getting rid of SureStart was an absolutely catastrophic decision. Through being an adopter, sitting on the adoption panel, and being a councillor, I am aware of so many families whose lives were changed for the better by having this support in place - and so many children whose lives have been blighted and warped by the removal. The way @Cyclefree feels about Post Office management is pretty much how I feel about those who decided to kill SureStart..
What has been the impact of the Pupil Premium?
There are two levels of PP - CLAs (Child Looked After, the current jargon for children in care or adopted) - get Pupil Premium Plus. The money is very useful, but as a parent you have to be very active in getting it allocated to support for your child; it goes straight to the school so the natural instinct for many is to subsume it into their general budget until pushed, because the guideance is woolly enough that can justify pretty much anything as supporting the child in question. A good school will be willing to use it for targeted TA support - two or three children in a class can provide enough funding for a TA to support them exclusively. With the general PP money, many of the parents of the eligible children won't be in a position to advocate for their child to get the funding, so it's down to the school being proactive and sympathetic.
Exactly this - we are currently in a fight at our school to keep the (large sums of) Pupil Premium + we receive ringfenced rather than subsumed into eg teaching assistant salaries. It's particularly difficult for schools to protect these funds when they have other big holes in their budgets, such as now.
In summary, PP and PP+ is a great idea that suffers from a lack of accountability over how the funds are spent, and lack of effective measurement of the disaggregated impact on children who have those funds attached. Also, PP (not PP+) is pretty measly so when you actually work out what you can buy with it, it ain't much.
If someone allegedly questions one's parentage one should not allegedly smack the alleged questioner in the face.
Of course not, but we don't yet know what actually happened.
Wouldn't it be great if they disqualified all entries bar the Israeli contribution. Thus the winning entry played twice, last year's winner once. It would all be over in a shade over 10 minutes and we could watch repeats of the Repair Shop instead.
Comments
That song with the Lilith invoker (evoker?) dressed in bandages, performing in front of a big eye symbol, and declaring that she is still wet from the October rain hurricane interests me not a little.
She may change the words, perhaps back to how some of them were.
The Croatian entry is interesting too, with its ghostly images of cattle.
We're talking about an audience of 150m+.
Back at the beginning of 2009, during a previous Gaza massacre, a film called Defiance was advertised all over the place.
Whilst ultimately it is individual, it is misleading to say there is not a very significant group impact that can be dominant in certain settings.
It has been done before on a grand scale, incidentally. Check out the disendowment of the Church in Wales in 1920.
Oh yes, getting rid of SureStart was an absolutely catastrophic decision. Through being an adopter, sitting on the adoption panel, and being a councillor, I am aware of so many families whose lives were changed for the better by having this support in place - and so many children whose lives have been blighted and warped by the removal. The way @Cyclefree feels about Post Office management is pretty much how I feel about those who decided to kill SureStart..
If you look at Eton, for example, it’s very broadly defined as being for the purposes of education. Clearly the school is part of that but there’s also a lot of broader educational work.
But the assets are owned by a trust. For the government to break the trust to take the assets would be theft.
Here it was bright enough to see some colour but the overall impression was of moving white mist.
Still very impressive though.
Might be visible again tonight but more likely to be the green glow on the northern horizon type which does need a camera and a dark location.
But of course that isn't the point of the policy. It's pure red meat for Labour's activist base, a kind of reverse-clause-four. Everyone knows that Starmer has shifted Labour to the middle and is a heir-to-Blair type figure. This is the bit of red meat he has to throw his activist base to prove he's Tony Blair lite and not David Cameron lite. Much as foxhunting was for the Blair era. The difference was, of course, a ban on foxhunting was never going to cost the taxpayer a fortune and bugger up the education of thousands of children.
The main financial terms were that the Church no longer received tithe money (a land tax), but kept all its churches, properties and glebes. The Welsh Church Commissioners were set up by the Act to identify affected assets and oversee their transfer.
A compulsory tax to a non-worshipper is something the government can rightfully intervene on. Seizing of privately owned assets is not, which is why the properties were left with the church of wales
As a lawyer you should be smart enough to work through it from first principles and I don’t have time to spoon feed you
See council tax. A tax for simply living.
"Private" is like a holy word for Tories and the British bourgeoisie generally. Best to just f***ing confiscate.
The abuse of chartering was really a 17-19 century thing (the British South Africa Company, the Royal Niger Company, the Hudson Bay Company, the East India Company, the North Borneo Company, etc etc.)
Your world view appears to be that the government is the ultimate authority and anything we own and use privately is by their good graces
The alternative is that government is formed by the people to run certain common functions. Tax is a payment to facilitate that. But the remainder is whole and exclusively the purview of the private individual
Must have been scary as hell for the ancients...
All taxation is confiscation of private property, not just taxes you think are somehow unfair.
https://x.com/shattenstone/status/1789211261063844297?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
My view is that we should be making state education so good private schools are irrelevant.
Its a school talent show with added feather boas.
Not sure what it has to do with politics but I'd bet on you as a father.
"Pure Eurovision" at its finest..
As for private schools- they've generally pushed fees through the roof in the last few decades, mostly because they could. And if they want to know how to cut costs without cutting quality, there are plenty of state schools who would be happy to offer tips.
After one night shift, I was cleaning my teeth in the works bathroom and thinking this two minutes was taking a long time, when I caught my reflection in the mirror and remembered it was a manual toothbrush so I just needed to stop moving my arm.
A TA covers a multitude. Some are amazing. But, being minimum wage, there's no guarantee that they will be literate or numerate. Let alone skilled in dealing with trauma.
When her [Natalie Elphicke's] husband was convicted of sexual assault, she called his victim a liar. Is this the sort of person who shares Labour values?'
'I'm delighted to welcome Natalie Elphicke to the Labour party.'
https://x.com/jrc1921/status/1789044012025860377?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
I feel pretty murderous about the way the government is basically ignoring the recommendations of the IICSA reports which deal with the harm to and neglect of some of the most vulnerable children in our society. The government has basically waved 2 finger at it. Professor Alexis Jay has criticised it severely for its response. To no avail.
Nor is there any sign that Labour will do anything.
So yet another report, yet more recommendations shelved.
To me - how we deal with our children is the most important thing we can do in our lives and as a society. Our children are our offering to the future.
My 3 are the most important beings in my life. If I have achieved anything it will be leaving behind 3 wonderful human beings.
We should be ashamed of how we neglect them and how we ignore their interests when it clashes with ours. Shame is - or ought to be - a bloody useful tool to make sure that people change their behaviour for the better.
For the government to declare that all private property is owned by the state - or only the property owned by certain undesirable groups or bodies - is a fundamental reshaping of the relative power of the state vs. the people.
On your second paragraph I absolutely agree.
Talk about starting behind square one!
There are two mechanisms that get confused. A company or corporation is a group of people that can act in combination. They can do this in various forms - an association, a partnership or a company or corporation being the most common. The government simply says that if they comply with certain administrative requirements they can create an entity that is recognised as having a separate legal identity. That is an administrative function of the government - it is not creating anything new that does not flow from the people.
Similarly limited liability is essentially saying that society/the government will not hold individuals financially responsible for their actions provided that they comply with certain regulations. There is nothing to say that a company needs to have limited liability - and liability can be limited for other forms of individual cooperation (eg LLPs).
Essentially both companies and limited liability are the government saying that it will limit its own powers, so creating more space for individuals to operate.
That’s not a response to a reasoned argument.
C-. Must try harder.
It occurred to me that there but for the grace of God etc.,..... I had parents and a family who bloody well made sure I knew the difference between right and wrong and when I went wrong and I did - a lot - when I was younger I was told so and made to put things right. I still feel ashamed at some of the things I did.
But the most important thing to remember is that we will make mistakes but when we do we say sorry, mean it, try to put things right and try to learn. And that applies our entire life. Though it is so much harder to learn that if you don't learn it when young.
This is rather a pragmatic response to the U.S. auto industry completely failing to recognise what was coming, and invest in it.
(A blindness pretty common on PB over the last decade, too.)
The devil will be in the detail; if it allows Chinese manufacturers to partner with US ones to build EVs in the US, everyone will benefit.
The Church in Wales was stripped of all assets acquired before or derived from assets acquired before 1660, except the parish churches themselves.
And having been a charity secretary on and off for twenty years, I know what the law is and isn’t on the use of funds, thanks, so I’m not going to be lectured or patronised by somebody who may be well connected but is clearly pretty ignorant and not willing to learn from those who do.
You may not like the solution, but if we’re to actually deal with the genuine problem of a lot of private schools turning out complete idiots who effortlessly float to the top and fuck everything up, it’s the obvious one to press for.
"Oddly, no one, including the “genius” that is Dominic Cummings, thought to model [lockdown economics] at the time. Before he attempts to fix Britain, Barnard Castle’s own tinpot authoritarian might perhaps want to consider owning up to being part of the reason why the country is in such a mess."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/11/dominic-cummings-isnt-britain-saviour/
"Tough on crime" is entirely counterproductive when it actively sabotages the possibility of rehabilitation.
Your point about prompt consequences being essential suggests that the sometimes multi-year delays in the criminal justice system also makes things worse.
I do find it strange that you need to accuse me of ignorance or unwillingness to learn. Playing the man rather than making a reasoned argument.
As always my argument is not “can” but “should”. Parliament can do many things.
Your basic argument is that a money given for a purpose is not a “private good” and that therefore the government has both the right and the ability to seize it. My argument is that a charitable trust exists and has legal rights in and of itself - as a legal person to seize its assets is no different to seizing the assets of an individual.
So back to my original question which you have avoided answering in your aggressive desire to be right:
How does disendowment differ from confiscation of private property?
They can also have a centre which can direct and guide, a character, even some sort of vision which produces values, and then courses of action and practices.
Consider the notion of the soul of a company:
The soul of a company is the unique qualities that make it distinct, such as its character traits. It's also the promise that purpose makes to people, or the cause the business is fighting for. Every company has a soul, and it's built on values such as innovation, quality, value, freedom, price, and choice. For example, Apple is described as innovative, design-conscious, iconic, and secretive, which are qualities that reflect its soul.
(This imo rather leaves out human and ethical values.)
Or the culture of an army - the UK tries to train it's soldiers to act legally and morally, and trains them in international law and the rules of war. That's not to say it always works, nor to ignore a darker history, but that is the aspiration.
Compare that to the Russian Army where there are few guard rails - domination by the use of sexual crime / exploitation on women, or use of violence and torture on prisoners, is an expression of power, and a part of the culture which was there in 1944-5 and is still there now in Ukraine. That assault is on the 'soul' and culture of Ukraine, with the aim of poisoning or destroying it.
There was a good exploration of some of these aspects in the Telegraph Ukraine, the Latest podcast yesterday.
https://youtu.be/f1Jku8IHVrw?list=PLJnf_DDTfIVCYlsANGtNkzMeM9Fdmqzxr&t=1103
Innuendo at its finest.
VAT should apply, at a much lower rate, to everything. There is no good reason for complex exemptions. All it does is distort markets, gives a lever to politicians to court favour, and make a living for accountants and lawyers while making smaller businesses a bit more complicated.
A higher rate could apply to pearls, diamonds, private jets and yachts.
Which would then require either a cut in government spending of double digits or hilarious inflation from printing money.
Argentina, here we come….
https://jalopnik.com/mexico-is-chinas-trojan-horse-in-the-war-for-ev-dominan-1850919598
You made some very offensive posts without checking out the facts. You also made incorrect assumptions about the post I made (eg assuming the girls were prostitutes).
I assume you are familiar with the famous Cook and Moore Tarzan sketch. It is still very funny today. It is not offensive to the disabled. It is funny because it is absurd. There is a difference. Ricky Gervais is rather good at explaining this stuff.
On the strip are significant numbers of girls with feather headdresses imitating showgirls, Elvis look alikes and topless muscle bound men with cowboy hats. You can have your photo taken with them and they earn an income for doing so. I posted jokingly about two of these girls and an Elvis impersonator who were together and completely deficient in the normal qualities needed for the roles they were playing. A bit like the Tarsan sketch. All credit to them doing what they were doing and I would never make fun of them to their face, but the combination of the 3 of them together looked ridiculous and I posted 'Only in Vegas'. I was not laughing at the roles they were playing but their inappropriateness for the roles eg like me applying to be a Chippendale. There is an important difference as it relates to discrimination.
May I suggest that in future instead of posting that you know nothing about a poster, you check them out before commenting accordingly.
I think others here would be willing to attest you have got me wrong. I have literally spent years campaigning against discrimination which you could have easily found out but you didn't.
I tried to persuade them that the US government couldn’t just expropriate assets without due process (I know, 1917 and all that) but they explained to me that that wasn’t their “lived experience” of governments…
In summary, PP and PP+ is a great idea that suffers from a lack of accountability over how the funds are spent, and lack of effective measurement of the disaggregated impact on children who have those funds attached. Also, PP (not PP+) is pretty measly so when you actually work out what you can buy with it, it ain't much.