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.
Enrolments down by 2.7% is far less reduction than I expected. This will help Labour to firm up their view.
3 weeks ago the Telegraph were claiming that it was more like 30% of parents would withdraw their children, based on a survey.
The tax raid would affect nearly three-quarters of private school families, the Saltus Wealth Index found.
Almost a third – 29 per cent – of those parents said the rising costs mean they would no longer be able to give their child or children a private education.
One in four parents said they would have to move their child or children out of private school and enrol them in a state school, just under half of whom said they would consider moving house to be in a better catchment area for high-performing state schools.
Half of parents who responded said they could keep their children in private education but would have to make changes – either moving them from boarding to day pupils or finding a cheaper school.
A quarter said they would be unaffected by the VAT increase on fees, a flagship policy of Labour, which is on track for a 1997-style landslide election victory this year, according to the latest polls. https://archive.ph/MRot5#selection-2695.129-2703.42
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.
It should - though that's a slightly different usage of the word than that in the header - both "guilt" and "shame", of course, carry multiple meanings.
A good definition of shame, which kind of works in both contexts, is the social equivalent of pain - something without which we’d cripple ourselves at a very young age; and something we ought not to seek to inflict on others.
Most countries in Europe charge full whack VAT on all food, from bread on upwards. Some charge a lower rate on essentials. Hardly any charge 0% on essentials like us. And they don't starve. But good luck introducing it here...
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.
That completely ignores the whole point of VAT which is that it is supposed to be levied on non essentials. It is a tax on disposable income rather than on necessities.
If you extend it to everything you remove the whole point of it and it just becomes tax burden - and one that will be disporportionatly felt by the poorest in society.
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…
I know a few Chinese families investing in London on the basis of The Plan.
As is, when shit happens in China, historically, the middle class catch it in the neck. So you have a Plan.
So when they get well off, the Chinese invest abroad. One junior at the bank is living in one of the flats the family owns (they own a couple of floors in a couple of blocks) - partly as a safe investment, partly for the investment visa thing. She basically runs the family property business here.
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.
That completely ignores the whole point of VAT which is that it is supposed to be levied on non essentials. It is a tax on disposable income rather than on necessities.
If you extend it to everything you remove the whole point of it and it just becomes tax burden - and one that will be disporportionatly felt by the poorest in society.
Indeed. VAT on rent would be rather bold, for example.
Most countries in Europe charge full whack VAT on all food, from bread on upwards. Some charge a lower rate on essentials. Hardly any charge 0% on essentials like us. And they don't starve. But good luck introducing it here...
Countries in Europe do lots of things differently to us. Many of them are good and we should learn from them. Many of them are stupid or bad and we should ignore them. VAT on basic essentials would fall into the second category.
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.
That completely ignores the whole point of VAT which is that it is supposed to be levied on non essentials. It is a tax on disposable income rather than on necessities.
If you extend it to everything you remove the whole point of it and it just becomes tax burden - and one that will be disporportionatly felt by the poorest in society.
Agree. And, of course, private school fees are a non-essential, not a necessity.
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…
It’s not the lived experience of all those US companies which invested in China a couple of decades back, either. They lost their assets, and in several cases their IP too.
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.
That completely ignores the whole point of VAT which is that it is supposed to be levied on non essentials. It is a tax on disposable income rather than on necessities.
If you extend it to everything you remove the whole point of it and it just becomes tax burden - and one that will be disporportionatly felt by the poorest in society.
Agree. And, of course, private school fees are a non-essential, not a necessity.
Oh I wasn't claiming they were. I have stayed out of that particular debate and was only answering the point about widening VAT.
Though I do fear that this will be a policy that backfires.
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.
B-but that's the whole way of thinking of those who support Israel and its actions.
US politics hasn’t changed all that much in the last seventy years.
Reminded of the time someone reported Hannah Arendt for "advocating a totalitarian philosophy in her political courses," when she was teaching a course on her book The Origins of Totalitarianism.
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…
It’s not the lived experience of all those US companies which invested in China a couple of decades back, either. They lost their assets, and in several cases their IP too.
There was a rather hilarious whine from a certain law firm in Washington. That US companies were not patenting as much as they used to.
Hilarious, because said firm was notorious for offering a service of hoovering up patents and finding the interesting ones to er… promote-for-fee to Chinese clients.
Isn"t the truth of the matter that private schools are a business. They provide a s ervice and charge for it. Simple as that,and as a consequence they should be treated as such.
Thank you @Richard_Tyndall for reading and liking my post. It was rather long and heart felt and so I am grateful to anyone putting the effort in. Appreciated.
I have a sneaking regard for the older, Christian (usually Anglican) conservatives like Peter Hitchens. I genuinely don't agree with them (sometimes vehemently), but I like listening to them because they know how to give structured lectures instead of "content". In that vein, here's David Starkey.
"...one of the things we have to have confidence about, finally (and again there's a logical reason for this if I am right) [is] that essentially freedom - that is the right of people to think act create make money in their own ways - is the actual foundation of human progress.
We need to leave people to be free. They will make mistakes but finally I suppose - and I may now be exhibiting absurd naivete - they will get it right..."
"...we've got to recover genuine courage. This seems to me there's only one virtue and again it's the whole attack (and women here will forgive me) on the classic masculine virtues, of which courage is the central one.
Every other virtue is useless without courage. It is why I repudiate with passion the word "victim". I hate that word.
We're turning ourselves into a supine culture of victimhood and it's contemptable and it will reap the rewards which contempt deserves. But that courage has got to say the unsayable..."
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.
That completely ignores the whole point of VAT which is that it is supposed to be levied on non essentials. It is a tax on disposable income rather than on necessities.
If you extend it to everything you remove the whole point of it and it just becomes tax burden - and one that will be disporportionatly felt by the poorest in society.
Perhaps that should be mentioned to the French, Germans and Spanish who seem to have missed this point.
I have a sneaking regard for the older, Christian (usually Anglican) conservatives like Peter Hitchens. I genuinely don't agree with them (sometimes vehemently), but I like listening to them because they know how to give structured lectures instead of "content". In that vein, here's David Starkey.
"...one of the things we have to have confidence about, finally (and again there's a logical reason for this if I am right) [is] that essentially freedom - that is the right of people to think act create make money in their own ways - is the actual foundation of human progress.
We need to leave people to be free. They will make mistakes but finally I suppose - and I may now be exhibiting absurd naivete - they will get it right..."
"...we've got to recover genuine courage. This seems to me there's only one virtue and again it's the whole attack (and women here will forgive me) on the classic masculine virtues, of which courage is the central one.
Every other virtue is useless without courage. It is why I repudiate with passion the word "victim". I hate that word.
We're turning ourselves into a supine culture of victimhood and it's contemptable and it will reap the rewards which contempt deserves. But that courage has got to say the unsayable..."
Shows how little he knows. Women have - and show time and again - courage.
Just macho ridiculous crap. I had a case earlier this year. A woman who had been abused for years was giving evidence in a High Court case. I played the recording of a call he had made to her (whilst on bail) threatening her. She just could not stop shaking, she was literally as white as a sheet but she kept going. If you want to know what genuine courage looks like, ask her.
@jamesdoyle Thank-you for your interesting and provocative header.
I do have things to say on guilt and shame (esp. around .. er cultural anthropology and punishment-restoration / banishment in legal systems) but I may not have time to give it enough thought today.
Isn"t the truth of the matter that private schools are a business. They provide a s ervice and charge for it. Simple as that,and as a consequence they should be treated as such.
Yes, in most cases. If they were charities their admissions policy would be unrelated to ability to pay and they would raise needed funds in the same way as other charities do.
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…
It’s not the lived experience of all those US companies which invested in China a couple of decades back, either. They lost their assets, and in several cases their IP too.
There was a rather hilarious whine from a certain law firm in Washington. That US companies were not patenting as much as they used to.
Hilarious, because said firm was notorious for offering a service of hoovering up patents and finding the interesting ones to er… promote-for-fee to Chinese clients.
How the US responds to increasing Chinese industrial dominance in large sectors of the global economy is going to be one if the more interesting questions of the next decade.
This article compares the US today with Britain’s eventually self-defeating response to the industrial challenges from Germany and the US at the start of the 20th C.
IMO the straightforward choice between free trade and protectionism is a misleading duality (in much the same way that the Thatcherite duality between free markets and state intervention was).
A pragmatic approach which recognises that both approaches have their merits, if selectively applied, makes much more sense. (It does require leaders who have some clue about what they’re doing, though.)
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.
Enrolments down by 2.7% is far less reduction than I expected. This will help Labour to firm up their view.
3 weeks ago the Telegraph were claiming that it was more like 30% of parents would withdraw their children, based on a survey.
The tax raid would affect nearly three-quarters of private school families, the Saltus Wealth Index found.
Almost a third – 29 per cent – of those parents said the rising costs mean they would no longer be able to give their child or children a private education.
One in four parents said they would have to move their child or children out of private school and enrol them in a state school, just under half of whom said they would consider moving house to be in a better catchment area for high-performing state schools.
Half of parents who responded said they could keep their children in private education but would have to make changes – either moving them from boarding to day pupils or finding a cheaper school.
A quarter said they would be unaffected by the VAT increase on fees, a flagship policy of Labour, which is on track for a 1997-style landslide election victory this year, according to the latest polls. https://archive.ph/MRot5#selection-2695.129-2703.42
You do know that on those figures 160,000 children will have to be relocated to the state schools
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?
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.
That completely ignores the whole point of VAT which is that it is supposed to be levied on non essentials. It is a tax on disposable income rather than on necessities.
If you extend it to everything you remove the whole point of it and it just becomes tax burden - and one that will be disporportionatly felt by the poorest in society.
But then that’s an argument for putting it on private school fees and university fees. These are not “essentials”.
@jamesdoyle Thank-you for your interesting and provocative header.
I do have things to say on guilt and shame (esp. around .. er cultural anthropology and punishment-restoration / banishment in legal systems) but I may not have time to give it enough thought today.
Off-core topic on Saturdays seems a good idea.
Though it’s not entirely off topic, having great relevance to debates over education and criminal justice. (A failure to recognise that is perhaps why government has done so poorly at both in recent years.)
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…
I know a few Chinese families investing in London on the basis of The Plan.
As is, when shit happens in China, historically, the middle class catch it in the neck. So you have a Plan.
So when they get well off, the Chinese invest abroad. One junior at the bank is living in one of the flats the family owns (they own a couple of floors in a couple of blocks) - partly as a safe investment, partly for the investment visa thing. She basically runs the family property business here.
Yes, and their marginal propensity to not invest in London is tiny. We could tax overseas investment in residential property at 10% stamp duty plus 1% per year, and it would make almost no difference to the level of investment. Because if you’re a wealthy Chinese, Russian, or African, you need an escape plan to somewhere with proper rule of law, and half a million quid is a very small price to pay for having that that bolthole available when required.
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…
It’s not the lived experience of all those US companies which invested in China a couple of decades back, either. They lost their assets, and in several cases their IP too.
There was a rather hilarious whine from a certain law firm in Washington. That US companies were not patenting as much as they used to.
Hilarious, because said firm was notorious for offering a service of hoovering up patents and finding the interesting ones to er… promote-for-fee to Chinese clients.
How the US responds to increasing Chinese industrial dominance in large sectors of the global economy is going to be one if the more interesting questions of the next decade.
This article compares the US today with Britain’s eventually self-defeating response to the industrial challenges from Germany and the US at the start of the 20th C.
IMO the straightforward choice between free trade and protectionism is a misleading duality (in much the same way that the Thatcherite duality between free markets and state intervention was).
A pragmatic approach which recognises that both approaches have their merits, if selectively applied, makes much more sense. (It does require leaders who have some clue about what they’re doing, though.)
Chinese industry won't achieve dominance without it becomes like US industry. It's likely a bit Fu Manchu, but I guess much the same.
This is one of the great things about capitalism - the idiots have some background.
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
Isn"t the truth of the matter that private schools are a business. They provide a s ervice and charge for it. Simple as that,and as a consequence they should be treated as such.
Yes, in most cases. If they were charities their admissions policy would be unrelated to ability to pay and they would raise needed funds in the same way as other charities do.
Fundamental to them is that you are paying for something most people can’t get. So in that sense we should be taxing them to ensure that those that can’t afford it are not shafted. You would find it hard to conclude that since 2010 state education has not been shafted.
This is the argument I never get. If private schools weren’t exclusive and “better” nobody would pay. So the answer is to accept that they are a luxury and to tax them as such. Not get rid of them but say that if you want to send your children there that is your right but you also pay tax on it as is not essential. They are an outlier.
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.
Enrolments down by 2.7% is far less reduction than I expected. This will help Labour to firm up their view.
3 weeks ago the Telegraph were claiming that it was more like 30% of parents would withdraw their children, based on a survey.
The tax raid would affect nearly three-quarters of private school families, the Saltus Wealth Index found.
Almost a third – 29 per cent – of those parents said the rising costs mean they would no longer be able to give their child or children a private education.
One in four parents said they would have to move their child or children out of private school and enrol them in a state school, just under half of whom said they would consider moving house to be in a better catchment area for high-performing state schools.
Half of parents who responded said they could keep their children in private education but would have to make changes – either moving them from boarding to day pupils or finding a cheaper school.
A quarter said they would be unaffected by the VAT increase on fees, a flagship policy of Labour, which is on track for a 1997-style landslide election victory this year, according to the latest polls. https://archive.ph/MRot5#selection-2695.129-2703.42
You do know that on those figures 160,000 children will have to be relocated to the state schools
Then now might be the best time to contemplate such a policy.
Isn"t the truth of the matter that private schools are a business. They provide a s ervice and charge for it. Simple as that,and as a consequence they should be treated as such.
Yes, in most cases. If they were charities their admissions policy would be unrelated to ability to pay and they would raise needed funds in the same way as other charities do.
Fundamental to them is that you are paying for something most people can’t get. So in that sense we should be taxing them to ensure that those that can’t afford it are not shafted. You would find it hard to conclude that since 2010 state education has not been shafted.
This is the argument I never get. If private schools weren’t exclusive and “better” nobody would pay. So the answer is to accept that they are a luxury and to tax them as such. Not get rid of them but say that if you want to send your children there that is your right but you also pay tax on it as is not essential. They are an outlier.
I do like your swagger these days now you are no longer known as CHB43bMkII - or whatever it was.
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…
It’s not the lived experience of all those US companies which invested in China a couple of decades back, either. They lost their assets, and in several cases their IP too.
There was a rather hilarious whine from a certain law firm in Washington. That US companies were not patenting as much as they used to.
Hilarious, because said firm was notorious for offering a service of hoovering up patents and finding the interesting ones to er… promote-for-fee to Chinese clients.
How the US responds to increasing Chinese industrial dominance in large sectors of the global economy is going to be one if the more interesting questions of the next decade.
This article compares the US today with Britain’s eventually self-defeating response to the industrial challenges from Germany and the US at the start of the 20th C.
IMO the straightforward choice between free trade and protectionism is a misleading duality (in much the same way that the Thatcherite duality between free markets and state intervention was).
A pragmatic approach which recognises that both approaches have their merits, if selectively applied, makes much more sense. (It does require leaders who have some clue about what they’re doing, though.)
Chinese industry won't achieve dominance without it becomes like US industry. It's likely a bit Fu Manchu, but I guess much the same.
This is one of the great things about capitalism - the idiots have some background.
It already has in some sectors - and that’s through a combination of market competition and state subsidy. The reality is that very few, if any successful economies are completely free markets, or practice completely free trade. But we’ve for decades debated economic policy through such slogans.
Isn"t the truth of the matter that private schools are a business. They provide a s ervice and charge for it. Simple as that,and as a consequence they should be treated as such.
Yes, in most cases. If they were charities their admissions policy would be unrelated to ability to pay and they would raise needed funds in the same way as other charities do.
Fundamental to them is that you are paying for something most people can’t get. So in that sense we should be taxing them to ensure that those that can’t afford it are not shafted. You would find it hard to conclude that since 2010 state education has not been shafted.
This is the argument I never get. If private schools weren’t exclusive and “better” nobody would pay. So the answer is to accept that they are a luxury and to tax them as such. Not get rid of them but say that if you want to send your children there that is your right but you also pay tax on it as is not essential. They are an outlier.
I do like your swagger these days now you are no longer known as CHB43bMkII - or whatever it was.
Not a clue what you’re on about. I am still campaigning to have @CorrectHorseBattery reinstated.
It's bullshit to talk of the schooling provided by private schools as being a charitable activity that comes under the heading of "services to education".
Charity is given for free.
If Oxfam give free food to the starving, that is a charitable act. If I give an item to Oxfam, that is a charitable act too. If Oxfam sell that item, that is an act of raising money so they can spend the money on charitable acts. But it is not a charitable act in itself.
At the private schools I went to (which include a school that keeps getting mentioned on this site) I never once heard a single person express the view that the schooling there was "superior" to any other schooling. That's not why parents send their children to private school. It's about exclusivity (they think the poor smell) and making contacts that will be useful in later life, as is constantly acknowledged. The parents mostly couldn't care a tinker's cuss for "education".
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.
You have to do both. That's how see-saws work.
Why do you need to do both?
I rarely agree with @CorrectHorseBattery but on this occasion he suggested making private schools irrelevant by improving the quality of state schools. Let the private sector wither as parents make their own choices.
That’s absolutely the right approach.
Making private schools worse (“attacking them”) should have no role to play.
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.
Enrolments down by 2.7% is far less reduction than I expected. This will help Labour to firm up their view.
3 weeks ago the Telegraph were claiming that it was more like 30% of parents would withdraw their children, based on a survey.
The tax raid would affect nearly three-quarters of private school families, the Saltus Wealth Index found.
Almost a third – 29 per cent – of those parents said the rising costs mean they would no longer be able to give their child or children a private education.
One in four parents said they would have to move their child or children out of private school and enrol them in a state school, just under half of whom said they would consider moving house to be in a better catchment area for high-performing state schools.
Half of parents who responded said they could keep their children in private education but would have to make changes – either moving them from boarding to day pupils or finding a cheaper school.
A quarter said they would be unaffected by the VAT increase on fees, a flagship policy of Labour, which is on track for a 1997-style landslide election victory this year, according to the latest polls. https://archive.ph/MRot5#selection-2695.129-2703.42
You do know that on those figures 160,000 children will have to be relocated to the state schools
Then now might be the best time to contemplate such a policy.
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
For instance, this example of Beer's brilliant and entirely justified sarcasm
"Rod Ismay: "I’m sorry, I've got so many documents and so many things in my mind, I'm not sure whether I did or I didn't, but it would make sense."
Beer: "Yes, apologies for the number of documents in the inquiry, we like to give people full disclosure."
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…
It’s not the lived experience of all those US companies which invested in China a couple of decades back, either. They lost their assets, and in several cases their IP too.
I’m generally of the view that the US government copying the Chinese government would be a Bad Thing.
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…
It’s not the lived experience of all those US companies which invested in China a couple of decades back, either. They lost their assets, and in several cases their IP too.
There was a rather hilarious whine from a certain law firm in Washington. That US companies were not patenting as much as they used to.
Hilarious, because said firm was notorious for offering a service of hoovering up patents and finding the interesting ones to er… promote-for-fee to Chinese clients.
How the US responds to increasing Chinese industrial dominance in large sectors of the global economy is going to be one if the more interesting questions of the next decade.
This article compares the US today with Britain’s eventually self-defeating response to the industrial challenges from Germany and the US at the start of the 20th C.
IMO the straightforward choice between free trade and protectionism is a misleading duality (in much the same way that the Thatcherite duality between free markets and state intervention was).
A pragmatic approach which recognises that both approaches have their merits, if selectively applied, makes much more sense. (It does require leaders who have some clue about what they’re doing, though.)
Chinese industry won't achieve dominance without it becomes like US industry. It's likely a bit Fu Manchu, but I guess much the same.
This is one of the great things about capitalism - the idiots have some background.
It already has in some sectors - and that’s through a combination of market competition and state subsidy. The reality is that very few, if any successful economies are completely free markets, or practice completely free trade. But we’ve for decades debated economic policy through such slogans.
Sure. Free trade when you're top dog. China won't get there any time soon. Chinese industry will in many sectors.
I rarely agree with @CorrectHorseBattery but on this occasion he suggested making private schools irrelevant by improving the quality of state schools. Let the private sector wither as parents make their own choices.
That’s absolutely the right approach.
Making private schools worse (“attacking them”) should have no role to play.
Isn"t the truth of the matter that private schools are a business. They provide a s ervice and charge for it. Simple as that,and as a consequence they should be treated as such.
Yes, in most cases. If they were charities their admissions policy would be unrelated to ability to pay and they would raise needed funds in the same way as other charities do.
Fundamental to them is that you are paying for something most people can’t get. So in that sense we should be taxing them to ensure that those that can’t afford it are not shafted. You would find it hard to conclude that since 2010 state education has not been shafted.
This is the argument I never get. If private schools weren’t exclusive and “better” nobody would pay. So the answer is to accept that they are a luxury and to tax them as such. Not get rid of them but say that if you want to send your children there that is your right but you also pay tax on it as is not essential. They are an outlier.
I do like your swagger these days now you are no longer known as CHB43bMkII - or whatever it was.
Not a clue what you’re on about. I am still campaigning to have @CorrectHorseBattery reinstated.
Isn"t the truth of the matter that private schools are a business. They provide a s ervice and charge for it. Simple as that,and as a consequence they should be treated as such.
Yes, in most cases. If they were charities their admissions policy would be unrelated to ability to pay and they would raise needed funds in the same way as other charities do.
Fundamental to them is that you are paying for something most people can’t get. So in that sense we should be taxing them to ensure that those that can’t afford it are not shafted. You would find it hard to conclude that since 2010 state education has not been shafted.
This is the argument I never get. If private schools weren’t exclusive and “better” nobody would pay. So the answer is to accept that they are a luxury and to tax them as such. Not get rid of them but say that if you want to send your children there that is your right but you also pay tax on it as is not essential. They are an outlier.
I do like your swagger these days now you are no longer known as CHB43bMkII - or whatever it was.
Not a clue what you’re on about. I am still campaigning to have @CorrectHorseBattery reinstated.
Well, as you've said. I guess a surfeit of fans.
It’s a real injustice that Horse is not allowed to post anymore. He offered a lot to this site. But I will do my best to honour his legacy.
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
Hope no-one bet on the non-runner. That makes everyone’s bets from yesterday good value.
“Swedish police have investigated a complaint made by a female member of the production crew after an incident following his performance in Thursday night’s semi final.
“While the legal process takes its course, it would not be appropriate for him to continue in the contest. 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.
“We maintain a zero-tolerance policy towards inappropriate behaviour at our event and are committed to providing a safe and secure working environment for all staff at the contest.
“In light of this, Joost Klein’s behaviour towards a team member is deemed in breach of contest rules. The Grand Final of the 68th Eurovision Song Contest will now proceed with 25 participating songs.”
The complaint originated from a production crew member, rather than an entrant in the competition.
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…
It’s not the lived experience of all those US companies which invested in China a couple of decades back, either. They lost their assets, and in several cases their IP too.
I’m generally of the view that the US government copying the Chinese government would be a Bad Thing.
Generally, absolutely - but not in some particulars.
And if US companies, both tech and manufacturing, were as customer focused as are the successful Chinese enterprises (contrast BYD or Geely and GM or Ford; Tick-tock with Instagram for example), it would be to both their and their customers’ benefit.
The Chinese system is overall a malign one, but we ought not to be blind to analysing what works there, and why.
Despite all the miserable crap we can write about here it’s an absolutely stunning day.
I’m working out a plan to subtly nudge a French chap sitting behind me off a nearby cliff so I can step in and comfort his incredibly beautiful partner because I am gallant like that.
But anyway, cheers and enjoy the sunshine but remember your sunscreen.
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
For instance, this example of Beer's brilliant and entirely justified sarcasm
"Rod Ismay: "I’m sorry, I've got so many documents and so many things in my mind, I'm not sure whether I did or I didn't, but it would make sense."
Beer: "Yes, apologies for the number of documents in the inquiry, we like to give people full disclosure."
Is there a formal petition anywhere to get Jason Beer a knighthood? Sir Jason Beer KC has a nice ring to it.
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…
It’s not the lived experience of all those US companies which invested in China a couple of decades back, either. They lost their assets, and in several cases their IP too.
There was a rather hilarious whine from a certain law firm in Washington. That US companies were not patenting as much as they used to.
Hilarious, because said firm was notorious for offering a service of hoovering up patents and finding the interesting ones to er… promote-for-fee to Chinese clients.
How the US responds to increasing Chinese industrial dominance in large sectors of the global economy is going to be one if the more interesting questions of the next decade.
This article compares the US today with Britain’s eventually self-defeating response to the industrial challenges from Germany and the US at the start of the 20th C.
IMO the straightforward choice between free trade and protectionism is a misleading duality (in much the same way that the Thatcherite duality between free markets and state intervention was).
A pragmatic approach which recognises that both approaches have their merits, if selectively applied, makes much more sense. (It does require leaders who have some clue about what they’re doing, though.)
Yes - declaring Free Trade without bothering to understand reciprocation is as stupid as Mercantilism.
Years back I was part of thing to try and persuade the government to change policy on tariffs. Individual electronic components had higher tariffs than finished goods - among other things this made getting the Raspberry Pi manufactured in the U.K. difficult.
We met a government official - when we suggested equalising the tariffs he was aghast - “The Chinese will throw a fit!”…
Edit: I think in this case Biden is correct. If you want tariffless free trade, that depends on both parties not using subsidies.
I think a few people are getting confused, partly because of StillWaters setting up a false dichotomy (and then getting rather agitated about it).
A charitable asset is NOT a private asset. It is designated for a particular purpose and legally must be managed by trustees and used for that purpose. If it is used for anything else, or transferred to another charity, a process must be gone through and it can be blocked. Using it for another purpose is a crime, punishable by a very heavy fine.
A business, or a person, can by contrast use their assets for any purpose it/he/she wishes. There are comparatively limited restrictions on doing so.
Now, we come to a grey area. Most private schools with large endowments were historically given those endowments for the purposes of providing an education for free. Not all such endowments - others were for building projects or for particular specific purposes. But most of them.
It is hard to argue those endowments are being used for such a purpose by these schools at present. For example Eton uses its endowments only for the maintenance of its buildings. All day to day running costs - including bursaries - are met from fees.
There is therefore a legitimate argument that the endowments can and should be redirected to other educational purposes by (checks notes) disendowing charitable schools that charge fees.*
Which is where we started.
If, of course, they wished to become businesses and keep their endowments while paying taxes, let them do so.
Either way, VAT on school fees is a silly red herring.
VAT is also a very bad tax in every other imaginable way and should be abolished altogether. But that's really not going to happen given how much it brings in.
*Incidentally the logic of disendowing the Church in Wales on a partial basis was that prior to 1660 gifts to the church were gifts to the nation rather than the church.
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
Charming
Well you are talking rubbish today. Taxation is theft is the sort of nonsense I'd expect from loony far right people not a lawyer who should understand the difference between theft and taxation or between expropriation without compensation and taxation.
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.
You have to do both. That's how see-saws work.
Why do you need to do both?
I rarely agree with @CorrectHorseBattery but on this occasion he suggested making private schools irrelevant by improving the quality of state schools. Let the private sector wither as parents make their own choices.
That’s absolutely the right approach.
Making private schools worse (“attacking them”) should have no role to play.
It's a platitude unless it comes with support for equalising the funding per pupil.
Isn"t the truth of the matter that private schools are a business. They provide a s ervice and charge for it. Simple as that,and as a consequence they should be treated as such.
Yes, in most cases. If they were charities their admissions policy would be unrelated to ability to pay and they would raise needed funds in the same way as other charities do.
Fundamental to them is that you are paying for something most people can’t get. So in that sense we should be taxing them to ensure that those that can’t afford it are not shafted. You would find it hard to conclude that since 2010 state education has not been shafted.
This is the argument I never get. If private schools weren’t exclusive and “better” nobody would pay. So the answer is to accept that they are a luxury and to tax them as such. Not get rid of them but say that if you want to send your children there that is your right but you also pay tax on it as is not essential. They are an outlier.
I do like your swagger these days now you are no longer known as CHB43bMkII - or whatever it was.
Not a clue what you’re on about. I am still campaigning to have @CorrectHorseBattery reinstated.
Quebec and British Colombia; there must be some connection.
Another side note - increasing numbers of private schools are becoming businesses anyway, simply because the financial logistics of borrowing are easier for a business than a charity. And boy oh boy have some of them needed to borrow to smooth income dips in the last five years.
Isn"t the truth of the matter that private schools are a business. They provide a s ervice and charge for it. Simple as that,and as a consequence they should be treated as such.
There are profit making schools and it’s fair to view them as a business.
Many/most (don’t know - anyone have stats?) are charities in some form. In their case the argument is that education is a public good. If you tax a public good you increase its price and therefore reduce demand/production.
The questions then become:
1. Does the increase in VAT income on school fees offset the increase in costs for the state of new children in the state system on a total government level (ie are the government finances improved in aggregate)?
2. Does the Treasury allocate all the incremental funds to education (a political choice but I have my doubts)?
3. Is the state sector as productive as the private sector in terms of net educational output or will the output be lower/higher for a given amount of funding?
4. Are the funds better focused on a lucky few vs. spread thinly across all state pupils?
I actually think that we are in a good position. The threat of VAT on school fees over the last few years has led to schools understand that they need to make much more of a social contribution than just fund a few bursaries to justify their special status. We have seen this through sharing facilities with local communities, the London Academy of Excellence partnership and now the STAR Academies (of which Jack Straw, incidentally, is a key supporter). Sometime jaw jaw is better than war war.
It's bullshit to talk of the schooling provided by private schools as being a charitable activity that comes under the heading of "services to education".
Charity is given for free.
If Oxfam give free food to the starving, that is a charitable act. If I give an item to Oxfam, that is a charitable act too. If Oxfam sell that item, that is an act of raising money so they can spend the money on charitable acts. But it is not a charitable act in itself.
At the private schools I went to (which include a school that keeps getting mentioned on this site) I never once heard a single person express the view that the schooling there was "superior" to any other schooling. That's not why parents send their children to private school. It's about exclusivity (they think the poor smell) and making contacts that will be useful in later life, as is constantly acknowledged. The parents mostly couldn't care a tinker's cuss for "education".
This is the private school version of the equally daft anecdote masquerading as an argument - "I went to a grammar school 40 years ago and it was great so let's bring them back".
Edit: Oxfam of course is the charity that gave out aid in return for sex so perhaps an unfortunate example to use.
It's bullshit to talk of the schooling provided by private schools as being a charitable activity that comes under the heading of "services to education".
Charity is given for free.
If Oxfam give free food to the starving, that is a charitable act. If I give an item to Oxfam, that is a charitable act too. If Oxfam sell that item, that is an act of raising money so they can spend the money on charitable acts. But it is not a charitable act in itself.
At the private schools I went to (which include a school that keeps getting mentioned on this site) I never once heard a single person express the view that the schooling there was "superior" to any other schooling. That's not why parents send their children to private school. It's about exclusivity (they think the poor smell) and making contacts that will be useful in later life, as is constantly acknowledged. The parents mostly couldn't care a tinker's cuss for "education".
The reason that most parents send their children to private schools are
1) much smaller class sizes 2) better support for SEND 3) better sports and non-academic facilities
The number of private schools that actually offer any social exclusivity is a tiny percentage of the whole.
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
Charming
Well you are talking rubbish today. Taxation is theft is the sort of nonsense I'd expect from loony far right people not a lawyer who should understand the difference between theft and taxation or between expropriation without compensation and taxation.
I haven’t said that taxation is theft. However I think it is arguable that taxation and “expropriation without compensation” by the state are indistinguishable on an objective level - you are just arguing about whether taxation in the form of an asset rather than taxation of that asset liquidated into cash is any different morally.
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
Charming
Well you are talking rubbish today. Taxation is theft is the sort of nonsense I'd expect from loony far right people not a lawyer who should understand the difference between theft and taxation or between expropriation without compensation and taxation.
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
Charming
Well you are talking rubbish today. Taxation is theft is the sort of nonsense I'd expect from loony far right people not a lawyer who should understand the difference between theft and taxation or between expropriation without compensation and taxation.
I haven’t said that taxation is theft. However I think it is arguable that taxation and “expropriation without compensation” by the state are indistinguishable on an objective level - you are just arguing about whether taxation in the form of an asset rather than taxation of that asset liquidated into cash is any different morally.
Taxation is theft. It's idiotic to suggest otherwise.
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
Charming
Well you are talking rubbish today. Taxation is theft is the sort of nonsense I'd expect from loony far right people not a lawyer who should understand the difference between theft and taxation or between expropriation without compensation and taxation.
I haven’t said that taxation is theft. However I think it is arguable that taxation and “expropriation without compensation” by the state are indistinguishable on an objective level - you are just arguing about whether taxation in the form of an asset rather than taxation of that asset liquidated into cash is any different morally.
Taxation is theft. It's idiotic to suggest otherwise.
Giving no opinion as to whether taxation is theft or not, if you consider taxation as theft then taxation is no different to “expropriation of property without compensation” by the state on a moral level.
It's bullshit to talk of the schooling provided by private schools as being a charitable activity that comes under the heading of "services to education".
Charity is given for free.
If Oxfam give free food to the starving, that is a charitable act. If I give an item to Oxfam, that is a charitable act too. If Oxfam sell that item, that is an act of raising money so they can spend the money on charitable acts. But it is not a charitable act in itself.
At the private schools I went to (which include a school that keeps getting mentioned on this site) I never once heard a single person express the view that the schooling there was "superior" to any other schooling. That's not why parents send their children to private school. It's about exclusivity (they think the poor smell) and making contacts that will be useful in later life, as is constantly acknowledged. The parents mostly couldn't care a tinker's cuss for "education".
Oxfam’s shops don’t pay business rates (which creates an issue for profit making shops) and don’t pay corporation tax on any money covenanted back to the charity.
There is special treatment for trading subsidiaries of charities.
In most cases the fees cover costs of the education. Sometimes they are subsidised by the parent charity, sometimes not.
And although the “signalling” benefit you refer to is relevant it is only meaningful for a small group of well known schools. People who went to Local Private School & Co Limited (which is the vast majority of kids in private education) get no real benefit from exclusivity/networking.
It's bullshit to talk of the schooling provided by private schools as being a charitable activity that comes under the heading of "services to education".
Charity is given for free.
If Oxfam give free food to the starving, that is a charitable act. If I give an item to Oxfam, that is a charitable act too. If Oxfam sell that item, that is an act of raising money so they can spend the money on charitable acts. But it is not a charitable act in itself.
At the private schools I went to (which include a school that keeps getting mentioned on this site) I never once heard a single person express the view that the schooling there was "superior" to any other schooling. That's not why parents send their children to private school. It's about exclusivity (they think the poor smell) and making contacts that will be useful in later life, as is constantly acknowledged. The parents mostly couldn't care a tinker's cuss for "education".
Sorry Donkeys but your last paragraph is absolute bs - you know full well that our school wasn’t people going for “exclusivity” and contacts. Everyone whose prep school sent them there were directed that way because the academic side - if contacts etc were key to the parents then there were schools such as slough comprehensive and the fools on Harrow Hill that were more about that sort of thing.
And as for nobody mentioning that the education was “superior” we had it drummed into us from the start we were very lucky to be there getting that level of teaching and other activities so we had to hold up our side of the bargain.
My parents, my friends who went to Winchester with me from my tother and my friends I made there were never there for social cachet because they would have taken an easier route elsewhere if that was important.
I rarely agree with @CorrectHorseBattery but on this occasion he suggested making private schools irrelevant by improving the quality of state schools. Let the private sector wither as parents make their own choices.
That’s absolutely the right approach.
Making private schools worse (“attacking them”) should have no role to play.
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…
It’s not the lived experience of all those US companies which invested in China a couple of decades back, either. They lost their assets, and in several cases their IP too.
I’m generally of the view that the US government copying the Chinese government would be a Bad Thing.
Generally, absolutely - but not in some particulars.
And if US companies, both tech and manufacturing, were as customer focused as are the successful Chinese enterprises (contrast BYD or Geely and GM or Ford; Tick-tock with Instagram for example), it would be to both their and their customers’ benefit.
The Chinese system is overall a malign one, but we ought not to be blind to analysing what works there, and why.
I believe it’s central to Tik-Tok’s defence that they are not an arm of the Chinese government…
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
Charming
Well you are talking rubbish today. Taxation is theft is the sort of nonsense I'd expect from loony far right people not a lawyer who should understand the difference between theft and taxation or between expropriation without compensation and taxation.
I haven’t said that taxation is theft. However I think it is arguable that taxation and “expropriation without compensation” by the state are indistinguishable on an objective level - you are just arguing about whether taxation in the form of an asset rather than taxation of that asset liquidated into cash is any different morally.
Taxation is theft. It's idiotic to suggest otherwise.
Giving no opinion as to whether taxation is theft or not, if you consider taxation as theft then taxation is no different to “expropriation of property without compensation” by the state on a moral level.
I don't see a big difference. However tax is usually a percentage fee. Seizure of property is a binary thing.
Functional and multi-omic aging rejuvenation with GLP-1R agonism
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.06.592653v1 Identifying readily implementable methods that can effectively counteract aging is urgently needed for tackling age-related degenerative disorders. Here, we conducted functional assessments and deep molecular phenotyping in the aging mouse to demonstrate that glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1RA) treatment attenuates body-wide age-related changes. Apart from improvements in physical and cognitive performance, the age-counteracting effects are prominently evident at multiple omic levels. These span the transcriptomes and DNA methylomes of various tissues, organs and circulating white blood cells, as well as the plasma metabolome. Importantly, the beneficial effects are specific to aged mice, not young adults, and are achieved with a low dosage of GLP-1RA which has a negligible impact on food consumption and body weight. The molecular rejuvenation effects exhibit organ-specific characteristics, which are generally heavily dependent on hypothalamic GLP-1R. We benchmarked the GLP-1RA age-counteracting effects against those of mTOR inhibition, a well-established anti-aging intervention, observing a strong resemblance across the two strategies. Our findings have broad implications for understanding the mechanistic basis of the clinically observed pleiotropic effects of GLP-1RAs, the design of intervention trials for age-related diseases, and the development of anti-aging-based therapeutics...
It's bullshit to talk of the schooling provided by private schools as being a charitable activity that comes under the heading of "services to education".
Charity is given for free.
If Oxfam give free food to the starving, that is a charitable act. If I give an item to Oxfam, that is a charitable act too. If Oxfam sell that item, that is an act of raising money so they can spend the money on charitable acts. But it is not a charitable act in itself.
At the private schools I went to (which include a school that keeps getting mentioned on this site) I never once heard a single person express the view that the schooling there was "superior" to any other schooling. That's not why parents send their children to private school. It's about exclusivity (they think the poor smell) and making contacts that will be useful in later life, as is constantly acknowledged. The parents mostly couldn't care a tinker's cuss for "education".
This is the private school version of the equally daft anecdote masquerading as an argument - "I went to a grammar school 40 years ago and it was great so let's bring them back".
Edit: Oxfam of course is the charity that gave out aid in return for sex so perhaps an unfortunate example to use.
If that's how you want to argue it: there's a London law firm that several top boarding schools use to pay parents to keep their mouths shut about abuse including sexual abuse. That's parents who aren't comme il faut of course, because otherwise they wouldn't be such whining boat rockers.
I rarely agree with @CorrectHorseBattery but on this occasion he suggested making private schools irrelevant by improving the quality of state schools. Let the private sector wither as parents make their own choices.
That’s absolutely the right approach.
Making private schools worse (“attacking them”) should have no role to play.
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
Charming
Well you are talking rubbish today. Taxation is theft is the sort of nonsense I'd expect from loony far right people not a lawyer who should understand the difference between theft and taxation or between expropriation without compensation and taxation.
I haven’t said that taxation is theft. However I think it is arguable that taxation and “expropriation without compensation” by the state are indistinguishable on an objective level - you are just arguing about whether taxation in the form of an asset rather than taxation of that asset liquidated into cash is any different morally.
Taxation is theft. It's idiotic to suggest otherwise.
Giving no opinion as to whether taxation is theft or not, if you consider taxation as theft then taxation is no different to “expropriation of property without compensation” by the state on a moral level.
I don't see a big difference. However tax is usually a percentage fee. Seizure of property is a binary thing.
Council tax, VED, fuel duty are some significant exceptions to your rule.
I think you're all getting very confused about currency as a store of value as well as a means of exchange. It's as much your property as anything else.
What's ultimately being taxed is some activity - working, damaging the environment, living in a particular area, enjoying "luxury" goods.
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…
It’s not the lived experience of all those US companies which invested in China a couple of decades back, either. They lost their assets, and in several cases their IP too.
There was a rather hilarious whine from a certain law firm in Washington. That US companies were not patenting as much as they used to.
Hilarious, because said firm was notorious for offering a service of hoovering up patents and finding the interesting ones to er… promote-for-fee to Chinese clients.
How the US responds to increasing Chinese industrial dominance in large sectors of the global economy is going to be one if the more interesting questions of the next decade.
This article compares the US today with Britain’s eventually self-defeating response to the industrial challenges from Germany and the US at the start of the 20th C.
IMO the straightforward choice between free trade and protectionism is a misleading duality (in much the same way that the Thatcherite duality between free markets and state intervention was).
A pragmatic approach which recognises that both approaches have their merits, if selectively applied, makes much more sense. (It does require leaders who have some clue about what they’re doing, though.)
Yes - declaring Free Trade without bothering to understand reciprocation is as stupid as Mercantilism.
Years back I was part of thing to try and persuade the government to change policy on tariffs. Individual electronic components had higher tariffs than finished goods - among other things this made getting the Raspberry Pi manufactured in the U.K. difficult.
We met a government official - when we suggested equalising the tariffs he was aghast - “The Chinese will throw a fit!”…
Edit: I think in this case Biden is correct. If you want tariffless free trade, that depends on both parties not using subsidies.
This research is very much on point.
Excited to share my latest article, co-authored with @jonasnahm, out now in the APSR:
“..We show that the choice of strategy is shaped by the level of uncertainty and the position of the domestic industry in global supply chains, that is, whether global supply chains are emerging or mature, and whether the domestic industry is an entrant or an incumbent..
.. States use targeted strategies when uncertainty is low and open-ended strategies when uncertainty is high.
They use industry-driven strategies when seeking to integrate firms and government-driven strategies when seeking to build entire ecosystems and supply chain….”
The fact that, at other times and in other places, Oxfam has occasionally had problems with sex scandals seems like a massive case of whataboutery. What does that have to do with their reporting of the situation in Gaza?
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
For instance, this example of Beer's brilliant and entirely justified sarcasm
"Rod Ismay: "I’m sorry, I've got so many documents and so many things in my mind, I'm not sure whether I did or I didn't, but it would make sense."
Beer: "Yes, apologies for the number of documents in the inquiry, we like to give people full disclosure."
Is there a formal petition anywhere to get Jason Beer a knighthood? Sir Jason Beer KC has a nice ring to it.
“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
I am afraid that, given the rubbish @Gallowgate is spouting today and the evidence from the Post Office Inquiry, the phrase "as a lawyer you should be smart enough" has to be retired immediately from use.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
Charming
Well you are talking rubbish today. Taxation is theft is the sort of nonsense I'd expect from loony far right people not a lawyer who should understand the difference between theft and taxation or between expropriation without compensation and taxation.
I haven’t said that taxation is theft. However I think it is arguable that taxation and “expropriation without compensation” by the state are indistinguishable on an objective level - you are just arguing about whether taxation in the form of an asset rather than taxation of that asset liquidated into cash is any different morally.
Taxation is theft. It's idiotic to suggest otherwise.
Giving no opinion as to whether taxation is theft or not, if you consider taxation as theft then taxation is no different to “expropriation of property without compensation” by the state on a moral level.
I don't see a big difference. However tax is usually a percentage fee. Seizure of property is a binary thing.
Council tax, VED, fuel duty are some significant exceptions to your rule.
I think you're all getting very confused about currency as a store of value as well as a means of exchange. It's as much your property as anything else.
What's ultimately being taxed is some activity - working, damaging the environment, living in a particular area, enjoying "luxury" goods.
You might be right, but are in fact completely wrong. (To be honest I proffered this just to amuse myself, but 'completely wrong' seems to knock on your door)
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…
It’s not the lived experience of all those US companies which invested in China a couple of decades back, either. They lost their assets, and in several cases their IP too.
I’m generally of the view that the US government copying the Chinese government would be a Bad Thing.
Generally, absolutely - but not in some particulars.
And if US companies, both tech and manufacturing, were as customer focused as are the successful Chinese enterprises (contrast BYD or Geely and GM or Ford; Tick-tock with Instagram for example), it would be to both their and their customers’ benefit.
The Chinese system is overall a malign one, but we ought not to be blind to analysing what works there, and why.
I believe it’s central to Tik-Tok’s defence that they are not an arm of the Chinese government…
I’m agnostic on that. My point was rather that they pay far more attention to user experience than do many of the US efforts.
VAT on private schools is excellent wedge politics from Labour. Significantly better than any of the stuff the Conservatives have tried.
For most people, private schools = that black and white Johnson/Cameron photo. And it links in beautifully with the helicoptered Sunak.
It's a nice bit of politicking that convinces the Labour faithful that Starmer might be heir to Blair, but at least he's still one of us.
It will cost the country money, in that it will cost more to educate those who would have been educated privately through the state sector instead, than it will raise in taxes.
And it will be full of unintended consequences - pushy middle class parents taking up places at better state schools that once went to those with less privileged backgrounds, further distortion of the housing market, a less well educated workforce, greater inequality (the ultra rich will still send their kids to the top public schools - it will be the climbers in the middle who miss out on the social mobility that sending your kids to a lesser day school provides), fewer initiatives for underprivileged kids that are currently provided by private schools and so on.
But it is red meat for red voters. Sometimes policies don't have to make sense to be popular, especially not when policy is based on ideology over evidence.
It's bullshit to talk of the schooling provided by private schools as being a charitable activity that comes under the heading of "services to education".
Charity is given for free.
If Oxfam give free food to the starving, that is a charitable act. If I give an item to Oxfam, that is a charitable act too. If Oxfam sell that item, that is an act of raising money so they can spend the money on charitable acts. But it is not a charitable act in itself.
At the private schools I went to (which include a school that keeps getting mentioned on this site) I never once heard a single person express the view that the schooling there was "superior" to any other schooling. That's not why parents send their children to private school. It's about exclusivity (they think the poor smell) and making contacts that will be useful in later life, as is constantly acknowledged. The parents mostly couldn't care a tinker's cuss for "education".
The reason that most parents send their children to private schools are
1) much smaller class sizes 2) better support for SEND 3) better sports and non-academic facilities
The number of private schools that actually offer any social exclusivity is a tiny percentage of the whole.
And the ones that are going to be unaffected by VAT on private school fees...
VAT on private schools is excellent wedge politics from Labour. Significantly better than any of the stuff the Conservatives have tried.
For most people, private schools = that black and white Johnson/Cameron photo. And it links in beautifully with the helicoptered Sunak.
It's a nice bit of politicking that convinces the Labour faithful that Starmer might be heir to Blair, but at least he's still one of us.
It will cost the country money, in that it will cost more to educate those who would have been educated privately through the state sector instead, than it will raise in taxes.
And it will be full of unintended consequences - pushy middle class parents taking up places at better state schools that once went to those with less privileged backgrounds, further distortion of the housing market, a less well educated workforce, greater inequality (the ultra rich will still send their kids to the top public schools - it will be the climbers in the middle who miss out on the social mobility that sending your kids to a lesser day school provides), fewer initiatives for underprivileged kids that are currently provided by private schools and so on.
But it is red meat for red voters. Sometimes policies don't have to make sense to be popular, especially not when policy is based on ideology over evidence.
Whether it will cost the country money is yet to be determined.
If you are right that it will cost the country money, do you think we should subsidise private school fees? If taxing them will cost the country money, presumably we can save the country money by subsidising them.
Isn"t the truth of the matter that private schools are a business. They provide a s ervice and charge for it. Simple as that,and as a consequence they should be treated as such.
There are profit making schools and it’s fair to view them as a business.
Many/most (don’t know - anyone have stats?) are charities in some form. In their case the argument is that education is a public good. If you tax a public good you increase its price and therefore reduce demand/production.
Around half of all private schools are businesses, but around 70% of ISA schools are charities (that was closer to 90% five years ago).
VAT on private schools is excellent wedge politics from Labour. Significantly better than any of the stuff the Conservatives have tried.
For most people, private schools = that black and white Johnson/Cameron photo. And it links in beautifully with the helicoptered Sunak.
It's a nice bit of politicking that convinces the Labour faithful that Starmer might be heir to Blair, but at least he's still one of us.
It will cost the country money, in that it will cost more to educate those who would have been educated privately through the state sector instead, than it will raise in taxes.
And it will be full of unintended consequences - pushy middle class parents taking up places at better state schools that once went to those with less privileged backgrounds, further distortion of the housing market, a less well educated workforce, greater inequality (the ultra rich will still send their kids to the top public schools - it will be the climbers in the middle who miss out on the social mobility that sending your kids to a lesser day school provides), fewer initiatives for underprivileged kids that are currently provided by private schools and so on.
But it is red meat for red voters. Sometimes policies don't have to make sense to be popular, especially not when policy is based on ideology over evidence.
Whether it will cost the country money is yet to be determined.
If you are right that it will cost the country money, do you think we should subsidise private school fees? If taxing them will cost the country money, presumably we can save the country money by subsidising them.
We already do through the numbers of children with EHCPs who attend them...without that most smaller private schools would have shut fifteen years ago.
It's bullshit to talk of the schooling provided by private schools as being a charitable activity that comes under the heading of "services to education".
Charity is given for free.
If Oxfam give free food to the starving, that is a charitable act. If I give an item to Oxfam, that is a charitable act too. If Oxfam sell that item, that is an act of raising money so they can spend the money on charitable acts. But it is not a charitable act in itself.
At the private schools I went to (which include a school that keeps getting mentioned on this site) I never once heard a single person express the view that the schooling there was "superior" to any other schooling. That's not why parents send their children to private school. It's about exclusivity (they think the poor smell) and making contacts that will be useful in later life, as is constantly acknowledged. The parents mostly couldn't care a tinker's cuss for "education".
This is the private school version of the equally daft anecdote masquerading as an argument - "I went to a grammar school 40 years ago and it was great so let's bring them back".
Edit: Oxfam of course is the charity that gave out aid in return for sex so perhaps an unfortunate example to use.
I went to a private school. There was a sex scandal involving one of the teachers. Does that mean it’s OK to apply VAT to the fees to that school?
VAT on private schools is excellent wedge politics from Labour. Significantly better than any of the stuff the Conservatives have tried.
For most people, private schools = that black and white Johnson/Cameron photo. And it links in beautifully with the helicoptered Sunak.
It's a nice bit of politicking that convinces the Labour faithful that Starmer might be heir to Blair, but at least he's still one of us.
It will cost the country money, in that it will cost more to educate those who would have been educated privately through the state sector instead, than it will raise in taxes.
And it will be full of unintended consequences - pushy middle class parents taking up places at better state schools that once went to those with less privileged backgrounds, further distortion of the housing market, a less well educated workforce, greater inequality (the ultra rich will still send their kids to the top public schools - it will be the climbers in the middle who miss out on the social mobility that sending your kids to a lesser day school provides), fewer initiatives for underprivileged kids that are currently provided by private schools and so on.
But it is red meat for red voters. Sometimes policies don't have to make sense to be popular, especially not when policy is based on ideology over evidence.
Whether it will cost the country money is yet to be determined.
If you are right that it will cost the country money, do you think we should subsidise private school fees? If taxing them will cost the country money, presumably we can save the country money by subsidising them.
You don’t need to subsidise them because the people who pay private school fees aren’t whinging shits who want free stuff - exemplified by the fact that they pay for something they can get for free.
The assisted places scheme needs to come back in some form. Maybe a national fund for scholarships for the brightest x thousand and the public schools have to set aside places for these pupils - maybe 20% as it would have a good effect on social mobility and opportunities.
But punishing private schools for success is just stupid. Like windfall taxes on successful businesses- punishing people for taking risks and investing where the state won’t or can’t because some people have an envious chip.
VAT on private schools is excellent wedge politics from Labour. Significantly better than any of the stuff the Conservatives have tried.
For most people, private schools = that black and white Johnson/Cameron photo. And it links in beautifully with the helicoptered Sunak.
It's a nice bit of politicking that convinces the Labour faithful that Starmer might be heir to Blair, but at least he's still one of us.
It will cost the country money, in that it will cost more to educate those who would have been educated privately through the state sector instead, than it will raise in taxes.
And it will be full of unintended consequences - pushy middle class parents taking up places at better state schools that once went to those with less privileged backgrounds, further distortion of the housing market, a less well educated workforce, greater inequality (the ultra rich will still send their kids to the top public schools - it will be the climbers in the middle who miss out on the social mobility that sending your kids to a lesser day school provides), fewer initiatives for underprivileged kids that are currently provided by private schools and so on.
But it is red meat for red voters. Sometimes policies don't have to make sense to be popular, especially not when policy is based on ideology over evidence.
Whether it will cost the country money is yet to be determined.
If you are right that it will cost the country money, do you think we should subsidise private school fees? If taxing them will cost the country money, presumably we can save the country money by subsidising them.
You don’t need to subsidise them because the people who pay private school fees aren’t whinging shits who want free stuff - exemplified by the fact that they pay for something they can get for free.
The assisted places scheme needs to come back in some form. Maybe a national fund for scholarships for the brightest x thousand and the public schools have to set aside places for these pupils - maybe 20% as it would have a good effect on social mobility and opportunities.
But punishing private schools for success is just stupid. Like windfall taxes on successful businesses- punishing people for taking risks and investing where the state won’t or can’t because some people have an envious chip.
So, people who don’t send their kids to private school are “whinging shits”? I don’t think you are helping your case.
VAT on private schools is excellent wedge politics from Labour. Significantly better than any of the stuff the Conservatives have tried.
For most people, private schools = that black and white Johnson/Cameron photo. And it links in beautifully with the helicoptered Sunak.
It's a nice bit of politicking that convinces the Labour faithful that Starmer might be heir to Blair, but at least he's still one of us.
It will cost the country money, in that it will cost more to educate those who would have been educated privately through the state sector instead, than it will raise in taxes.
And it will be full of unintended consequences - pushy middle class parents taking up places at better state schools that once went to those with less privileged backgrounds, further distortion of the housing market, a less well educated workforce, greater inequality (the ultra rich will still send their kids to the top public schools - it will be the climbers in the middle who miss out on the social mobility that sending your kids to a lesser day school provides), fewer initiatives for underprivileged kids that are currently provided by private schools and so on.
But it is red meat for red voters. Sometimes policies don't have to make sense to be popular, especially not when policy is based on ideology over evidence.
Whether it will cost the country money is yet to be determined.
If you are right that it will cost the country money, do you think we should subsidise private school fees? If taxing them will cost the country money, presumably we can save the country money by subsidising them.
Though I'm ill inclined to spend ages looking through my old posts to dig out the figures, I did some calculations in a thread last year using assumptions based on private school closures during the GFC along with a couple of scenarios based on guesses at price elasticity of demand, and my calculations were at best revenue neutral and most likely net negative to the treasury. They were reasonably well discussed here, with one of the key additions from other posters being that the effects would likely increase over time - i.e. in year 1 of the policy, most parents with kids in private school will 'see them through' but subsequent kids will be increasingly more likely to be sent to state schools. So its a policy whose negative effects will be increasingly seen over a number of years.
Of course, my calculations are based on assumptions of price elasticity that may be proved wrong. But I doubt it's going to raise significant amounts for the treasury and, as noted above, it comes with a whole heap of secondary effects, such as pushing out less privileged pupils from the better state school places. Or, as other posters added, placing additional strain on state services for kids with special needs, which the private sector apparently handles better (not something I know much about).
As to your second point, in a sense we do 'subsidise' them - by choosing not to charge VAT on them. It's a tax policy designed to encourage their uptake. In my opinion there's a very good argument for allowing parents to take the £7200ish we spend per pupil and allowing them to put it towards the cost of a private education, topping up by paying the remainder of the fees themselves.
VAT on private schools is excellent wedge politics from Labour. Significantly better than any of the stuff the Conservatives have tried.
For most people, private schools = that black and white Johnson/Cameron photo. And it links in beautifully with the helicoptered Sunak.
It's a nice bit of politicking that convinces the Labour faithful that Starmer might be heir to Blair, but at least he's still one of us.
It will cost the country money, in that it will cost more to educate those who would have been educated privately through the state sector instead, than it will raise in taxes.
And it will be full of unintended consequences - pushy middle class parents taking up places at better state schools that once went to those with less privileged backgrounds, further distortion of the housing market, a less well educated workforce, greater inequality (the ultra rich will still send their kids to the top public schools - it will be the climbers in the middle who miss out on the social mobility that sending your kids to a lesser day school provides), fewer initiatives for underprivileged kids that are currently provided by private schools and so on.
But it is red meat for red voters. Sometimes policies don't have to make sense to be popular, especially not when policy is based on ideology over evidence.
Whether it will cost the country money is yet to be determined.
If you are right that it will cost the country money, do you think we should subsidise private school fees? If taxing them will cost the country money, presumably we can save the country money by subsidising them.
You don’t need to subsidise them because the people who pay private school fees aren’t whinging shits who want free stuff - exemplified by the fact that they pay for something they can get for free.
The assisted places scheme needs to come back in some form. Maybe a national fund for scholarships for the brightest x thousand and the public schools have to set aside places for these pupils - maybe 20% as it would have a good effect on social mobility and opportunities.
But punishing private schools for success is just stupid. Like windfall taxes on successful businesses- punishing people for taking risks and investing where the state won’t or can’t because some people have an envious chip.
So, people who don’t send their kids to private school are “whinging shits”? I don’t think you are helping your case.
Um, no, I’m saying that the people who are sending their kids to private school aren’t - it doesn’t follow that because one group are not whinging shits that the other group are.
You have demonstrated the benefits of improving education though in the reading comprehension and reasoning areas.
VAT on private schools is excellent wedge politics from Labour. Significantly better than any of the stuff the Conservatives have tried.
For most people, private schools = that black and white Johnson/Cameron photo. And it links in beautifully with the helicoptered Sunak.
It's a nice bit of politicking that convinces the Labour faithful that Starmer might be heir to Blair, but at least he's still one of us.
It will cost the country money, in that it will cost more to educate those who would have been educated privately through the state sector instead, than it will raise in taxes.
And it will be full of unintended consequences - pushy middle class parents taking up places at better state schools that once went to those with less privileged backgrounds, further distortion of the housing market, a less well educated workforce, greater inequality (the ultra rich will still send their kids to the top public schools - it will be the climbers in the middle who miss out on the social mobility that sending your kids to a lesser day school provides), fewer initiatives for underprivileged kids that are currently provided by private schools and so on.
But it is red meat for red voters. Sometimes policies don't have to make sense to be popular, especially not when policy is based on ideology over evidence.
Whether it will cost the country money is yet to be determined.
If you are right that it will cost the country money, do you think we should subsidise private school fees? If taxing them will cost the country money, presumably we can save the country money by subsidising them.
I don't see why not. Presumably there is a sweet spot somewhere on the spectrum from taxatiom to subsidy. I instinctively don't think it's in the direction of more taxation, and it seems unlikely that the sweet spot is neither taxation nor subsidy.
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.
As well as the small private day schools, it’s going to do 50% of the job of finishing off the cathedral choirs.
(The other 50% is already being done by the Church of England itself, as per Winchester and Sheffield.)
A massive act of cultural vandalism that matters not a jot to Starmer because, yes, red meat.
It's bullshit to talk of the schooling provided by private schools as being a charitable activity that comes under the heading of "services to education".
Charity is given for free.
If Oxfam give free food to the starving, that is a charitable act. If I give an item to Oxfam, that is a charitable act too. If Oxfam sell that item, that is an act of raising money so they can spend the money on charitable acts. But it is not a charitable act in itself.
At the private schools I went to (which include a school that keeps getting mentioned on this site) I never once heard a single person express the view that the schooling there was "superior" to any other schooling. That's not why parents send their children to private school. It's about exclusivity (they think the poor smell) and making contacts that will be useful in later life, as is constantly acknowledged. The parents mostly couldn't care a tinker's cuss for "education".
The reason that most parents send their children to private schools are
1) much smaller class sizes 2) better support for SEND 3) better sports and non-academic facilities
The number of private schools that actually offer any social exclusivity is a tiny percentage of the whole.
And the ones that are going to be unaffected by VAT on private school fees...
Yup
I wonder what will happen in the case of the specialist SEND schools that, among other things, have state funded children sent to them?
VAT on private schools is excellent wedge politics from Labour. Significantly better than any of the stuff the Conservatives have tried.
For most people, private schools = that black and white Johnson/Cameron photo. And it links in beautifully with the helicoptered Sunak.
Yes. It works on multiple levels. If it doesn't lead to a drop in private school numbers, good because it raises money to channel to the underfunded state sector. If it does lead to a drop, also good because it's about discouraging the affluent from forming their own educational 'gated community' outside of the mainstream. Either which way it can be presented with a straight face as a win.
In addition it's a policy that: (i) Pleases the left. (ii) Polls well amongst target voters in target seats, esp the Red Wall. (iii) Is both eyecatching and affordable.
Policies that tick all those boxes are very very hard to come up with. This one does it. It's a star.
VAT on private schools is excellent wedge politics from Labour. Significantly better than any of the stuff the Conservatives have tried.
For most people, private schools = that black and white Johnson/Cameron photo. And it links in beautifully with the helicoptered Sunak.
It's a nice bit of politicking that convinces the Labour faithful that Starmer might be heir to Blair, but at least he's still one of us.
It will cost the country money, in that it will cost more to educate those who would have been educated privately through the state sector instead, than it will raise in taxes.
And it will be full of unintended consequences - pushy middle class parents taking up places at better state schools that once went to those with less privileged backgrounds, further distortion of the housing market, a less well educated workforce, greater inequality (the ultra rich will still send their kids to the top public schools - it will be the climbers in the middle who miss out on the social mobility that sending your kids to a lesser day school provides), fewer initiatives for underprivileged kids that are currently provided by private schools and so on.
But it is red meat for red voters. Sometimes policies don't have to make sense to be popular, especially not when policy is based on ideology over evidence.
Whether it will cost the country money is yet to be determined.
If you are right that it will cost the country money, do you think we should subsidise private school fees? If taxing them will cost the country money, presumably we can save the country money by subsidising them.
Though I'm ill inclined to spend ages looking through my old posts to dig out the figures, I did some calculations in a thread last year using assumptions based on private school closures during the GFC along with a couple of scenarios based on guesses at price elasticity of demand, and my calculations were at best revenue neutral and most likely net negative to the treasury. They were reasonably well discussed here, with one of the key additions from other posters being that the effects would likely increase over time - i.e. in year 1 of the policy, most parents with kids in private school will 'see them through' but subsequent kids will be increasingly more likely to be sent to state schools. So its a policy whose negative effects will be increasingly seen over a number of years.
Of course, my calculations are based on assumptions of price elasticity that may be proved wrong. But I doubt it's going to raise significant amounts for the treasury and, as noted above, it comes with a whole heap of secondary effects, such as pushing out less privileged pupils from the better state school places. Or, as other posters added, placing additional strain on state services for kids with special needs, which the private sector apparently handles better (not something I know much about).
As to your second point, in a sense we do 'subsidise' them - by choosing not to charge VAT on them. It's a tax policy designed to encourage their uptake. In my opinion there's a very good argument for allowing parents to take the £7200ish we spend per pupil and allowing them to put it towards the cost of a private education, topping up by paying the remainder of the fees themselves.
Ah, like the Republican Party’s voucher scheme in the US?
Comments
3 weeks ago the Telegraph were claiming that it was more like 30% of parents would withdraw their children, based on a survey.
The tax raid would affect nearly three-quarters of private school families, the Saltus Wealth Index found.
Almost a third – 29 per cent – of those parents said the rising costs mean they would no longer be able to give their child or children a private education.
One in four parents said they would have to move their child or children out of private school and enrol them in a state school, just under half of whom said they would consider moving house to be in a better catchment area for high-performing state schools.
Half of parents who responded said they could keep their children in private education but would have to make changes – either moving them from boarding to day pupils or finding a cheaper school.
A quarter said they would be unaffected by the VAT increase on fees, a flagship policy of Labour, which is on track for a 1997-style landslide election victory this year, according to the latest polls.
https://archive.ph/MRot5#selection-2695.129-2703.42
A good definition of shame, which kind of works in both contexts, is the social equivalent of pain - something without which we’d cripple ourselves at a very young age; and something we ought not to seek to inflict on others.
Pain ought not to be a tool, though.
If you extend it to everything you remove the whole point of it and it just becomes tax burden - and one that will be disporportionatly felt by the poorest in society.
As is, when shit happens in China, historically, the middle class catch it in the neck. So you have a Plan.
So when they get well off, the Chinese invest abroad. One junior at the bank is living in one of the flats the family owns (they own a couple of floors in a couple of blocks) - partly as a safe investment, partly for the investment visa thing. She basically runs the family property business here.
Though I do fear that this will be a policy that backfires.
Reminded of the time someone reported Hannah Arendt for "advocating a totalitarian philosophy in her political courses," when she was teaching a course on her book The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Arendt's FBI file..
https://twitter.com/Samantharhill/status/1786831738770956398
Though I doubt the FBI would use the term “Jewess” today.
Hilarious, because said firm was notorious for offering a service of hoovering up patents and finding the interesting ones to er… promote-for-fee to Chinese clients.
I do have things to say on guilt and shame (esp. around .. er cultural anthropology and punishment-restoration / banishment in legal systems) but I may not have time to give it enough thought today.
Off-core topic on Saturdays seems a good idea.
This article compares the US today with Britain’s eventually self-defeating response to the industrial challenges from Germany and the US at the start of the 20th C.
A Clean Technology Trade War Shows How Empires Fall
US hegemony may be hard to maintain. It will be all but impossible if it retreats into an isolationist shell.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-05/a-clean-technology-trade-war-shows-how-empires-fall
IMO the straightforward choice between free trade and protectionism is a misleading duality (in much the same way that the Thatcherite duality between free markets and state intervention was).
A pragmatic approach which recognises that both approaches have their merits, if selectively applied, makes much more sense.
(It does require leaders who have some clue about what they’re doing, though.)
(A failure to recognise that is perhaps why government has done so poorly at both in recent years.)
This is one of the great things about capitalism - the idiots have some background.
It may be wheeled out from time to time for some exceptional examples, but only on the provision of ample evidence first.
This is the argument I never get. If private schools weren’t exclusive and “better” nobody would pay. So the answer is to accept that they are a luxury and to tax them as such. Not get rid of them but say that if you want to send your children there that is your right but you also pay tax on it as is not essential. They are an outlier.
Schools face £1bn funding hit from falling pupil rolls
Hits to primary and secondary funding streams could force school mergers or closures, Education Policy Institute research suggests
https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/school-funding-hit-falling-pupil-rolls
The reality is that very few, if any successful economies are completely free markets, or practice completely free trade. But we’ve for decades debated economic policy through such slogans.
Charity is given for free.
If Oxfam give free food to the starving, that is a charitable act.
If I give an item to Oxfam, that is a charitable act too.
If Oxfam sell that item, that is an act of raising money so they can spend the money on charitable acts. But it is not a charitable act in itself.
At the private schools I went to (which include a school that keeps getting mentioned on this site) I never once heard a single person express the view that the schooling there was "superior" to any other schooling. That's not why parents send their children to private school. It's about exclusivity (they think the poor smell) and making contacts that will be useful in later life, as is constantly acknowledged. The parents mostly couldn't care a tinker's cuss for "education".
I rarely agree with @CorrectHorseBattery but on this occasion he suggested making private schools irrelevant by improving the quality of state schools. Let the private sector wither as parents make their own choices.
That’s absolutely the right approach.
Making private schools worse (“attacking them”) should have no role to play.
"Rod Ismay: "I’m sorry, I've got so many documents and so many things in my mind, I'm not sure whether I did or I didn't, but it would make sense."
Beer: "Yes, apologies for the number of documents in the inquiry, we like to give people full disclosure."
“Swedish police have investigated a complaint made by a female member of the production crew after an incident following his performance in Thursday night’s semi final.
“While the legal process takes its course, it would not be appropriate for him to continue in the contest. 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.
“We maintain a zero-tolerance policy towards inappropriate behaviour at our event and are committed to providing a safe and secure working environment for all staff at the contest.
“In light of this, Joost Klein’s behaviour towards a team member is deemed in breach of contest rules. The Grand Final of the 68th Eurovision Song Contest will now proceed with 25 participating songs.”
The complaint originated from a production crew member, rather than an entrant in the competition.
And if US companies, both tech and manufacturing, were as customer focused as are the successful Chinese enterprises (contrast BYD or Geely and GM or Ford; Tick-tock with Instagram for example), it would be to both their and their customers’ benefit.
The Chinese system is overall a malign one, but we ought not to be blind to analysing what works there, and why.
I’m working out a plan to subtly nudge a French chap sitting behind me off a nearby cliff so I can step in and comfort his incredibly beautiful partner because I am gallant like that.
But anyway, cheers and enjoy the sunshine but remember your sunscreen.
Beer for scale.
Years back I was part of thing to try and persuade the government to change policy on tariffs. Individual electronic components had higher tariffs than finished goods - among other things this made getting the Raspberry Pi manufactured in the U.K. difficult.
We met a government official - when we suggested equalising the tariffs he was aghast - “The Chinese will throw a fit!”…
Edit: I think in this case Biden is correct. If you want tariffless free trade, that depends on both parties not using subsidies.
A charitable asset is NOT a private asset. It is designated for a particular purpose and legally must be managed by trustees and used for that purpose. If it is used for anything else, or transferred to another charity, a process must be gone through and it can be blocked. Using it for another purpose is a crime, punishable by a very heavy fine.
A business, or a person, can by contrast use their assets for any purpose it/he/she wishes. There are comparatively limited restrictions on doing so.
Now, we come to a grey area. Most private schools with large endowments were historically given those endowments for the purposes of providing an education for free. Not all such endowments - others were for building projects or for particular specific purposes. But most of them.
It is hard to argue those endowments are being used for such a purpose by these schools at present. For example Eton uses its endowments only for the maintenance of its buildings. All day to day running costs - including bursaries - are met from fees.
There is therefore a legitimate argument that the endowments can and should be redirected to other educational purposes by (checks notes) disendowing charitable schools that charge fees.*
Which is where we started.
If, of course, they wished to become businesses and keep their endowments while paying taxes, let them do so.
Either way, VAT on school fees is a silly red herring.
VAT is also a very bad tax in every other imaginable way and should be abolished altogether. But that's really not going to happen given how much it brings in.
*Incidentally the logic of disendowing the Church in Wales on a partial basis was that prior to 1660 gifts to the church were gifts to the nation rather than the church.
Many/most (don’t know - anyone have stats?) are charities in some form. In their case the argument is that education is a public good. If you tax a public good you increase its price and therefore reduce demand/production.
The questions then become:
1. Does the increase in VAT income on school fees offset the increase in costs for the state of new children in the state system on a total government level (ie are the government finances improved in aggregate)?
2. Does the Treasury allocate all the incremental funds to education (a political choice but I have my doubts)?
3. Is the state sector as productive as the private sector in terms of net educational output or will the output be lower/higher for a given amount of funding?
4. Are the funds better focused on a lucky few vs. spread thinly across all state pupils?
I actually think that we are in a good position. The threat of VAT on school fees over the last few years has led to schools understand that they need to make much more of a social contribution than just fund a few bursaries to justify their special status. We have seen this through sharing facilities with local communities, the London Academy of Excellence partnership and now the STAR Academies (of which Jack Straw, incidentally, is a key supporter). Sometime jaw jaw is better than war war.
Edit: Oxfam of course is the charity that gave out aid in return for sex so perhaps an unfortunate example to use.
1) much smaller class sizes
2) better support for SEND
3) better sports and non-academic facilities
The number of private schools that actually offer any social exclusivity is a tiny percentage of the whole.
Who grew up surrounded by lawyers and judges… 😉
Simons Foundation Co-Founder, Mathematician and Investor Jim Simons Dies at 86
https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2024/05/10/simons-foundation-co-founder-mathematician-and-investor-jim-simons-dies-at-86
Made billions, and gave away quite a lot of them.
Unusual in being both a massively successful businessman and a world class mathematician.
https://www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/people-in-northern-gaza-forced-to-survive-on-245-calories-a-day-less-than-a-can-of-beans-oxfam/
"The IPC report [*] found that famine is imminent in northern Gaza and that almost all the population is now experiencing extreme hunger"
*Integrated Food Security Phase Classification
"Amitabh Behar, Oxfam International Executive Director said 'Israel is making deliberate choices to starve civilians.'"
"Israel is ignoring both the International Court of Justice order to prevent genocide and UN Security Council resolutions."
"Oxfam is calling for [...] for countries to immediately stop supplying arms to Israel"
Expect Oxfam to be bad-jacketed.
There is special treatment for trading subsidiaries of charities.
In most cases the fees cover costs of the education. Sometimes they are subsidised by the parent charity, sometimes not.
And although the “signalling” benefit you refer to is relevant it is only meaningful for a small group of well known schools. People who went to Local Private School & Co Limited (which is the vast majority of kids in private education) get no real benefit from exclusivity/networking.
And as for nobody mentioning that the education was “superior” we had it drummed into us from the start we were very lucky to be there getting that level of teaching and other activities so we had to hold up our side of the bargain.
My parents, my friends who went to Winchester with me from my tother and my friends I made there were never there for social cachet because they would have taken an easier route elsewhere if that was important.
For most people, private schools = that black and white Johnson/Cameron photo. And it links in beautifully with the helicoptered Sunak.
Some very interesting research out of Hong Kong.
Functional and multi-omic aging rejuvenation with GLP-1R agonism
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.05.06.592653v1
Identifying readily implementable methods that can effectively counteract aging is urgently needed for tackling age-related degenerative disorders. Here, we conducted functional assessments and deep molecular phenotyping in the aging mouse to demonstrate that glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist (GLP-1RA) treatment attenuates body-wide age-related changes. Apart from improvements in physical and cognitive performance, the age-counteracting effects are prominently evident at multiple omic levels. These span the transcriptomes and DNA methylomes of various tissues, organs and circulating white blood cells, as well as the plasma metabolome. Importantly, the beneficial effects are specific to aged mice, not young adults, and are achieved with a low dosage of GLP-1RA which has a negligible impact on food consumption and body weight. The molecular rejuvenation effects exhibit organ-specific characteristics, which are generally heavily dependent on hypothalamic GLP-1R. We benchmarked the GLP-1RA age-counteracting effects against those of mTOR inhibition, a well-established anti-aging intervention, observing a strong resemblance across the two strategies. Our findings have broad implications for understanding the mechanistic basis of the clinically observed pleiotropic effects of GLP-1RAs, the design of intervention trials for age-related diseases, and the development of anti-aging-based therapeutics...
https://x.com/dinosofos/status/1789169587038077122?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
I think you're all getting very confused about currency as a store of value as well as a means of exchange. It's as much your property as anything else.
What's ultimately being taxed is some activity - working, damaging the environment, living in a particular area, enjoying "luxury" goods.
Excited to share my latest article, co-authored with @jonasnahm, out now in the APSR:
Strategies of green industrial policy: How states position firms in global supply chains.
https://twitter.com/bentleyballan/status/1788944028047716606
“..We show that the choice of strategy is shaped by the level of uncertainty and the position of the domestic industry in global supply chains, that is, whether global supply chains are emerging or mature, and whether the domestic industry is an entrant or an incumbent..
.. States use targeted strategies when uncertainty is low and open-ended strategies when uncertainty is high.
They use industry-driven strategies when seeking to integrate firms and government-driven strategies when seeking to build entire ecosystems and supply chain….”
My point was rather that they pay far more attention to user experience than do many of the US efforts.
It will cost the country money, in that it will cost more to educate those who would have been educated privately through the state sector instead, than it will raise in taxes.
And it will be full of unintended consequences - pushy middle class parents taking up places at better state schools that once went to those with less privileged backgrounds, further distortion of the housing market, a less well educated workforce, greater inequality (the ultra rich will still send their kids to the top public schools - it will be the climbers in the middle who miss out on the social mobility that sending your kids to a lesser day school provides), fewer initiatives for underprivileged kids that are currently provided by private schools and so on.
But it is red meat for red voters. Sometimes policies don't have to make sense to be popular, especially not when policy is based on ideology over evidence.
If you are right that it will cost the country money, do you think we should subsidise private school fees? If taxing them will cost the country money, presumably we can save the country money by subsidising them.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05222/
However, that 50% figure will include such things as overseas language schools (for example).
Schools that are businesses also tend to be smaller and more specifically focussed, e.g. proprietary prep schools.
The majority of secondary school aged children in independent schools in the U.K. will be in schools with charitable status.
The assisted places scheme needs to come back in some form. Maybe a national fund for scholarships for the brightest x thousand and the public schools have to set aside places for these pupils - maybe 20% as it would have a good effect on social mobility and opportunities.
But punishing private schools for success is just stupid. Like windfall taxes on successful businesses- punishing people for taking risks and investing where the state won’t or can’t because some people have an envious chip.
https://twitter.com/labour_history/status/1788937119366259138
Note, though, a very young looking Gordon Brown laughing along.
Of course, my calculations are based on assumptions of price elasticity that may be proved wrong. But I doubt it's going to raise significant amounts for the treasury and, as noted above, it comes with a whole heap of secondary effects, such as pushing out less privileged pupils from the better state school places. Or, as other posters added, placing additional strain on state services for kids with special needs, which the private sector apparently handles better (not something I know much about).
As to your second point, in a sense we do 'subsidise' them - by choosing not to charge VAT on them. It's a tax policy designed to encourage their uptake. In my opinion there's a very good argument for allowing parents to take the £7200ish we spend per pupil and allowing them to put it towards the cost of a private education, topping up by paying the remainder of the fees themselves.
You have demonstrated the benefits of improving education though in the reading comprehension and reasoning areas.
(The other 50% is already being done by the Church of England itself, as per Winchester and Sheffield.)
A massive act of cultural vandalism that matters not a jot to Starmer because, yes, red meat.
I wonder what will happen in the case of the specialist SEND schools that, among other things, have state funded children sent to them?
France's government is disputing a portion of Kristi Noem's book that describes a canceled meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.
A representative from the Élysée Palace disputed Noem's account, saying there’s no record of a scheduled meeting, nor was there an invitation extended to her…
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1789295746073625068
In addition it's a policy that:
(i) Pleases the left.
(ii) Polls well amongst target voters in target seats, esp the Red Wall.
(iii) Is both eyecatching and affordable.
Policies that tick all those boxes are very very hard to come up with. This one does it. It's a star.