A sunnier spell splitting some sharp showers (try saying that with your teeth out).
I'm not quite sure what to make of this "national service" idea - it's an old Conservative meme which gets wheeled out every so often under various guises. I recall a scheme to make sure 16-18 year old "NEET"s (Not in Education, Employment or Training) had to attend some form of training scheme at Youth Centres or something like that.
I remember various attempts to encourage apprenticeships sponsoring companies to employ and train young people but as it seems we have a "threat" again - seriously, Putin isn't the Warsaw Pact with 100 divisions two hours from the Rhine. We always have to have a "threat", don't we, and when we didn't for a brief period from 1989 people actually started asking whether all the money we were throwing at the military-industrial complex (including nuclear weapons) was money well spent?
The "threat" is used as glue to hold society together and, if I were being a complete cynic, supportive of the Government.
There's some interesting comments on birth rates - the last time birth rates fell, schools were closed or merged together and playing fields sold off for housing development. When the birth rate recovered, money had to be spent providing additional classrooms to deal with the new bulge in capacity. Currently, the big problem in school construction is the severe shortage of SEN units to deal with the post-lockdown increase in referrals.
Deltapoll continues the 17.5% swing from Conservative to Labour. We have the Monday R&W poll tomorrow which will be interesting as R&W do their fieldwork on the Sunday and the last poll had a larger than usual sample base (3,700) which is more than double Deltapoll or Opinium.
Just again, why should people not be paid for this? If they are being forced to do it, surely they should be paid? Does anyone actually think people shouldn't be paid?
They are not being forced to do something specific.
They are being asked to make a contribution to society. A few hours a month.
Think of it as non-cash tax if it makes you feel better.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
So youre for VAT on university fees ?
Yes. 100%.
In fact, I'd have fees eliminated for doctors and nurses but up them for other degrees. In principle I oppose fees but accept - unlike the Tories - it is unaffordable. Of course with the £2.5bn they've just plucked out of thin air, perhaps that could eliminate the fees?
I think forgiveness is a better approach. Each year in the NHS knocks a couple of grand off the amount to be repaid. That way you don’t train people and then they promptly bugger off without paying for it.
Yeah I can have a discussion about how it would be done. Stay in the NHS five years and it gets wiped.
Labour have already closed my son's fucking school
Labour are not in Government
And, yet, they've still managed to close my son's school.
No. They haven't. If it's the school on the Times front page they acknowledge that pupil numbers have been dwindling for some time. A school near here, St Mary's Shaftesbury closed a few years ago for the same reason. Was that one shut by Labour too?
It is that school but, with respect, you know nothing about it other than keen to find an angle that absolves Labour of all blame. It'd otherwise compell you to engage with the complexities of a nasty and unpleasant policy that you'd prefer not to.
The 20% price demand shock has been sufficient to kill it off, whereas otherwise it would have survived, and the disruption its going to cause to my son and his friends, and all the job losses it causes - including several pre-school teachers who are family friends - can be laid entirely at the door of SKS. Everyone knows he's going to win and that's having real world effects now.
I'd walk through blood to stop the man. He has deeply angered me and ripped the heart out of one of the core pillars of our local community.
He is dirt.
I doubt VAT on private schools is going to raise much money for the government as it will move some pupils back to the state sector.
But in the upcoming decades we're going to have to see more taxes raised and lower spending on pretty much all of the country.
And it will be easier for many of the disadvantaged groups to lose out if some of those at the top are visibly doing so as well.
Even if its unfortunate and unpleasant for your family.
It is deeply unpleasant and deeply personal.
But the point is it won't raise any money for the government and will make the education smaller and worse. That's my argument as to why anyone who cares about state education should oppose it.
I think Starmer would have more fruit pursuing a line of broader wealth taxes, even if I didn't necessarily agree with them.
I agree in that I would prefer more taxes on property and wealth.
More taxes on inheritance and rentierism and less on work and 'self-improvement'.
I think we should be encouraging more spending on education.
Personally I think we should all have a lifetime 'learning allowance'.
It's very personal for me that we have a government that wants to shaft me at every turn.
Lock down to protect society, put your life on hold for two years
Up your taxes to the highest in history
Offer no help on housing - build no houses
Force you to do unpaid work
It feels like a deliberate attack on young people.
You were one of the biggest proponents of lockdown on this site!
Hey - you can be pro-lockdown (as I was for the first one) and remain upset about how society treated young people during that period. Tuition fees, the lack of gardens, the bans on Parkrun, prioritising recreation over getting schools back open and so on
I still have this memory of a radio call in where it was suggested that pubs and bars should only open to people aged 50 and over to prevent young people bringing COVID in. Arseholes. But I still understood what needed to be done.
Labour have already closed my son's fucking school
Labour are not in Government
And, yet, they've still managed to close my son's school.
No. They haven't. If it's the school on the Times front page they acknowledge that pupil numbers have been dwindling for some time. A school near here, St Mary's Shaftesbury closed a few years ago for the same reason. Was that one shut by Labour too?
I’m not sure that follows.
If numbers are dwindling the directors may think there is scope to turn it around. But then VAT puts prices up 20% and the decline accelerates.
It may not be the only contributing factor but it doesn’t mean that Labour isn’t responsible
It always amuses me that people cannot seem to see that many - in fact most - things are multifactorial. Events are rarely caused by just one thing, but several working together.
I n this case, it's perfectly possible that the school could have kept going, but the *threat* of the tax placed an additional burden onto the school - perhaps in part by putting off prospective parents. It's a perfectly feasible scenario.
In addition, the directors have a moral responsibility to try to give as much warning of closure as possible. Taking in another year's intake, just to close a few months later, would IMV be irresponsible.
It made the difference between surviving a bad year and closure.
On that the Trustee letter is very clear.
Most of the private schools are expecting a shakeout due to Starmer. Single sex schools are increasingly going co-ed so they can pick up families of those faced with school closures. The smaller schools are most vulnerable as they live closer to the breadline.
I suspect the net effect will be fewer schools but the really well off will go on as usual. The fall out will be less well off families who want to invest in their kids education.
By less well off, I presume you mean in the top decile by wealth, but not the top percentile.
I'd walk through blood to stop the man. He has deeply angered me and ripped the heart out of one of the core pillars of our local community.
He is dirt.
Calm down dear. It's only an election.
You forget, Chris, it's not: my son is losing his school and his teachers their jobs. The town, a school that's been at the centre of the community for almost 90 years.
This is deeply deeply real. It's not a game. It's not a ding-dong.
Real people, real lives, real impact.
Learn it.
If you think Keir Starmer "is dirt" and you would "wade through blood" to stop him, because a school is closing, then quite frankly I think you need professional help.
I suspect that saying those kinds of things would have the police knocking at your door if you belonged to some minority communities.
I think CR is very upset, and is venting a little.
No doubt. But I think he does need to calm down with the "wade through blood to stop him" stuff. It's not healthy for anyone to be thinking like that.
He’s experiencing a policy that hurts him. He’s reacting as many others do. It’s understandable.
I like the policy (ending tax breaks for inequality machines is the very least I expect from a Labour government) - but if you replace "school" with "mine" and "Starmer" with "Thatcher", CR's 'blood up' post reads exactly like a Scargill speech from the 1980s. I was therefore able to empathize a little bit.
Labour have already closed my son's fucking school
Labour are not in Government
And, yet, they've still managed to close my son's school.
No. They haven't. If it's the school on the Times front page they acknowledge that pupil numbers have been dwindling for some time. A school near here, St Mary's Shaftesbury closed a few years ago for the same reason. Was that one shut by Labour too?
It is that school but, with respect, you know nothing about it other than keen to find an angle that absolves Labour of all blame. It'd otherwise compell you to engage with the complexities of a nasty and unpleasant policy that you'd prefer not to.
The 20% price demand shock has been sufficient to kill it off, whereas otherwise it would have survived, and the disruption its going to cause to my son and his friends, and all the job losses it causes - including several pre-school teachers who are family friends - can be laid entirely at the door of SKS. Everyone knows he's going to win and that's having real world effects now.
I'd walk through blood to stop the man. He has deeply angered me and ripped the heart out of one of the core pillars of our local community.
He is dirt.
I doubt VAT on private schools is going to raise much money for the government as it will move some pupils back to the state sector.
But in the upcoming decades we're going to have to see more taxes raised and lower spending on pretty much all of the country.
And it will be easier for many of the disadvantaged groups to lose out if some of those at the top are visibly doing so as well.
Even if its unfortunate and unpleasant for your family.
The credit crunch killed off about thirty schools in the UK, and that was a one or two year blip. Assume Labour in power for ten years and the policy won't be reversed until at least 2034, and you're potentially looking at a prolonged depression that kills off (ballpark figure here) 300 private schools.
All those kids have to go somewhere. Some of them will be absorbed into other private schools, but even then, imagine if an additional 100-ish state schools need to be built to accommodate kids from private schools that have closed down, on top of an extra 10-20% demand created by parents who would have sent their kids to private schools, but are no longer able to. More schools will have to be built, meaning the cost will probably be greater than the extra £6k per child.
The truth is we don't know exactly how this policy is going to play out, but I did some calculations a few weeks ago and worked out that it's likely to have a creeping, cumulative effect, as parents will pay for kids with three or four years left to go, but be less likely to pay for 5 year olds with 13 years to go, creating a progressive hollowing out of the system that will lead to more and more private schools closing over time.
In short, I reckon Labour's tax wheeze may generate a windfall at first, but will slowly become net negative in terms of tax take over time.
But it won't be the top public schools closing down. It will be the minor schools favoured by the middle classes. So we'll end up with an even more divided system than we have now.
For those reasons, I think it's a bad policy. It will cost the taxpayer more than it brings in revenue, and actually increase division in society by limiting educational choices to an even smaller, more privileged elite.
Except. We are facing a baby bust. The birth rate fell off a cliff around 2013. Primary Schools are already facing closure because of falling rolls. This will feed into Secondary very soon. More kids in the system leads to the much cheaper option of State schools staying open rather than the costs of closing them down.
I'm actually deeply unconvinced of this, based on my very unscientific study of who's at the school gates of the primary schools near me.
We've yet to see how the birthrate changes, taking into account the preferences of recent immigrants. They may well, due to cultural values, place much higher emphasis on having children than we do.
I wouldn't be surprised to see an uptick in the birthrate in the next decade.
Not enough immigrants to change the figures that much. The underlying issue is that people of normal child-raising age can't afford to have children, because their finances are so stretched by mortgage payments.
Which is probably at least as big an issue for parents in the private school market.
It means that the state primary I went to is closing, because the area doesn't have enough children in it any more. Which is a bit sad, but not worth wading through blood for.
It is not just a UK problem though, across the developed world parents are having less children.
The UK fertility rate of 1.6 is actually higher than that in Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, South Korea and China and the same as in Australia and only just below the 1.7 fertility rate in the US in 2024. Only France and Ireland at an average of 1.8 children per mother and Argentina at 1.9 are close to replacement rate of 2.1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
So youre for VAT on university fees ?
Yes. 100%.
In fact, I'd have fees eliminated for doctors and nurses but up them for other degrees. In principle I oppose fees but accept - unlike the Tories - it is unaffordable. Of course with the £2.5bn they've just plucked out of thin air, perhaps that could eliminate the fees?
I think forgiveness is a better approach. Each year in the NHS knocks a couple of grand off the amount to be repaid. That way you don’t train people and then they promptly bugger off without paying for it.
Its such a no-brainer policy. Politically, the Tories could have easily got ahead on this kind of thing. I don't think it gets students voting for you, but it probably brings some more parents back on side. Practically, it is good idea and I wouldn't be surprised if long term it isn't even money saver for government. A dentist costs what £100k+ to train, getting a few more years of them being NHS dentist versus knocking off £10-15k in debt.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
The argument is that education is a social good.
Restricting private education reduces the resources available for the less well off.
The cost of waiving VAT is a fraction of the cost of providing it via the state
Labour have already closed my son's fucking school
Labour are not in Government
And, yet, they've still managed to close my son's school.
No. They haven't. If it's the school on the Times front page they acknowledge that pupil numbers have been dwindling for some time. A school near here, St Mary's Shaftesbury closed a few years ago for the same reason. Was that one shut by Labour too?
It is that school but, with respect, you know nothing about it other than keen to find an angle that absolves Labour of all blame. It'd otherwise compell you to engage with the complexities of a nasty and unpleasant policy that you'd prefer not to.
The 20% price demand shock has been sufficient to kill it off, whereas otherwise it would have survived, and the disruption its going to cause to my son and his friends, and all the job losses it causes - including several pre-school teachers who are family friends - can be laid entirely at the door of SKS. Everyone knows he's going to win and that's having real world effects now.
I'd walk through blood to stop the man. He has deeply angered me and ripped the heart out of one of the core pillars of our local community.
He is dirt.
Yet you're entirely happy for this government to take actions that will cause universities to go bust.
Are you referring to the comment: "How do you type that noise where you wibble your lips with your fingers really rapidly whilst air comes out, followed by "diddums" ? " ?
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
So youre for VAT on university fees ?
Yes. 100%.
In fact, I'd have fees eliminated for doctors and nurses but up them for other degrees. In principle I oppose fees but accept - unlike the Tories - it is unaffordable. Of course with the £2.5bn they've just plucked out of thin air, perhaps that could eliminate the fees?
I think forgiveness is a better approach. Each year in the NHS knocks a couple of grand off the amount to be repaid. That way you don’t train people and then they promptly bugger off without paying for it.
Its such a no-brainer policy. The Tories could have easily got ahead on this kind of thing. I don't think it gets students voting for you, but it probably brings some more parents back on side.
In the future, if the Tories offered something like that, environmental policy, house building, they'd win over a lot of people like me.
But as HYUFD has said many times, they hold me in contempt.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
I actually think Horse has it right - we should be focused on making state schools so excellent, no parent like Casino feels the need to send their kid to private school.
While you will always get an elite who want their kids to be educated around other elite types, the majority of parents who send their kids to minor private schools are parents who are deeply skeptical about the ability of the state system to provide an adequate education for their kids, and highly value the importance of a good education in getting on in life, to the point where they are prepared to spend a huge percentage of their disposable income on it.
The answer to this isn't making private schools more expensive, it's making state schools better. Reduce demand for private education by making the alternative more appealing.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
So youre for VAT on university fees ?
Yes. 100%.
In fact, I'd have fees eliminated for doctors and nurses but up them for other degrees. In principle I oppose fees but accept - unlike the Tories - it is unaffordable. Of course with the £2.5bn they've just plucked out of thin air, perhaps that could eliminate the fees?
I think forgiveness is a better approach. Each year in the NHS knocks a couple of grand off the amount to be repaid. That way you don’t train people and then they promptly bugger off without paying for it.
Its such a no-brainer policy. The Tories could have easily got ahead on this kind of thing. I don't think it gets students voting for you, but it probably brings some more parents back on side.
I would also reduce the interest rate to CPI, or perhaps CPI-0.5/1%. I don’t think there’s any justification for charging above-inflation interest on it.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
So youre for VAT on university fees ?
Yes. 100%.
In fact, I'd have fees eliminated for doctors and nurses but up them for other degrees. In principle I oppose fees but accept - unlike the Tories - it is unaffordable. Of course with the £2.5bn they've just plucked out of thin air, perhaps that could eliminate the fees?
Don’t eliminate the fees. Pay them off as part of working for the NHS. Do the same for teachers.
So if you work as a teacher (say) your student loans are paid down for you. No personal payments while you are a teacher, capital repaid on an increasing scale. So relatively little is paid off in the first year or 2. But by the end of the 6th year (say) the last is gone.
10% 10% 10% 20% 20% 30%
Or some such.
If you’ve got someone on a career for 6 years, you’ve got value out of the bargain. And they are very likely to stay in that career
Just again, why should people not be paid for this? If they are being forced to do it, surely they should be paid? Does anyone actually think people shouldn't be paid?
They are not being forced to do something specific.
They are being asked to make a contribution to society. A few hours a month.
Think of it as non-cash tax if it makes you feel better.
They are not being asked. They are being told.
Do you support not paying people to work?
If it's a tax as you call it, why is nobody else paying it?
She wouldn't be getting half of it if she were a bloke.
Nick Robinson was a bloke and he was lambasted on here as Toenails for his pro-Labour bias, at least until David Cameron tried to recruit Robinson who had been a Conservative even at Oxford.
True, but that was sort of a meme/piss-take but the stuff aimed at Laura Kuenssberg is just aggressive and downright nasty.
No it is not.
She is supposed to be impartial and above the fray. She is hoist by her own petard. See the podcast with another idiot Paddy O'Connell. The one about Starmer attending non-league football grounds. I can't be arsed to post it again. I've already posted it twice.
For reference I have no idea who Chris Mason votes for.
Laura K who I have often defended, on the night of the LEs, literally said that the race was closer than expected and that Khan would quite possibly lose. Now this was before a single vote had even been counted.
It doesn't say much for the credibility of her sources - but also what on Earth was she doing?
To be fair, lots of journalists and lots of people here were saying that. It was a shared delusion.
I would also reduce the interest rate to CPI, or perhaps CPI-0.5/1%. I don’t think there’s any justification for charging above-inflation interest on it.
The Tories made it the wrong kind of inflation specifically to make the cost higher!
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
So youre for VAT on university fees ?
Yes. 100%.
In fact, I'd have fees eliminated for doctors and nurses but up them for other degrees. In principle I oppose fees but accept - unlike the Tories - it is unaffordable. Of course with the £2.5bn they've just plucked out of thin air, perhaps that could eliminate the fees?
Don’t eliminate the fees. Pay them off as part of working for the NHS. Do the same for teachers.
So if you work as a teacher (say) your student loans are paid down for you. No personal payments while you are a teacher, capital repaid on an increasing scale. So relatively little is paid off in the first year or 2. But by the end of the 6th year (say) the last is gone.
10% 10% 10% 20% 20% 30%
Or some such.
If you’ve got someone on a career for 6 years, you’ve got value out of the bargain. And they are very likely to stay in that career
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
So youre for VAT on university fees ?
Yes. 100%.
In fact, I'd have fees eliminated for doctors and nurses but up them for other degrees. In principle I oppose fees but accept - unlike the Tories - it is unaffordable. Of course with the £2.5bn they've just plucked out of thin air, perhaps that could eliminate the fees?
I think forgiveness is a better approach. Each year in the NHS knocks a couple of grand off the amount to be repaid. That way you don’t train people and then they promptly bugger off without paying for it.
Its such a no-brainer policy. The Tories could have easily got ahead on this kind of thing. I don't think it gets students voting for you, but it probably brings some more parents back on side.
In the future, if the Tories offered something like that, environmental policy, house building, they'd win over a lot of people like me.
But as HYUFD has said many times, they hold me in contempt.
I think if I was Sunak I would even lean in more to nerdy I like maths / STEM optics. Really big push for more STEM at uni by grants / loan foregiveness / ring-fenced funding to unis to run such courses. Sure all the journalists that did liberal arts will be huffing about no fair, but again its actually good for the country. AI going to take a lot of the low hanging paper pushing / writing report jobs, LLMs aren't actually good at doing logic / science (despite what the contrived benchmarks say).
Labour have already closed my son's fucking school
Labour are not in Government
And, yet, they've still managed to close my son's school.
No. They haven't. If it's the school on the Times front page they acknowledge that pupil numbers have been dwindling for some time. A school near here, St Mary's Shaftesbury closed a few years ago for the same reason. Was that one shut by Labour too?
Maybe if the Tories hadn't spend their time in power penalising raising families, there wouldn't be such a shrinking customer base for these schools that the weaker ones are being forced out of business.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
So youre for VAT on university fees ?
Yes. 100%.
In fact, I'd have fees eliminated for doctors and nurses but up them for other degrees. In principle I oppose fees but accept - unlike the Tories - it is unaffordable. Of course with the £2.5bn they've just plucked out of thin air, perhaps that could eliminate the fees?
Don’t eliminate the fees. Pay them off as part of working for the NHS. Do the same for teachers.
So if you work as a teacher (say) your student loans are paid down for you. No personal payments while you are a teacher, capital repaid on an increasing scale. So relatively little is paid off in the first year or 2. But by the end of the 6th year (say) the last is gone.
10% 10% 10% 20% 20% 30%
Or some such.
If you’ve got someone on a career for 6 years, you’ve got value out of the bargain. And they are very likely to stay in that career
I can get behind that. That is a very good idea.
Companies that provide expensive professional training sometimes do something similar - a loan that is paid off by working for them. The back loading of the repayments is also typical, I believe.
I think if I was Sunak I would even lean in more to nerdy I like maths / STEM optics. Really big push for more STEM at uni by grants / loan foregiveness / ring-fenced funding to unis to run such courses. Sure all the journalists that did liberal arts will be huffing about no fair, but again its actually good for the country.
I would be building that into some kind of "tech bro" political strategy. Talking about raising the next generation of software engineers etc, something which the UK does actually compete on. Talk about start-up culture, a kind of "silicon valley" lite or something like that.
All of these are things that Sunak would actually do quite well on.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
So youre for VAT on university fees ?
Yes. 100%.
In fact, I'd have fees eliminated for doctors and nurses but up them for other degrees. In principle I oppose fees but accept - unlike the Tories - it is unaffordable. Of course with the £2.5bn they've just plucked out of thin air, perhaps that could eliminate the fees?
I think forgiveness is a better approach. Each year in the NHS knocks a couple of grand off the amount to be repaid. That way you don’t train people and then they promptly bugger off without paying for it.
Its such a no-brainer policy. Politically, the Tories could have easily got ahead on this kind of thing. I don't think it gets students voting for you, but it probably brings some more parents back on side. Practically, it is good idea and I wouldn't be surprised if long term it isn't even money saver for government. A dentist costs what £100k+ to train, getting a few more years of them being NHS dentist versus knocking off £10-15k in debt.
The Tories could easily have got ahead on lots of things. But they spent their time having pointless internal squabbles and ignored the electorate. Whether theyve got the brains to get their act together in opposition remains to be seen.
A sunnier spell splitting some sharp showers (try saying that with your teeth out).
I'm not quite sure what to make of this "national service" idea - it's an old Conservative meme which gets wheeled out every so often under various guises. I recall a scheme to make sure 16-18 year old "NEET"s (Not in Education, Employment or Training) had to attend some form of training scheme at Youth Centres or something like that.
I remember various attempts to encourage apprenticeships sponsoring companies to employ and train young people but as it seems we have a "threat" again - seriously, Putin isn't the Warsaw Pact with 100 divisions two hours from the Rhine. We always have to have a "threat", don't we, and when we didn't for a brief period from 1989 people actually started asking whether all the money we were throwing at the military-industrial complex (including nuclear weapons) was money well spent?
The "threat" is used as glue to hold society together and, if I were being a complete cynic, supportive of the Government.
There's some interesting comments on birth rates - the last time birth rates fell, schools were closed or merged together and playing fields sold off for housing development. When the birth rate recovered, money had to be spent providing additional classrooms to deal with the new bulge in capacity. Currently, the big problem in school construction is the severe shortage of SEN units to deal with the post-lockdown increase in referrals.
Deltapoll continues the 17.5% swing from Conservative to Labour. We have the Monday R&W poll tomorrow which will be interesting as R&W do their fieldwork on the Sunday and the last poll had a larger than usual sample base (3,700) which is more than double Deltapoll or Opinium.
The R&W poll is so important for the narrative. If Sunak survives these opening few days with his vote share largely intact, then the Labour landslide is still to play for.
I don’t agree with the school VAT policy for the reasons many have articulated here. I think if they do introduce it, though, they should have tapered it in over 4-5 years (say 5% increase year on year?) rather than a big bang. Feels to me like that would help institutions and parents make easier long-term budgeting decisions.
Just a question that I don't fully understand, how is a private school in such a dire state that it needs a tax exemption to survive? Do we do this for other businesses that have gone bust?
I don’t agree with the school VAT policy for the reasons many have articulated here. I think if they do introduce it, though, they should have tapered it in over 4-5 years (say 5% increase year on year?) rather than a big bang. Feels to me like that would help institutions and parents make easier long-term budgeting decisions.
I think if I was Sunak I would even lean in more to nerdy I like maths / STEM optics. Really big push for more STEM at uni by grants / loan foregiveness / ring-fenced funding to unis to run such courses. Sure all the journalists that did liberal arts will be huffing about no fair, but again its actually good for the country.
I would be building that into some kind of "tech bro" political strategy. Talking about raising the next generation of software engineers etc, something which the UK does actually compete on. Talk about start-up culture, a kind of "silicon valley" lite or something like that.
All of these are things that Sunak would actually do quite well on.
I thought this was an interesting article
I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK’s top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College. Along with UCL, these British universities represent 4 of the top 10 universities in the world. The US - a country with 5x more people and 8x higher GDP - has the same number of universities in the global top 10... it’s striking how undergraduates at top US universities start companies at more than 5x the rate of their British-educated peers....
I like to tease you because I find your wrath to be overblown and you crash around this place like a bear with a sore head over small things. But for the first time, I'm actually starting to worry you might be a danger to others' safety and to your own liberty. Can you have a little think to yourself about whether you might be a little overradicalised? The violent imagery in one of your posts today is unhealthy. I really think you need help. It's not ok to be talking about "wading through blood". It's red flag territory.
She wouldn't be getting half of it if she were a bloke.
Nick Robinson was a bloke and he was lambasted on here as Toenails for his pro-Labour bias, at least until David Cameron tried to recruit Robinson who had been a Conservative even at Oxford.
True, but that was sort of a meme/piss-take but the stuff aimed at Laura Kuenssberg is just aggressive and downright nasty.
No it is not.
She is supposed to be impartial and above the fray. She is hoist by her own petard. See the podcast with another idiot Paddy O'Connell. The one about Starmer attending non-league football grounds. I can't be arsed to post it again. I've already posted it twice.
For reference I have no idea who Chris Mason votes for.
Laura K who I have often defended, on the night of the LEs, literally said that the race was closer than expected and that Khan would quite possibly lose. Now this was before a single vote had even been counted.
It doesn't say much for the credibility of her sources - but also what on Earth was she doing?
To be fair, lots of journalists and lots of people here were saying that. It was a shared delusion.
It started, as I recall, with a tweet on Thursday evening from someone claiming "A source at Conservative HQ" said "they were confident Hall had won" or words to that effect. Indeed, CCHQ sought to distance themselves from the tweet fairly quickly but others (almost all of them anti-Khan types) were quick to jump on the bandwagon and by Friday evening the notion Hall had somehow won was gaining currency.
This was based not on any actual counting but on turnout numbers from verification and local hearsay and gossip. It moved the hairtrigger betting markets (and I suspect someone made a killing),
There will be all manner of tweets flying after 10pm on July 4th irrespective of the exit poll - as to how many of them should be given any kind of credence that's another question but they will move the betting markets far out of proportion to their actual impact but those playing the spreads will or should be acutely aware of that.
Just a question that I don't fully understand, how is a private school in such a dire state that it needs a tax exemption to survive? Do we do this for other businesses that have gone bust?
Most businesses would go bust if you suddenly introduced a 20% tax on them. And most private schools aren't businesses. They aren't there to make a profit.
She wouldn't be getting half of it if she were a bloke.
Nick Robinson was a bloke and he was lambasted on here as Toenails for his pro-Labour bias, at least until David Cameron tried to recruit Robinson who had been a Conservative even at Oxford.
True, but that was sort of a meme/piss-take but the stuff aimed at Laura Kuenssberg is just aggressive and downright nasty.
No it is not.
She is supposed to be impartial and above the fray. She is hoist by her own petard. See the podcast with another idiot Paddy O'Connell. The one about Starmer attending non-league football grounds. I can't be arsed to post it again. I've already posted it twice.
For reference I have no idea who Chris Mason votes for.
Laura K who I have often defended, on the night of the LEs, literally said that the race was closer than expected and that Khan would quite possibly lose. Now this was before a single vote had even been counted.
It doesn't say much for the credibility of her sources - but also what on Earth was she doing?
To be fair, lots of journalists and lots of people here were saying that. It was a shared delusion.
It started, as I recall, with a tweet on Thursday evening from someone claiming "A source at Conservative HQ" said "they were confident Hall had won" or words to that effect. Indeed, CCHQ sought to distance themselves from the tweet fairly quickly but others (almost all of them anti-Khan types) were quick to jump on the bandwagon and by Friday evening the notion Hall had somehow won was gaining currency.
This was based not on any actual counting but on turnout numbers from verification and local hearsay and gossip. It moved the hairtrigger betting markets (and I suspect someone made a killing),
There will be all manner of tweets flying after 10pm on July 4th irrespective of the exit poll - as to how many of them should be given any kind of credence that's another question but they will move the betting markets far out of proportion to their actual impact but those playing the spreads will or should be acutely aware of that.
Twatter is full of bullshit.
If the betting markets start listening to such, it is the duty of all Followers of Adam Smith to smite the heathen with the Invisible Hand. By relieving them of their money.
Tis a hard duty to be sure, but the way of The Blessed is The True Path.
Labour have already closed my son's fucking school
Labour are not in Government
And, yet, they've still managed to close my son's school.
No. They haven't. If it's the school on the Times front page they acknowledge that pupil numbers have been dwindling for some time. A school near here, St Mary's Shaftesbury closed a few years ago for the same reason. Was that one shut by Labour too?
It is that school but, with respect, you know nothing about it other than keen to find an angle that absolves Labour of all blame. It'd otherwise compell you to engage with the complexities of a nasty and unpleasant policy that you'd prefer not to.
The 20% price demand shock has been sufficient to kill it off, whereas otherwise it would have survived, and the disruption its going to cause to my son and his friends, and all the job losses it causes - including several pre-school teachers who are family friends - can be laid entirely at the door of SKS. Everyone knows he's going to win and that's having real world effects now.
I'd walk through blood to stop the man. He has deeply angered me and ripped the heart out of one of the core pillars of our local community.
He is dirt.
I doubt VAT on private schools is going to raise much money for the government as it will move some pupils back to the state sector.
But in the upcoming decades we're going to have to see more taxes raised and lower spending on pretty much all of the country.
And it will be easier for many of the disadvantaged groups to lose out if some of those at the top are visibly doing so as well.
Even if its unfortunate and unpleasant for your family.
The credit crunch killed off about thirty schools in the UK, and that was a one or two year blip. Assume Labour in power for ten years and the policy won't be reversed until at least 2034, and you're potentially looking at a prolonged depression that kills off (ballpark figure here) 300 private schools.
All those kids have to go somewhere. Some of them will be absorbed into other private schools, but even then, imagine if an additional 100-ish state schools need to be built to accommodate kids from private schools that have closed down, on top of an extra 10-20% demand created by parents who would have sent their kids to private schools, but are no longer able to. More schools will have to be built, meaning the cost will probably be greater than the extra £6k per child.
The truth is we don't know exactly how this policy is going to play out, but I did some calculations a few weeks ago and worked out that it's likely to have a creeping, cumulative effect, as parents will pay for kids with three or four years left to go, but be less likely to pay for 5 year olds with 13 years to go, creating a progressive hollowing out of the system that will lead to more and more private schools closing over time.
In short, I reckon Labour's tax wheeze may generate a windfall at first, but will slowly become net negative in terms of tax take over time.
But it won't be the top public schools closing down. It will be the minor schools favoured by the middle classes. So we'll end up with an even more divided system than we have now.
For those reasons, I think it's a bad policy. It will cost the taxpayer more than it brings in revenue, and actually increase division in society by limiting educational choices to an even smaller, more privileged elite.
Except. We are facing a baby bust. The birth rate fell off a cliff around 2013. Primary Schools are already facing closure because of falling rolls. This will feed into Secondary very soon. More kids in the system leads to the much cheaper option of State schools staying open rather than the costs of closing them down.
I'm actually deeply unconvinced of this, based on my very unscientific study of who's at the school gates of the primary schools near me.
We've yet to see how the birthrate changes, taking into account the preferences of recent immigrants. They may well, due to cultural values, place much higher emphasis on having children than we do.
I wouldn't be surprised to see an uptick in the birthrate in the next decade.
Not enough immigrants to change the figures that much. The underlying issue is that people of normal child-raising age can't afford to have children, because their finances are so stretched by mortgage payments.
Which is probably at least as big an issue for parents in the private school market.
It means that the state primary I went to is closing, because the area doesn't have enough children in it any more. Which is a bit sad, but not worth wading through blood for.
It is not just a UK problem though, across the developed world parents are having less children.
The UK fertility rate of 1.6 is actually higher than that in Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, South Korea and China and the same as in Australia and only just below the 1.7 fertility rate in the US in 2024. Only France and Ireland at an average of 1.8 children per mother and Argentina at 1.9 are close to replacement rate of 2.1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
252,000 abortions in England Wales last year. Up 17% in a single year and the highest ever. You are way too sanguine.
Just a question that I don't fully understand, how is a private school in such a dire state that it needs a tax exemption to survive? Do we do this for other businesses that have gone bust?
Most businesses would go bust if you suddenly introduced a 20% tax on them. And most private schools aren't businesses. They aren't there to make a profit.
But it's introducing a tax which all businesses pay already. My point is that if a business today goes bust, we don't say "it's because VAT was charged".
To be clear, I am sceptical this policy will do much good or bad but I am slightly baffled that it's causing so much trouble. To me if schools privately run are that much almost in the red, it suggests an issue with possibly how they are run?
My view remains that it would be better to make state eduction so good, private education didn't need to exist.
I think if I was Sunak I would even lean in more to nerdy I like maths / STEM optics. Really big push for more STEM at uni by grants / loan foregiveness / ring-fenced funding to unis to run such courses. Sure all the journalists that did liberal arts will be huffing about no fair, but again its actually good for the country.
I would be building that into some kind of "tech bro" political strategy. Talking about raising the next generation of software engineers etc, something which the UK does actually compete on. Talk about start-up culture, a kind of "silicon valley" lite or something like that.
All of these are things that Sunak would actually do quite well on.
I thought this was an interesting article
I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK’s top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College. Along with UCL, these British universities represent 4 of the top 10 universities in the world. The US - a country with 5x more people and 8x higher GDP - has the same number of universities in the global top 10... it’s striking how undergraduates at top US universities start companies at more than 5x the rate of their British-educated peers....
Just a question that I don't fully understand, how is a private school in such a dire state that it needs a tax exemption to survive? Do we do this for other businesses that have gone bust?
Most businesses would go bust if you suddenly introduced a 20% tax on them. And most private schools aren't businesses. They aren't there to make a profit.
But it's introducing a tax which all businesses pay already. My point is that if a business today goes bust, we don't say "it's because VAT was charged".
I think youre forgetting VAT was eased in. It started at 10% with lots of exceptions. It wasnt a 20% hit at once.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
Not often I agree with Casino and disagree with Rochdale, but on this I do.
Whether to apply VAT to a given product or service is entirely discretionary on the Government's part (pace EU rules pre-Brexit).
We charge VAT on services.... but not healthcare services. We charge VAT on boats, including small houseboats... but not large houseboats. We charge VAT on petrol... but not train fares. We charge VAT on clothes... but not children's clothes. We charge VAT on boilers... but not wood-fuelled boilers. And so on.
It's not about "evenly and equally". It's about Government making policy decisions and choosing where the impact will fall.
In this case, Starmer has made a policy choice that will affect the middle class but not the seriously rich, that will affect specialist autism and music schools but not Eton or Harrow. That is entirely his choice to make. That's what Governments do.
But let's not pretend it's about making tax rules "even and equal". It isn't. It's a piece of red meat to throw to his base to disguise the fact he's abandoned most of the left-wing principles he won the leadership on. That's politics but it doesn't mean that we all have to like it.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
So youre for VAT on university fees ?
Yes. 100%.
In fact, I'd have fees eliminated for doctors and nurses but up them for other degrees. In principle I oppose fees but accept - unlike the Tories - it is unaffordable. Of course with the £2.5bn they've just plucked out of thin air, perhaps that could eliminate the fees?
Don’t eliminate the fees. Pay them off as part of working for the NHS. Do the same for teachers.
So if you work as a teacher (say) your student loans are paid down for you. No personal payments while you are a teacher, capital repaid on an increasing scale. So relatively little is paid off in the first year or 2. But by the end of the 6th year (say) the last is gone.
10% 10% 10% 20% 20% 30%
Or some such.
If you’ve got someone on a career for 6 years, you’ve got value out of the bargain. And they are very likely to stay in that career
Why not just pay staff more in Health and education? It would have a similar effect on both budgets and retention.
Perhaps those junior doctors, nurses and teachers have a point?
Just a question that I don't fully understand, how is a private school in such a dire state that it needs a tax exemption to survive? Do we do this for other businesses that have gone bust?
Most businesses would go bust if you suddenly introduced a 20% tax on them. And most private schools aren't businesses. They aren't there to make a profit.
But it's introducing a tax which all businesses pay already. My point is that if a business today goes bust, we don't say "it's because VAT was charged".
I think youre forgetting VAT was eased in. It started at 10% with lots of exceptions. It wasnt a 20% hit at once.
But that's a question of introduction - something which I can also get behind.
My view basically is that I can't see why VAT isn't already charged.
She wouldn't be getting half of it if she were a bloke.
Nick Robinson was a bloke and he was lambasted on here as Toenails for his pro-Labour bias, at least until David Cameron tried to recruit Robinson who had been a Conservative even at Oxford.
True, but that was sort of a meme/piss-take but the stuff aimed at Laura Kuenssberg is just aggressive and downright nasty.
No it is not.
She is supposed to be impartial and above the fray. She is hoist by her own petard. See the podcast with another idiot Paddy O'Connell. The one about Starmer attending non-league football grounds. I can't be arsed to post it again. I've already posted it twice.
For reference I have no idea who Chris Mason votes for.
Laura K who I have often defended, on the night of the LEs, literally said that the race was closer than expected and that Khan would quite possibly lose. Now this was before a single vote had even been counted.
It doesn't say much for the credibility of her sources - but also what on Earth was she doing?
To be fair, lots of journalists and lots of people here were saying that. It was a shared delusion.
It started, as I recall, with a tweet on Thursday evening from someone claiming "A source at Conservative HQ" said "they were confident Hall had won" or words to that effect. Indeed, CCHQ sought to distance themselves from the tweet fairly quickly but others (almost all of them anti-Khan types) were quick to jump on the bandwagon and by Friday evening the notion Hall had somehow won was gaining currency.
This was based not on any actual counting but on turnout numbers from verification and local hearsay and gossip. It moved the hairtrigger betting markets (and I suspect someone made a killing),
There will be all manner of tweets flying after 10pm on July 4th irrespective of the exit poll - as to how many of them should be given any kind of credence that's another question but they will move the betting markets far out of proportion to their actual impact but those playing the spreads will or should be acutely aware of that.
Just one thing to note here: the liquidity on the GE winner market, and some of the related markets, is likely to be better than it was on the Mayoralty market. That could help stabilise any rumour-induced fluctuations.
I think if I was Sunak I would even lean in more to nerdy I like maths / STEM optics. Really big push for more STEM at uni by grants / loan foregiveness / ring-fenced funding to unis to run such courses. Sure all the journalists that did liberal arts will be huffing about no fair, but again its actually good for the country.
I would be building that into some kind of "tech bro" political strategy. Talking about raising the next generation of software engineers etc, something which the UK does actually compete on. Talk about start-up culture, a kind of "silicon valley" lite or something like that.
All of these are things that Sunak would actually do quite well on.
I thought this was an interesting article
I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK’s top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College. Along with UCL, these British universities represent 4 of the top 10 universities in the world. The US - a country with 5x more people and 8x higher GDP - has the same number of universities in the global top 10... it’s striking how undergraduates at top US universities start companies at more than 5x the rate of their British-educated peers....
This requires a combination finance and the interest (and ability) to master productionising inventions.
Some universities are outright predatory on this as well. They will offer small amount of money to aid start-up in return for massive stakes in the company from the get-go. I have seen examples of 40% of the company for pretty modest amounts. If you took that deal, and are successful in getting off the ground, then go looking for VC funding, your personal stake is going to be single digits in no time. Nobody takes all the risk of setting up a company to be left with a couple of points after 3-4 years, the whole point is you take a massive risk, get little to no pay for quite a few years, but 10 years down the line you have a good chunk of the company which you can cash in.
Just a question that I don't fully understand, how is a private school in such a dire state that it needs a tax exemption to survive? Do we do this for other businesses that have gone bust?
Most businesses would go bust if you suddenly introduced a 20% tax on them. And most private schools aren't businesses. They aren't there to make a profit.
But it's introducing a tax which all businesses pay already. My point is that if a business today goes bust, we don't say "it's because VAT was charged".
It’s a big change to a particular sector, so I would support a transitional phase when introducing the policy.
However, I note again that Casino was dismissive of the impact the Government could have on universities by making sudden shifts in student visa policy. He was dismissive about universities going bust. He cares about his own family, but he doesn’t care about anyone else’s.
I wonder if it is just a sign of my own increasing age that even though he is older than me Sunak feels very much like a young policitian, whereas Cameron seemed older thank Sunak in 2010 despite being the same age Sunak is now.
It's not due to experience, as Sunak has been an MP just as long as Cameron had back then, and is a lot more politically experienced than Cameron was in 2010, with years as a senior minister behind him.
Sunak comes across as being too green and inexperienced. Cameron, for all his faults, was a much smarter political operator across the board (a lot of that also, it has to be said, being driven by Osborne).
I do actually think Sunak has also suffered from what seems to be a paucity of good advisors. I did think bringing Cameron back might be a way to try and fix that - his Mandelson moment if you will - but it seems not.
I'm still baffled by bringing Cameron back. I liked him fine, but it was a snub to all the MPs who could have filled the role, he is not popular now, and it did not form part of any cohesive strategy to pitch to the centre - instead they've still wobbled back and forth from appealing to the right with some gimmicks and attempts at steady as she goes dull competence.
I think there were more votes available on the right, I think the centre was already lost by the Boris-Truss-Sunak debacle, so the campaign going that way is not a surprise, but undercut by things like bringing back Cameron.
The point with Sunak and why he's been useless is that while there are different routes to a winning coalition of voters, you have to pick one, and a theory of the case, and stick to it. The most obvious ones broadly being the Cameron 2010-15 one - which was founded on detoxifying the party with more liberal voters and gluing those on to more traditional Tories and those fearful or fed up of Labour. Then there's the Boris, unite Brexit voters one, which united socially conservative types sharing both left and right economic views, while daring its liberal wing to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.
Neither are now an easy option for the Tories. Brexit has receded as a frontline issue but has made the Cameron route difficult to take without a mea culpa as the fracture with liberalism (not solely caused by Brexit, but a useful shorthand for the breach) is here to stay. It's not likely Boris' works either now as it was dependent on promises of spending to those left-wing on that were empty and now impossible. Brexit is largely seen to be a failure, even by enough leave voters who support the principle, to make standing on it as your big thing a vote loser. Plus there's no Jeremy Corbyn to shore up the Tories' liberal wing.
But you do have to pick one and stick to it. Sunak has flailed between them - he's cast himself as a pragmatic ideologically unbound problem solver one minute, then sounded like a rabid right-wing Boomer Facebook group the next. Which just annoy everyone.
Like their campaign is "stick with us, we've got a sensible plan" but the policies broadcast at the loudest volume are back of a fag packet populism that tells you they haven't beyond scraping the bottom of the barrel.
To get an idea of how ludicrous it is think about what a similar approach from Labour would look. Running their "security and patriotism" stuff one minute, then, because they didn't want to upset Corbyn fans, pivoting to saying NATO is actually rubbish and why can't we all have a cup of tea with Putin and the Ayatollah the next.
Churchill was quite happy to have a cup of tea with Stalin, and he wasn't considered weak on security or patriotism, so I'm not sure of the basis of your point.
He was when we were allies - less so when Churchill was warning Stalin was a menace to European peace.
But that's by the by, whichever you agree with - Corbyn and Starmer have quite different political approaches and appeals to target voters. In relation to defence, which I used as an example Starmer makes sure to reassure he supports our existing international security arrangements and to appear strong on this. Repudiate that and take the far left's position that those security arrangements are bad and certain anti-West dictatorships have a point, and you annoy everyone and appear a fool.
You can pick one or the other of those positions or other ones associated with a particular type of politics, but if you pick both at the same time you look ridiculous.
As Sunak does by trying to promote himself as both a pragmatic problem solver aiming to "get the job done" and then by flailing about on the right trying to appease his party's headbangers.
Tory Party supporters and members have not afaicr been agitating strongly (or even weakly) for national service to be revived. Nor was the policy consulted on amongst members, supporters, voters, MPs or even the cabinet. This is a brain fart of Sunak and the people he's chosen to surround himself with - it is false and unfair to impute it to 'headbangers' except those occupying 10 Downing Street.
Labour have already closed my son's fucking school
Labour are not in Government
And, yet, they've still managed to close my son's school.
No. They haven't. If it's the school on the Times front page they acknowledge that pupil numbers have been dwindling for some time. A school near here, St Mary's Shaftesbury closed a few years ago for the same reason. Was that one shut by Labour too?
It is that school but, with respect, you know nothing about it other than keen to find an angle that absolves Labour of all blame. It'd otherwise compell you to engage with the complexities of a nasty and unpleasant policy that you'd prefer not to.
The 20% price demand shock has been sufficient to kill it off, whereas otherwise it would have survived, and the disruption its going to cause to my son and his friends, and all the job losses it causes - including several pre-school teachers who are family friends - can be laid entirely at the door of SKS. Everyone knows he's going to win and that's having real world effects now.
I'd walk through blood to stop the man. He has deeply angered me and ripped the heart out of one of the core pillars of our local community.
He is dirt.
I doubt VAT on private schools is going to raise much money for the government as it will move some pupils back to the state sector.
But in the upcoming decades we're going to have to see more taxes raised and lower spending on pretty much all of the country.
And it will be easier for many of the disadvantaged groups to lose out if some of those at the top are visibly doing so as well.
Even if its unfortunate and unpleasant for your family.
The credit crunch killed off about thirty schools in the UK, and that was a one or two year blip. Assume Labour in power for ten years and the policy won't be reversed until at least 2034, and you're potentially looking at a prolonged depression that kills off (ballpark figure here) 300 private schools.
All those kids have to go somewhere. Some of them will be absorbed into other private schools, but even then, imagine if an additional 100-ish state schools need to be built to accommodate kids from private schools that have closed down, on top of an extra 10-20% demand created by parents who would have sent their kids to private schools, but are no longer able to. More schools will have to be built, meaning the cost will probably be greater than the extra £6k per child.
The truth is we don't know exactly how this policy is going to play out, but I did some calculations a few weeks ago and worked out that it's likely to have a creeping, cumulative effect, as parents will pay for kids with three or four years left to go, but be less likely to pay for 5 year olds with 13 years to go, creating a progressive hollowing out of the system that will lead to more and more private schools closing over time.
In short, I reckon Labour's tax wheeze may generate a windfall at first, but will slowly become net negative in terms of tax take over time.
But it won't be the top public schools closing down. It will be the minor schools favoured by the middle classes. So we'll end up with an even more divided system than we have now.
For those reasons, I think it's a bad policy. It will cost the taxpayer more than it brings in revenue, and actually increase division in society by limiting educational choices to an even smaller, more privileged elite.
Except. We are facing a baby bust. The birth rate fell off a cliff around 2013. Primary Schools are already facing closure because of falling rolls. This will feed into Secondary very soon. More kids in the system leads to the much cheaper option of State schools staying open rather than the costs of closing them down.
I'm actually deeply unconvinced of this, based on my very unscientific study of who's at the school gates of the primary schools near me.
We've yet to see how the birthrate changes, taking into account the preferences of recent immigrants. They may well, due to cultural values, place much higher emphasis on having children than we do.
I wouldn't be surprised to see an uptick in the birthrate in the next decade.
Not enough immigrants to change the figures that much. The underlying issue is that people of normal child-raising age can't afford to have children, because their finances are so stretched by mortgage payments.
Which is probably at least as big an issue for parents in the private school market.
It means that the state primary I went to is closing, because the area doesn't have enough children in it any more. Which is a bit sad, but not worth wading through blood for.
It is not just a UK problem though, across the developed world parents are having less children.
The UK fertility rate of 1.6 is actually higher than that in Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, South Korea and China and the same as in Australia and only just below the 1.7 fertility rate in the US in 2024. Only France and Ireland at an average of 1.8 children per mother and Argentina at 1.9 are close to replacement rate of 2.1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
252,000 abortions in England Wales last year. Up 17% in a single year and the highest ever. You are way too sanguine.
I wonder how much lack of access to GP services for contraception, the cost of living crisis and the two-child benefit cap has caused such an increase. If you're pregnant and you can barely manage to support yourself with a full-time job, how can you manage on statutory maternity pay and a young child? Abortion becomes a solution even if the woman would wish to have the child.
Anecdote alert. Never heard people openly complaining about government policy before at Horsham Waitrose. But somehow Rishis managed it. Impressive
He's brought the campaign alive. Well done Rishi. Maybe turnout will be higher now.
You get high turnout when it’s close and both tribes are motivated to turn out. From what I can see, that’s currently not the situation. One strand of opinion is exceptionally motivated.
Portillo has made some interesting points on the policy that I hadn't considered.
It's GBeebies but just ignore pointless Camilla and listen to what he actually says.
The tldw is that it creates a hole which says "how will they pay for that, how will they find the money"? Which to me sounds just like Labour 2019's free broadband idea.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
Not often I agree with Casino and disagree with Rochdale, but on this I do.
Whether to apply VAT to a given product or service is entirely discretionary on the Government's part (pace EU rules pre-Brexit).
We charge VAT on services.... but not healthcare services. We charge VAT on boats, including small houseboats... but not large houseboats. We charge VAT on petrol... but not train fares. We charge VAT on clothes... but not children's clothes. We charge VAT on boilers... but not wood-fuelled boilers. And so on.
It's not about "evenly and equally". It's about Government making policy decisions and choosing where the impact will fall.
In this case, Starmer has made a policy choice that will affect the middle class but not the seriously rich, that will affect specialist autism and music schools but not Eton or Harrow. That is entirely his choice to make. That's what Governments do.
But let's not pretend it's about making tax rules "even and equal". It isn't. It's a piece of red meat to throw to his base to disguise the fact he's abandoned most of the left-wing principles he won the leadership on. That's politics but it doesn't mean that we all have to like it.
I agree with the broad point you are making.
However, I think it is misleading to say this policy choice will affect the middle class. Private school fees have increased far higher than inflation over my lifetime. A private school education was something the middle class could once afford, but that’s not been true for a while. This is about a policy affecting the seriously rich.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
But the state educates my kids, and I'm against it too, for reasons which include the personal, such as will daughter 3 be able to get into the same secondary school as her sisters, or will she be crowded out by kids who would have otherwise gone to private schools? I just can't see this being a positive for state education. Surely it will introduce far more costs than benefits? (Where I live - i.e. not the south east - private schools don't tend to cater to price-insensitive multi-millionaires. I think this is being drawn up with an unrepresentative view of the sorts of people who go to private schools driven by some spads idea that it's all Harrows and Etons.)
Just a question that I don't fully understand, how is a private school in such a dire state that it needs a tax exemption to survive? Do we do this for other businesses that have gone bust?
Most businesses would go bust if you suddenly introduced a 20% tax on them. And most private schools aren't businesses. They aren't there to make a profit.
But it's introducing a tax which all businesses pay already. My point is that if a business today goes bust, we don't say "it's because VAT was charged".
I think youre forgetting VAT was eased in. It started at 10% with lots of exceptions. It wasnt a 20% hit at once.
But that's a question of introduction - something which I can also get behind.
My view basically is that I can't see why VAT isn't already charged.
Yes, but Starmer is proposing a 20% hit day one. No business sector can take that on without there being a shakeout.
Your earlier comment about making the state sector better than the private is the way to go, however there are always going to be a set of parents who need boarding and the state doesnt really offer that. So there is always going to be the need for a private secotr.
Portillo has made some interesting points on the policy that I hadn't considered.
It's GBeebies but just ignore pointless Camilla and listen to what he actually says.
The tldw is that it creates a hole which says "how will they pay for that, how will they find the money"? Which to me sounds just like Labour 2019's free broadband idea.
The problem with the Corbyn Cable Company wasn't just how to pay for it. It was that people realised there would be a single ISP, offering a bandwidth speed lower than what is currently available to all but a small percentage of people and in theory this state organisation could view every bodies browsing history. And what happens if you do a naughty thing and download a movie illegally, banned from CCC, then what?
Just a question that I don't fully understand, how is a private school in such a dire state that it needs a tax exemption to survive? Do we do this for other businesses that have gone bust?
Most businesses would go bust if you suddenly introduced a 20% tax on them. And most private schools aren't businesses. They aren't there to make a profit.
But it's introducing a tax which all businesses pay already. My point is that if a business today goes bust, we don't say "it's because VAT was charged".
To be clear, I am sceptical this policy will do much good or bad but I am slightly baffled that it's causing so much trouble. To me if schools privately run are that much almost in the red, it suggests an issue with possibly how they are run?
My view remains that it would be better to make state eduction so good, private education didn't need to exist.
If you changed to rules to remove the exemptions for taxation on charity shops over night, this would result in a large number closing the day after.
If you impose a price shock in any industry, a number of companies go out of business.
Claiming that doesn’t happen flies in the face of observed experience.
The result of VAT on school fees will be
- Some measure of contraction in demand. - Which in turn means some measure in contraction of the number of private schools. It is very unlikely that it will be just a reduction in places across schools.
Portillo has made some interesting points on the policy that I hadn't considered.
It's GBeebies but just ignore pointless Camilla and listen to what he actually says.
The tldw is that it creates a hole which says "how will they pay for that, how will they find the money"? Which to me sounds just like Labour 2019's free broadband idea.
Portillo has made some interesting points on the policy that I hadn't considered.
It's GBeebies but just ignore pointless Camilla and listen to what he actually says.
The tldw is that it creates a hole which says "how will they pay for that, how will they find the money"? Which to me sounds just like Labour 2019's free broadband idea.
The problem with the Corbyn Cable Company wasn't just how to pay for it. It was that people realised there would be a single ISP, offering a bandwidth speed lower than what is currently available to all but a small percentage of people and in theory this state organisation could view your browsing history.
I think that's all valid stuff (and to be honest in hindsight I've been so impressed by Openreach's work - actually one of the few things the Tories have done was to get Ofcom to threaten them to be taken from BT - that I now don't support the state getting involved except to make sure provision reaches 100%) but I think this is all hindsight judgment.
The issue with the policy was that people went "great idea" but it fitted into the narrative that Labour just kept plucking money out of thin air. The idea they would never be able to do this stuff undermined the quite restrained 2017 package they'd offered before.
So I think Portillo makes a good point. Even those that support this, will wonder "why can't this £2.5bn be spent on the NHS"?
I wonder if it is just a sign of my own increasing age that even though he is older than me Sunak feels very much like a young policitian, whereas Cameron seemed older thank Sunak in 2010 despite being the same age Sunak is now.
It's not due to experience, as Sunak has been an MP just as long as Cameron had back then, and is a lot more politically experienced than Cameron was in 2010, with years as a senior minister behind him.
Sunak comes across as being too green and inexperienced. Cameron, for all his faults, was a much smarter political operator across the board (a lot of that also, it has to be said, being driven by Osborne).
I do actually think Sunak has also suffered from what seems to be a paucity of good advisors. I did think bringing Cameron back might be a way to try and fix that - his Mandelson moment if you will - but it seems not.
I'm still baffled by bringing Cameron back. I liked him fine, but it was a snub to all the MPs who could have filled the role, he is not popular now, and it did not form part of any cohesive strategy to pitch to the centre - instead they've still wobbled back and forth from appealing to the right with some gimmicks and attempts at steady as she goes dull competence.
I think there were more votes available on the right, I think the centre was already lost by the Boris-Truss-Sunak debacle, so the campaign going that way is not a surprise, but undercut by things like bringing back Cameron.
The point with Sunak and why he's been useless is that while there are different routes to a winning coalition of voters, you have to pick one, and a theory of the case, and stick to it. The most obvious ones broadly being the Cameron 2010-15 one - which was founded on detoxifying the party with more liberal voters and gluing those on to more traditional Tories and those fearful or fed up of Labour. Then there's the Boris, unite Brexit voters one, which united socially conservative types sharing both left and right economic views, while daring its liberal wing to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.
Neither are now an easy option for the Tories. Brexit has receded as a frontline issue but has made the Cameron route difficult to take without a mea culpa as the fracture with liberalism (not solely caused by Brexit, but a useful shorthand for the breach) is here to stay. It's not likely Boris' works either now as it was dependent on promises of spending to those left-wing on that were empty and now impossible. Brexit is largely seen to be a failure, even by enough leave voters who support the principle, to make standing on it as your big thing a vote loser. Plus there's no Jeremy Corbyn to shore up the Tories' liberal wing.
But you do have to pick one and stick to it. Sunak has flailed between them - he's cast himself as a pragmatic ideologically unbound problem solver one minute, then sounded like a rabid right-wing Boomer Facebook group the next. Which just annoy everyone.
Like their campaign is "stick with us, we've got a sensible plan" but the policies broadcast at the loudest volume are back of a fag packet populism that tells you they haven't beyond scraping the bottom of the barrel.
To get an idea of how ludicrous it is think about what a similar approach from Labour would look. Running their "security and patriotism" stuff one minute, then, because they didn't want to upset Corbyn fans, pivoting to saying NATO is actually rubbish and why can't we all have a cup of tea with Putin and the Ayatollah the next.
Churchill was quite happy to have a cup of tea with Stalin, and he wasn't considered weak on security or patriotism, so I'm not sure of the basis of your point.
He was when we were allies - less so when Churchill was warning Stalin was a menace to European peace.
But that's by the by, whichever you agree with - Corbyn and Starmer have quite different political approaches and appeals to target voters. In relation to defence, which I used as an example Starmer makes sure to reassure he supports our existing international security arrangements and to appear strong on this. Repudiate that and take the far left's position that those security arrangements are bad and certain anti-West dictatorships have a point, and you annoy everyone and appear a fool.
You can pick one or the other of those positions or other ones associated with a particular type of politics, but if you pick both at the same time you look ridiculous.
As Sunak does by trying to promote himself as both a pragmatic problem solver aiming to "get the job done" and then by flailing about on the right trying to appease his party's headbangers.
Tory Party supporters and members have not afaicr been agitating strongly (or even weakly) for national service to be revived. Nor was the policy consulted on amongst members, supporters, voters, MPs or even the cabinet. This is a brain fart of Sunak and the people he's chosen to surround himself with - it is false and unfair to impute it to 'headbangers' except those occupying 10 Downing Street.
The idea was specifically rubbished by Number 10 and the MOD only four months ago!
Just come in and there is a lot of comment today that I haven't had time to wade through so apologies if someone else has made the same point.
There might be merit in either aspect of the policy if thought through - but as some others have said, this (like Rwanda) isn't a policy that's meant to be actually delivered, it's just to signal to the hard right not to flirt with Reform and stick with the Tories.
But I wonder whether all it does is feed into the narrative of Chaos with the Conservatives. This policy has clearly just been pulled out of Sunak's backside, with no discussion or thought.
And that's what worries me most about the Tories. In a democratic party, policy is decided by the membership, and although the leadership has flexibility in how to prioritise and apply to circumstances, we know what their policy is. With the Tories it is whatever the leadership decides it is. Even if it's the polar opposite of what they stood for yesterday. The last 6 years show this in extreme form. The backbenchers are mostly so supine they just go along with whatever the leadership says.
If you vote Tory, there is no knowing what you might get.
I am not sure I would want Tory party membership deciding policy. The membership of any political party tends to be at the more extreme end of the spectrum.
That might be true of the Conservative Party currently, but isn't a reason in a democracy to deny membership a role. If they want to vote themselves into extreme irrelevance, that is their choice. In a vibrant democracy another party would spring up in its place, offering policies more aligned to the general wishes of the centre-right segment of the electorate.
The problem is of course the FPTP deadlock which makes that impossible.
Portillo has made some interesting points on the policy that I hadn't considered.
It's GBeebies but just ignore pointless Camilla and listen to what he actually says.
The tldw is that it creates a hole which says "how will they pay for that, how will they find the money"? Which to me sounds just like Labour 2019's free broadband idea.
Portillo would have been a good PM. Sadly the members got a choice between Kenneth Clarke and IDS instead. Thanks Tory MPs.
Did anyone ever explain what happened in that round of voting, Ancram and Davis both supported IDS but their 35 votes went 20 to Clarke, 12 to IDS and 3 to Portillo. The assumption was that some IDS votes tactically went to Clarke because he was weaker with the membership but was that ever substantiated?
We all know the VAT on private schools is red meat for the left wing of the party / country. If it was solely about raising revenue for the country, there are loads of easy way you could extract similar amounts. Play with IC thresholds at top end, IHT, wealth tax, reform council taxes.
IMO, there are lots more important issues facing the country, and potential downside of a load of disruption, loads of extra kids in state schools etc. And if your concern is about unfair advantages that privately educated have, I have long said the fairest way of doing university applications is post A-level results. Shift the calendar, make it post results, then none of this predicted grade nonsense, unis can see all the results, see how a kid did, see how they did in relation to their year at that school.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
The argument is that education is a social good.
Restricting private education reduces the resources available for the less well off.
The cost of waiving VAT is a fraction of the cost of providing it via the state
Facilitating the schooling of affluent children in a parallel system exclusive to them is a social good? That's quite a stretch.
Just come in and there is a lot of comment today that I haven't had time to wade through so apologies if someone else has made the same point.
There might be merit in either aspect of the policy if thought through - but as some others have said, this (like Rwanda) isn't a policy that's meant to be actually delivered, it's just to signal to the hard right not to flirt with Reform and stick with the Tories.
But I wonder whether all it does is feed into the narrative of Chaos with the Conservatives. This policy has clearly just been pulled out of Sunak's backside, with no discussion or thought.
And that's what worries me most about the Tories. In a democratic party, policy is decided by the membership, and although the leadership has flexibility in how to prioritise and apply to circumstances, we know what their policy is. With the Tories it is whatever the leadership decides it is. Even if it's the polar opposite of what they stood for yesterday. The last 6 years show this in extreme form. The backbenchers are mostly so supine they just go along with whatever the leadership says.
If you vote Tory, there is no knowing what you might get.
I am not sure I would want Tory party membership deciding policy. The membership of any political party tends to be at the more extreme end of the spectrum.
That might be true of the Conservative Party currently, but isn't a reason in a democracy to deny membership a role. If they want to vote themselves into extreme irrelevance, that is their choice. In a vibrant democracy another party would spring up in its place, offering policies more aligned to the general wishes of the centre-right segment of the electorate.
The problem is of course the FPTP deadlock which makes that impossible.
Point of order, we live in a democracy where we elect MPs on the basis that during their time they will decide matters of policy for us. That is, we have a representative democracy as opposed to a direct democracy.
There's no reason why having the same representative decision making within a party shouldn't also still be thought of as a democracy.
I'm not necessarily saying it's preferable, I leave that to party members to debate either way. But I don't accept the implication that having MPs choose the party leader is undemocratic.
Just again, why should people not be paid for this? If they are being forced to do it, surely they should be paid? Does anyone actually think people shouldn't be paid?
They are not being forced to do something specific.
They are being asked to make a contribution to society. A few hours a month.
Think of it as non-cash tax if it makes you feel better.
They are not being asked. They are being told.
Do you support not paying people to work?
If it's a tax as you call it, why is nobody else paying it?
So Sunak, the Chancellor who paid people not to go to work, has become Sunak, the PM who doesn't want to pay people to do forced labour.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
But the state educates my kids, and I'm against it too, for reasons which include the personal, such as will daughter 3 be able to get into the same secondary school as her sisters, or will she be crowded out by kids who would have otherwise gone to private schools? I just can't see this being a positive for state education. Surely it will introduce far more costs than benefits? (Where I live - i.e. not the south east - private schools don't tend to cater to price-insensitive multi-millionaires. I think this is being drawn up with an unrepresentative view of the sorts of people who go to private schools driven by some spads idea that it's all Harrows and Etons.)
Siblings raises priority. More generally might it not raise state school standards due to the sharp elbow effect ?
Portillo has made some interesting points on the policy that I hadn't considered.
It's GBeebies but just ignore pointless Camilla and listen to what he actually says.
The tldw is that it creates a hole which says "how will they pay for that, how will they find the money"? Which to me sounds just like Labour 2019's free broadband idea.
Portillo would have been a good PM. Sadly the members got a choice between Kenneth Clarke and IDS instead. Thanks Tory MPs.
He may well have been but he wouldn't have beaten Blair in 2005 anymore than Howard failed to do.
Portillo was though effectively the prophet for the Conservative modernisters, Cameron and Osborne backed him for leader in 2001 and built on his ideas to win Cameron the leadership in 2005 and beat Brown in 2010.
I think if I was Sunak I would even lean in more to nerdy I like maths / STEM optics. Really big push for more STEM at uni by grants / loan foregiveness / ring-fenced funding to unis to run such courses. Sure all the journalists that did liberal arts will be huffing about no fair, but again its actually good for the country.
I would be building that into some kind of "tech bro" political strategy. Talking about raising the next generation of software engineers etc, something which the UK does actually compete on. Talk about start-up culture, a kind of "silicon valley" lite or something like that.
All of these are things that Sunak would actually do quite well on.
I thought this was an interesting article
I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK’s top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College. Along with UCL, these British universities represent 4 of the top 10 universities in the world. The US - a country with 5x more people and 8x higher GDP - has the same number of universities in the global top 10... it’s striking how undergraduates at top US universities start companies at more than 5x the rate of their British-educated peers....
This requires a combination finance and the interest (and ability) to master productionising inventions.
Some universities are outright predatory on this as well. They will offer small amount of money to aid start-up in return for massive stakes in the company from the get-go. I have seen examples of 40% of the company for pretty modest amounts. If you took that deal, and are successful in getting off the ground, then go looking for VC funding, your personal stake is going to be single digits in no time. Nobody takes all the risk of setting up a company to be left with a couple of points after 3-4 years, the whole point is you take a massive risk, get little to no pay for quite a few years, but 10 years down the line you have a good chunk of the company which you can cash in.
That used to be the model of the US VC industry - get the founders out.
That model changed as competition to provide finance resulted in better deals for the founders.
I notice that Trump has pivoted to go all-in on crypto-bro-ism. There has to be a grift in there somewhere. Maybe he is thinking of launching his own meme coin?
We all know the VAT on private schools is red meat for the left wing of the party / country. If it was solely about raising revenue for the country, there are loads of easy way you could extract similar amounts. Play with IC thresholds at top end, IHT, wealth tax, reform council taxes.
IMO, there are lots more important issues facing the country, and potential downside of a load of disruption, loads of extra kids in state schools etc. And if your concern is about unfair advantages that privately educated have, I have long said the fairest way of doing university applications is post A-level results. Shift the calendar, make it post results, then none of this predicted grade nonsense, unis can see all the results, see how a kid did, see how they did in relation to their year at that school.
Actual exam results help. But the private schools get high grades in A levels far out of proportion to their numbers. This is why many pay for private education.
We all know the VAT on private schools is red meat for the left wing of the party / country. If it was solely about raising revenue for the country, there are loads of easy way you could extract similar amounts. Play with IC thresholds at top end, IHT, wealth tax, reform council taxes.
IMO, there are lots more important issues facing the country, and potential downside of a load of disruption, loads of extra kids in state schools etc. And if your concern is about unfair advantages that privately educated have, I have long said the fairest way of doing university applications is post A-level results. Shift the calendar, make it post results, then none of this predicted grade nonsense, unis can see all the results, see how a kid did, see how they did in relation to their year at that school.
Perhaps the few month gap can be used for national service?
Labour have already closed my son's fucking school
Labour are not in Government
And, yet, they've still managed to close my son's school.
No. They haven't. If it's the school on the Times front page they acknowledge that pupil numbers have been dwindling for some time. A school near here, St Mary's Shaftesbury closed a few years ago for the same reason. Was that one shut by Labour too?
It is that school but, with respect, you know nothing about it other than keen to find an angle that absolves Labour of all blame. It'd otherwise compell you to engage with the complexities of a nasty and unpleasant policy that you'd prefer not to.
The 20% price demand shock has been sufficient to kill it off, whereas otherwise it would have survived, and the disruption its going to cause to my son and his friends, and all the job losses it causes - including several pre-school teachers who are family friends - can be laid entirely at the door of SKS. Everyone knows he's going to win and that's having real world effects now.
I'd walk through blood to stop the man. He has deeply angered me and ripped the heart out of one of the core pillars of our local community.
He is dirt.
I doubt VAT on private schools is going to raise much money for the government as it will move some pupils back to the state sector.
But in the upcoming decades we're going to have to see more taxes raised and lower spending on pretty much all of the country.
And it will be easier for many of the disadvantaged groups to lose out if some of those at the top are visibly doing so as well.
Even if its unfortunate and unpleasant for your family.
The credit crunch killed off about thirty schools in the UK, and that was a one or two year blip. Assume Labour in power for ten years and the policy won't be reversed until at least 2034, and you're potentially looking at a prolonged depression that kills off (ballpark figure here) 300 private schools.
All those kids have to go somewhere. Some of them will be absorbed into other private schools, but even then, imagine if an additional 100-ish state schools need to be built to accommodate kids from private schools that have closed down, on top of an extra 10-20% demand created by parents who would have sent their kids to private schools, but are no longer able to. More schools will have to be built, meaning the cost will probably be greater than the extra £6k per child.
The truth is we don't know exactly how this policy is going to play out, but I did some calculations a few weeks ago and worked out that it's likely to have a creeping, cumulative effect, as parents will pay for kids with three or four years left to go, but be less likely to pay for 5 year olds with 13 years to go, creating a progressive hollowing out of the system that will lead to more and more private schools closing over time.
In short, I reckon Labour's tax wheeze may generate a windfall at first, but will slowly become net negative in terms of tax take over time.
But it won't be the top public schools closing down. It will be the minor schools favoured by the middle classes. So we'll end up with an even more divided system than we have now.
For those reasons, I think it's a bad policy. It will cost the taxpayer more than it brings in revenue, and actually increase division in society by limiting educational choices to an even smaller, more privileged elite.
Except. We are facing a baby bust. The birth rate fell off a cliff around 2013. Primary Schools are already facing closure because of falling rolls. This will feed into Secondary very soon. More kids in the system leads to the much cheaper option of State schools staying open rather than the costs of closing them down.
I'm actually deeply unconvinced of this, based on my very unscientific study of who's at the school gates of the primary schools near me.
We've yet to see how the birthrate changes, taking into account the preferences of recent immigrants. They may well, due to cultural values, place much higher emphasis on having children than we do.
I wouldn't be surprised to see an uptick in the birthrate in the next decade.
Not enough immigrants to change the figures that much. The underlying issue is that people of normal child-raising age can't afford to have children, because their finances are so stretched by mortgage payments.
Which is probably at least as big an issue for parents in the private school market.
It means that the state primary I went to is closing, because the area doesn't have enough children in it any more. Which is a bit sad, but not worth wading through blood for.
It is not just a UK problem though, across the developed world parents are having less children.
The UK fertility rate of 1.6 is actually higher than that in Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, South Korea and China and the same as in Australia and only just below the 1.7 fertility rate in the US in 2024. Only France and Ireland at an average of 1.8 children per mother and Argentina at 1.9 are close to replacement rate of 2.1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
252,000 abortions in England Wales last year. Up 17% in a single year and the highest ever. You are way too sanguine.
Well we could certainly look at the time limit even if we don't go full GOP and try and ban it completely
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
I actually think Horse has it right - we should be focused on making state schools so excellent, no parent like Casino feels the need to send their kid to private school.
While you will always get an elite who want their kids to be educated around other elite types, the majority of parents who send their kids to minor private schools are parents who are deeply skeptical about the ability of the state system to provide an adequate education for their kids, and highly value the importance of a good education in getting on in life, to the point where they are prepared to spend a huge percentage of their disposable income on it.
The answer to this isn't making private schools more expensive, it's making state schools better. Reduce demand for private education by making the alternative more appealing.
We'll put you down as supporting an increase in the education budget such that spend per pupil is equal to that in the private sector then, will we?
We all know the VAT on private schools is red meat for the left wing of the party / country. If it was solely about raising revenue for the country, there are loads of easy way you could extract similar amounts. Play with IC thresholds at top end, IHT, wealth tax, reform council taxes.
IMO, there are lots more important issues facing the country, and potential downside of a load of disruption, loads of extra kids in state schools etc. And if your concern is about unfair advantages that privately educated have, I have long said the fairest way of doing university applications is post A-level results. Shift the calendar, make it post results, then none of this predicted grade nonsense, unis can see all the results, see how a kid did, see how they did in relation to their year at that school.
Actual exam results help. But the private schools get high grades in A levels far out of proportion to their numbers. This is why many pay for private education.
Yes, I know that. But what it allows you to do is do a little bit of thumb on the scale where you get a candidate with perhaps the same or one grade less, but you can now only justify but its evidence based that look at how absolutely shit the rest of his school did and still this kid got very good grades. At the moment, its all guessing games.
I think this is better than entrance exams / interviews 6 months+ before they do their A-levels.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
So youre for VAT on university fees ?
Yes. 100%.
In fact, I'd have fees eliminated for doctors and nurses but up them for other degrees. In principle I oppose fees but accept - unlike the Tories - it is unaffordable. Of course with the £2.5bn they've just plucked out of thin air, perhaps that could eliminate the fees?
I think forgiveness is a better approach. Each year in the NHS knocks a couple of grand off the amount to be repaid. That way you don’t train people and then they promptly bugger off without paying for it.
Its such a no-brainer policy. The Tories could have easily got ahead on this kind of thing. I don't think it gets students voting for you, but it probably brings some more parents back on side.
In the future, if the Tories offered something like that, environmental policy, house building, they'd win over a lot of people like me.
But as HYUFD has said many times, they hold me in contempt.
I think if I was Sunak I would even lean in more to nerdy I like maths / STEM optics. Really big push for more STEM at uni by grants / loan foregiveness / ring-fenced funding to unis to run such courses. Sure all the journalists that did liberal arts will be huffing about no fair, but again its actually good for the country. AI going to take a lot of the low hanging paper pushing / writing report jobs, LLMs aren't actually good at doing logic / science (despite what the contrived benchmarks say).
Yes but at most only the top 10% academically will be able to do STEM courses to a high enough standard to get a post graduate job using those skills.
If anything creative jobs and ones with most interaction with people are the most AI proof
In all the excitement have we noted Rudy Giuliani's Excellent Adventure?
He's been dodging his indictment for election crimes in Arizona, and tweeted "nah nah nah" from his 80th Birthday Party.
I hour later the authorities in Arizona tweeted that he had been served as he left his birthday party, him having finally identified where he was located.
Leaving aside the actual policy, it’s hard to discern what the national service idea tells us about Sunaks strategy. He talks about being a reassuring safety first, conservative PM and then does something deliberately designed to be provocative. It’s very confusing. Is he deliberately trying to mix things up?
Labour on the other hand are pretty obviously going for ‘sensible’ change.
I notice that Trump has pivoted to go all-in on crypto-bro-ism. There has to be a grift in there somewhere. Maybe he is thinking of launching his own meme coin?
Courting the libertarian vote. If Trump did win, I'm sure those with genuine libertarian beliefs will enjoy the gulags he will create to house the ideologically impure. Those who booed and heckled him yesterday, they know the truth about him.
I wonder if it is just a sign of my own increasing age that even though he is older than me Sunak feels very much like a young policitian, whereas Cameron seemed older thank Sunak in 2010 despite being the same age Sunak is now.
It's not due to experience, as Sunak has been an MP just as long as Cameron had back then, and is a lot more politically experienced than Cameron was in 2010, with years as a senior minister behind him.
Sunak comes across as being too green and inexperienced. Cameron, for all his faults, was a much smarter political operator across the board (a lot of that also, it has to be said, being driven by Osborne).
I do actually think Sunak has also suffered from what seems to be a paucity of good advisors. I did think bringing Cameron back might be a way to try and fix that - his Mandelson moment if you will - but it seems not.
I'm still baffled by bringing Cameron back. I liked him fine, but it was a snub to all the MPs who could have filled the role, he is not popular now, and it did not form part of any cohesive strategy to pitch to the centre - instead they've still wobbled back and forth from appealing to the right with some gimmicks and attempts at steady as she goes dull competence.
I think there were more votes available on the right, I think the centre was already lost by the Boris-Truss-Sunak debacle, so the campaign going that way is not a surprise, but undercut by things like bringing back Cameron.
The point with Sunak and why he's been useless is that while there are different routes to a winning coalition of voters, you have to pick one, and a theory of the case, and stick to it. The most obvious ones broadly being the Cameron 2010-15 one - which was founded on detoxifying the party with more liberal voters and gluing those on to more traditional Tories and those fearful or fed up of Labour. Then there's the Boris, unite Brexit voters one, which united socially conservative types sharing both left and right economic views, while daring its liberal wing to vote for Jeremy Corbyn.
Neither are now an easy option for the Tories. Brexit has receded as a frontline issue but has made the Cameron route difficult to take without a mea culpa as the fracture with liberalism (not solely caused by Brexit, but a useful shorthand for the breach) is here to stay. It's not likely Boris' works either now as it was dependent on promises of spending to those left-wing on that were empty and now impossible. Brexit is largely seen to be a failure, even by enough leave voters who support the principle, to make standing on it as your big thing a vote loser. Plus there's no Jeremy Corbyn to shore up the Tories' liberal wing.
But you do have to pick one and stick to it. Sunak has flailed between them - he's cast himself as a pragmatic ideologically unbound problem solver one minute, then sounded like a rabid right-wing Boomer Facebook group the next. Which just annoy everyone.
Like their campaign is "stick with us, we've got a sensible plan" but the policies broadcast at the loudest volume are back of a fag packet populism that tells you they haven't beyond scraping the bottom of the barrel.
To get an idea of how ludicrous it is think about what a similar approach from Labour would look. Running their "security and patriotism" stuff one minute, then, because they didn't want to upset Corbyn fans, pivoting to saying NATO is actually rubbish and why can't we all have a cup of tea with Putin and the Ayatollah the next.
Churchill was quite happy to have a cup of tea with Stalin, and he wasn't considered weak on security or patriotism, so I'm not sure of the basis of your point.
He was when we were allies - less so when Churchill was warning Stalin was a menace to European peace.
But that's by the by, whichever you agree with - Corbyn and Starmer have quite different political approaches and appeals to target voters. In relation to defence, which I used as an example Starmer makes sure to reassure he supports our existing international security arrangements and to appear strong on this. Repudiate that and take the far left's position that those security arrangements are bad and certain anti-West dictatorships have a point, and you annoy everyone and appear a fool.
You can pick one or the other of those positions or other ones associated with a particular type of politics, but if you pick both at the same time you look ridiculous.
As Sunak does by trying to promote himself as both a pragmatic problem solver aiming to "get the job done" and then by flailing about on the right trying to appease his party's headbangers.
Tory Party supporters and members have not afaicr been agitating strongly (or even weakly) for national service to be revived. Nor was the policy consulted on amongst members, supporters, voters, MPs or even the cabinet. This is a brain fart of Sunak and the people he's chosen to surround himself with - it is false and unfair to impute it to 'headbangers' except those occupying 10 Downing Street.
The idea was specifically rubbished by Number 10 and the MOD only four months ago!
Even better than that, it was rubbished by the Minister for Defence in a Parliamentary answer as recently as Thursday 23rd May 2024:
I notice that Trump has pivoted to go all-in on crypto-bro-ism. There has to be a grift in there somewhere. Maybe he is thinking of launching his own meme coin?
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
I actually think Horse has it right - we should be focused on making state schools so excellent, no parent like Casino feels the need to send their kid to private school.
While you will always get an elite who want their kids to be educated around other elite types, the majority of parents who send their kids to minor private schools are parents who are deeply skeptical about the ability of the state system to provide an adequate education for their kids, and highly value the importance of a good education in getting on in life, to the point where they are prepared to spend a huge percentage of their disposable income on it.
The answer to this isn't making private schools more expensive, it's making state schools better. Reduce demand for private education by making the alternative more appealing.
We'll put you down as supporting an increase in the education budget such that spend per pupil is equal to that in the private sector then, will we?
There would have to be more funding.
But not necessarily all of it in schools. Are kids failing school because the schools are bad, or also because there are other factors - bad parenting, poor food, educational / behavioural issues - that may be causing them to fail?
Address these (how?), and you will fix more than the education system.
1) We should make sure private schools can educate separately to the peasantry of East Hampshire.
2) Everyone should be forced into National Service so they mix outside their narrow social circles.
Apparently, according to Cleverly, the slaves will not be cast into jail if they refuse to do as told. I imagine the plan is, therefore, to impose financial penalties on refuseniks, calibrated to be punishing to proles but a drop in the ocean for rich families (e.g, those of cabinet ministers.) Who'd-a-thunk-it, eh?
Rishi's apparently genuine National Service announcement has finally given me a reason to vote Labour. Keeping Labour out is now less important to me than stopping the Tories.
Thing is, I am pretty receptive to the idea that our military is far less than it needs to be. But this doesn't strike me as a massively helpful solution to the problem.
It's like the maths to 18 policy. I'm receptive to the argument that as a nation we are insufficiently numerate. I'm a maths fan. But what we need is a) better basic maths education to 16, and b) encouragement for those so inclined to take it further than 18.
Like this, the national service policy is a bafflingly stupid solution to a valid problem. But at least the maths to 18 argument isn't going to needlessly ruin long periods of my kids' childhoods.
Before you do, perhaps remind yourself of what that might mean:
I'm quite aware that Labour are a bunch of dangerous and spiteful left wing nutters who will make everything worse in countless ways. But what are the Tories doing to stop any of this? State spending up, immigration up, woke up, growth down. And now they propose to deprive my kids of their liberty.
Have you read all the detail properly? That's not at all how I see it.
There are quite a few flakey Tories on here and I sometimes wonder if it's just me, @MarqueeMark and @HYUFD fighting to back our own team. I get that morale is low but, goodness, we need to pull ourselves together.
I don't think you've enjoy a Labour government with a massive majority - and a huge phalanx of left-wing MPs on its backbenches - one iota. It'd be far worse on all the things you describe and you'd have to deal with the knowledge (and the guilt) that you helped enable it.
It no longer strikes me as rational to vote Con to keep state spending or immigration or woke down, because they transparently can't.
And this is being trumpeted as 'national service'. We all know what that means because it existed in the 1950s. If it actually isn't this but giving all 18 and 19 year olds a lovely slice of cake, why don't they say that? It's because implausibly, they think there is yet more mileage in shafting the young, of extracting a bit more from they young to give to the old.
I'm not a flakey Tory. I'm not a Tory at all. I'm just a voter for whom up until now the Conservative Party has been the best way of keeping the lunacy of the left at bay. But the Conservative Party is a) clearly not keeping the left at bay (i.e. state spending, immigration and wokery are rising anf rising) and b) introducing all sorts of unnecessary bloody awful of their own. I also felt this way over the cancellation of HS2, but then Labour confirmed they'd do it too.
You're not voting for 2024, you're voting for 2029.
The Conservatives are going to lose, badly, but if there's a decent cadre of parliamentary representation they have a chance of coming back in 5 years, after what will be a deeply unpopular Starmer Government that makes all of those things you describe much worse.
Please don't be goaded by those saying you must vote Labour to be sure they win; they are simply trying to co-opt you to wipe out the centre-right as a political force in this country.
Don't play their game.
I think you can forget 2029. The defeated Tories are going to lurch to the right for at least one, possibly two elections. 2038 may be more like it. Assuming they survive at all.
Most commentators thought when one Margaret Thatcher replaced defeated PM Ted Heath as Conservative leader in 1975 it was a lurch to the right and she would be unelectable and Labour would be there for a decade or more. Yet by 1979 she defeated Callaghan against the consensus due to the strikes and high inflation and poor growth under his Labour government.
In 2015 too most thought far left Corbyn being elected Labour leader guaranteed a Tory landslide at the next general election, yet May only just scraped most seats in a hung parliament against him in 2017 and needed the DUP to remain in power and it took Boris to finally defeat him clearly in 2019.
One thing in politics is that nothing is certain, we don't always elect centrist governments, especially in the current economic circumstances it is not impossible hard right or hard left leaders could win
This is a good post. Elections are won from the centre until they aren’t. I personally remain convinced that a populist right wing movement is entirely likely to arise in the next 5-10 years in this country, and it could do really well. Look at France.
It could be the Tory Party. They could choose that route. It depends on how they react to July 4th.
You mean 4th of July 2024?
For reference, most Tories including & especially the Prime Minister, reacted rather badly to July 4th 1776!
It's very personal for me that we have a government that wants to shaft me at every turn.
Lock down to protect society, put your life on hold for two years
Up your taxes to the highest in history
Offer no help on housing - build no houses
Force you to do unpaid work
It feels like a deliberate attack on young people.
I’d remind you again of another poster with a similar name to yours, who was a young chap who made post after post after post screaming for lockdown.
I think this National Service idea is nuts. I love the idea of encouraging people to volunteer, could not a way be found to do this with 2.5 billion of funding? I think you take the idea that the young are being shafted too far though. It’s been tough for everyone.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
I actually think Horse has it right - we should be focused on making state schools so excellent, no parent like Casino feels the need to send their kid to private school.
While you will always get an elite who want their kids to be educated around other elite types, the majority of parents who send their kids to minor private schools are parents who are deeply skeptical about the ability of the state system to provide an adequate education for their kids, and highly value the importance of a good education in getting on in life, to the point where they are prepared to spend a huge percentage of their disposable income on it.
The answer to this isn't making private schools more expensive, it's making state schools better. Reduce demand for private education by making the alternative more appealing.
We'll put you down as supporting an increase in the education budget such that spend per pupil is equal to that in the private sector then, will we?
London inner city comprehensives have a much higher spend per pupil than schools in places like leafy Solihull.
Labour's Liz Kendall confirms that the party would bring back Rishi Sunak's smoking ban and keep the pensions triple lock
If you’re going to ban smoking just ban it (I’d prefer they didn’t because it’s illiberal).
But none of this age threshold nonsense.
It is a laughably bad policy. The future of, yes I know you look in your 50s, but ID please. Hey Bob, you are 51 right, yeah, can you nip in the Premier and get me 20 fags as they won't serve me.
Just say in 5 years time we will ban smoking, we will support people to move away from ciggies.
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
So youre for VAT on university fees ?
Yes. 100%.
In fact, I'd have fees eliminated for doctors and nurses but up them for other degrees. In principle I oppose fees but accept - unlike the Tories - it is unaffordable. Of course with the £2.5bn they've just plucked out of thin air, perhaps that could eliminate the fees?
Pharmacists? Physios? Why are doctors and nurses so favoured?
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
I actually think Horse has it right - we should be focused on making state schools so excellent, no parent like Casino feels the need to send their kid to private school.
While you will always get an elite who want their kids to be educated around other elite types, the majority of parents who send their kids to minor private schools are parents who are deeply skeptical about the ability of the state system to provide an adequate education for their kids, and highly value the importance of a good education in getting on in life, to the point where they are prepared to spend a huge percentage of their disposable income on it.
The answer to this isn't making private schools more expensive, it's making state schools better. Reduce demand for private education by making the alternative more appealing.
We'll put you down as supporting an increase in the education budget such that spend per pupil is equal to that in the private sector then, will we?
If it were possible, that would be fantastic. But even closing the gap somewhat would be preferable. At the moment some parents face the choice between "inadequate" and "overkill".
By improving state education somewhat - albeit not to private school levels - what you could end up with is a situation where more parents are willing to do state education + top up with private tutors out of their own pocket.
The demand for private education is largely driven by the awfulness of the state system, which is underfunded, class sizes are too large, teaching often inadequate, and infrastructure literally falling down. I imagine 35k a year is a lot of Casino's disposable income, yet he's willing to pay it. Why?
I know why Casino is angry about the proposed closure of his kids' school - its personal. Of course its personal, you want whats best for your kids.
But - and its a very big but - if VAT is the difference between the school thriving and the school closing then I have to ask how they expect all other businesses to cope with similar increases in their costs which they can't pass on.
We need to have principles and create rules which apply evenly and equally. We charge VAT on services - and a private school provides a service. We say "market forces" when businesses fail and don't support bailing them out or preferential tax treatments to protect them. Every other school gets stuck with the local demographic impacts and budget constraints.
So when it's your kids, its personal. Get that. But does the same principle not apply to all kids? Or just your own? The argument seems to be "this will cost the state" because private school kids will transfer to the state sector. OK, thats fine. As happens all the time already when schools close.
I actually think Horse has it right - we should be focused on making state schools so excellent, no parent like Casino feels the need to send their kid to private school.
While you will always get an elite who want their kids to be educated around other elite types, the majority of parents who send their kids to minor private schools are parents who are deeply skeptical about the ability of the state system to provide an adequate education for their kids, and highly value the importance of a good education in getting on in life, to the point where they are prepared to spend a huge percentage of their disposable income on it.
The answer to this isn't making private schools more expensive, it's making state schools better. Reduce demand for private education by making the alternative more appealing.
We'll put you down as supporting an increase in the education budget such that spend per pupil is equal to that in the private sector then, will we?
There would have to be more funding.
But not necessarily all of it in schools. Are kids failing school because the schools are bad, or also because there are other factors - bad parenting, poor food, educational / behavioural issues - that may be causing them to fail?
Address these (how?), and you will fix more than the education system.
You rapidly end up at state boarding schools for some children.
Comments
A sunnier spell splitting some sharp showers (try saying that with your teeth out).
I'm not quite sure what to make of this "national service" idea - it's an old Conservative meme which gets wheeled out every so often under various guises. I recall a scheme to make sure 16-18 year old "NEET"s (Not in Education, Employment or Training) had to attend some form of training scheme at Youth Centres or something like that.
I remember various attempts to encourage apprenticeships sponsoring companies to employ and train young people but as it seems we have a "threat" again - seriously, Putin isn't the Warsaw Pact with 100 divisions two hours from the Rhine. We always have to have a "threat", don't we, and when we didn't for a brief period from 1989 people actually started asking whether all the money we were throwing at the military-industrial complex (including nuclear weapons) was money well spent?
The "threat" is used as glue to hold society together and, if I were being a complete cynic, supportive of the Government.
There's some interesting comments on birth rates - the last time birth rates fell, schools were closed or merged together and playing fields sold off for housing development. When the birth rate recovered, money had to be spent providing additional classrooms to deal with the new bulge in capacity. Currently, the big problem in school construction is the severe shortage of SEN units to deal with the post-lockdown increase in referrals.
Deltapoll continues the 17.5% swing from Conservative to Labour. We have the Monday R&W poll tomorrow which will be interesting as R&W do their fieldwork on the Sunday and the last poll had a larger than usual sample base (3,700) which is more than double Deltapoll or Opinium.
They are being asked to make a contribution to society. A few hours a month.
Think of it as non-cash tax if it makes you feel better.
More taxes on inheritance and rentierism and less on work and 'self-improvement'.
I think we should be encouraging more spending on education.
Personally I think we should all have a lifetime 'learning allowance'.
I still have this memory of a radio call in where it was suggested that pubs and bars should only open to people aged 50 and over to prevent young people bringing COVID in. Arseholes. But I still understood what needed to be done.
The UK fertility rate of 1.6 is actually higher than that in Canada, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, South Korea and China and the same as in Australia and only just below the 1.7 fertility rate in the US in 2024. Only France and Ireland at an average of 1.8 children per mother and Argentina at 1.9 are close to replacement rate of 2.1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
Restricting private education reduces the resources available for the less well off.
The cost of waiving VAT is a fraction of the cost of providing it via the state
"How do you type that noise where you wibble your lips with your fingers really rapidly whilst air comes out, followed by "diddums" ? "
?
But as HYUFD has said many times, they hold me in contempt.
While you will always get an elite who want their kids to be educated around other elite types, the majority of parents who send their kids to minor private schools are parents who are deeply skeptical about the ability of the state system to provide an adequate education for their kids, and highly value the importance of a good education in getting on in life, to the point where they are prepared to spend a huge percentage of their disposable income on it.
The answer to this isn't making private schools more expensive, it's making state schools better. Reduce demand for private education by making the alternative more appealing.
So if you work as a teacher (say) your student loans are paid down for you. No personal payments while you are a teacher, capital repaid on an increasing scale. So relatively little is paid off in the first year or 2. But by the end of the 6th year (say) the last is gone.
10%
10%
10%
20%
20%
30%
Or some such.
If you’ve got someone on a career for 6 years, you’ve got value out of the bargain. And they are very likely to stay in that career
Do you support not paying people to work?
If it's a tax as you call it, why is nobody else paying it?
All of these are things that Sunak would actually do quite well on.
If there is a >MOE fall... it could be like this scene from The Office: https://youtu.be/gO8N3L_aERg?si=q_aBph6TmUGfVcvy
I just spent a week talking with some exceptional students from three of the UK’s top universities; Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College. Along with UCL, these British universities represent 4 of the top 10 universities in the world. The US - a country with 5x more people and 8x higher GDP - has the same number of universities in the global top 10... it’s striking how undergraduates at top US universities start companies at more than 5x the rate of their British-educated peers....
https://tomblomfield.com/post/750852175114174464/taking-risk
I like to tease you because I find your wrath to be overblown and you crash around this place like a bear with a sore head over small things.
But for the first time, I'm actually starting to worry you might be a danger to others' safety and to your own liberty. Can you have a little think to yourself about whether you might be a little overradicalised? The violent imagery in one of your posts today is unhealthy. I really think you need help. It's not ok to be talking about "wading through blood". It's red flag territory.
Do you hear me? It's really not ok.
This was based not on any actual counting but on turnout numbers from verification and local hearsay and gossip. It moved the hairtrigger betting markets (and I suspect someone made a killing),
There will be all manner of tweets flying after 10pm on July 4th irrespective of the exit poll - as to how many of them should be given any kind of credence that's another question but they will move the betting markets far out of proportion to their actual impact but those playing the spreads will or should be acutely aware of that.
https://x.com/asallen/status/1794467197039079654
And most private schools aren't businesses. They aren't there to make a profit.
If the betting markets start listening to such, it is the duty of all Followers of Adam Smith to smite the heathen with the Invisible Hand. By relieving them of their money.
Tis a hard duty to be sure, but the way of The Blessed is The True Path.
To be clear, I am sceptical this policy will do much good or bad but I am slightly baffled that it's causing so much trouble. To me if schools privately run are that much almost in the red, it suggests an issue with possibly how they are run?
My view remains that it would be better to make state eduction so good, private education didn't need to exist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMlH2c3kzMM
This requires a combination of finance and the interest (and ability) to master productionising inventions.
Whether to apply VAT to a given product or service is entirely discretionary on the Government's part (pace EU rules pre-Brexit).
We charge VAT on services.... but not healthcare services. We charge VAT on boats, including small houseboats... but not large houseboats. We charge VAT on petrol... but not train fares. We charge VAT on clothes... but not children's clothes. We charge VAT on boilers... but not wood-fuelled boilers. And so on.
It's not about "evenly and equally". It's about Government making policy decisions and choosing where the impact will fall.
In this case, Starmer has made a policy choice that will affect the middle class but not the seriously rich, that will affect specialist autism and music schools but not Eton or Harrow. That is entirely his choice to make. That's what Governments do.
But let's not pretend it's about making tax rules "even and equal". It isn't. It's a piece of red meat to throw to his base to disguise the fact he's abandoned most of the left-wing principles he won the leadership on. That's politics but it doesn't mean that we all have to like it.
Perhaps those junior doctors, nurses and teachers have a point?
My view basically is that I can't see why VAT isn't already charged.
However, I note again that Casino was dismissive of the impact the Government could have on universities by making sudden shifts in student visa policy. He was dismissive about universities going bust. He cares about his own family, but he doesn’t care about anyone else’s.
1) We should make sure private schools can educate separately to the peasantry of East Hampshire.
2) Everyone should be forced into National Service so they mix outside their narrow social circles.
It's GBeebies but just ignore pointless Camilla and listen to what he actually says.
The tldw is that it creates a hole which says "how will they pay for that, how will they find the money"? Which to me sounds just like Labour 2019's free broadband idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMlH2c3kzMM
Anyway, enjoy PB
However, I think it is misleading to say this policy choice will affect the middle class. Private school fees have increased far higher than inflation over my lifetime. A private school education was something the middle class could once afford, but that’s not been true for a while. This is about a policy affecting the seriously rich.
I just can't see this being a positive for state education. Surely it will introduce far more costs than benefits?
(Where I live - i.e. not the south east - private schools don't tend to cater to price-insensitive multi-millionaires. I think this is being drawn up with an unrepresentative view of the sorts of people who go to private schools driven by some spads idea that it's all Harrows and Etons.)
Your earlier comment about making the state sector better than the private is the way to go, however there are always going to be a set of parents who need boarding and the state doesnt really offer that. So there is always going to be the need for a private secotr.
If you impose a price shock in any industry, a number of companies go out of business.
Claiming that doesn’t happen flies in the face of observed experience.
The result of VAT on school fees will be
- Some measure of contraction in demand.
- Which in turn means some measure in contraction of the number of private schools. It is very unlikely that it will be just a reduction in places across schools.
The issue with the policy was that people went "great idea" but it fitted into the narrative that Labour just kept plucking money out of thin air. The idea they would never be able to do this stuff undermined the quite restrained 2017 package they'd offered before.
So I think Portillo makes a good point. Even those that support this, will wonder "why can't this £2.5bn be spent on the NHS"?
The problem is of course the FPTP deadlock which makes that impossible.
IMO, there are lots more important issues facing the country, and potential downside of a load of disruption, loads of extra kids in state schools etc. And if your concern is about unfair advantages that privately educated have, I have long said the fairest way of doing university applications is post A-level results. Shift the calendar, make it post results, then none of this predicted grade nonsense, unis can see all the results, see how a kid did, see how they did in relation to their year at that school.
There's no reason why having the same representative decision making within a party shouldn't also still be thought of as a democracy.
I'm not necessarily saying it's preferable, I leave that to party members to debate either way. But I don't accept the implication that having MPs choose the party leader is undemocratic.
And he wonders why his popularity has dipped.
Portillo was though effectively the prophet for the Conservative modernisters, Cameron and Osborne backed him for leader in 2001 and built on his ideas to win Cameron the leadership in 2005 and beat Brown in 2010.
That model changed as competition to provide finance resulted in better deals for the founders.
I think this is better than entrance exams / interviews 6 months+ before they do their A-levels.
If anything creative jobs and ones with most interaction with people are the most AI proof
He's been dodging his indictment for election crimes in Arizona, and tweeted "nah nah nah" from his 80th Birthday Party.
I hour later the authorities in Arizona tweeted that he had been served as he left his birthday party, him having finally identified where he was located.
Nice 5 minute vid with an account:
https://youtu.be/wpos4hrsYWQ?t=30
Labour on the other hand are pretty obviously going for ‘sensible’ change.
If Trump did win, I'm sure those with genuine libertarian beliefs will enjoy the gulags he will create to house the ideologically impure. Those who booed and heckled him yesterday, they know the truth about him.
https://x.com/Huge_action/status/1794684909635899440?t=gFLTgjGiksJJQorhDixZRg&s=19
And they say a week is a long time in politics.
But not necessarily all of it in schools. Are kids failing school because the schools are bad, or also because there are other factors - bad parenting, poor food, educational / behavioural issues - that may be causing them to fail?
Address these (how?), and you will fix more than the education system.
https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1794373334630568440
What is happening here
For reference, most Tories including & especially the Prime Minister, reacted rather badly to July 4th 1776!
But none of this age threshold nonsense.
I think this National Service idea is nuts. I love the idea of encouraging people to volunteer, could not a way be found to do this with 2.5 billion of funding?
I think you take the idea that the young are being shafted too far though. It’s been tough for everyone.
Just say in 5 years time we will ban smoking, we will support people to move away from ciggies.
By improving state education somewhat - albeit not to private school levels - what you could end up with is a situation where more parents are willing to do state education + top up with private tutors out of their own pocket.
The demand for private education is largely driven by the awfulness of the state system, which is underfunded, class sizes are too large, teaching often inadequate, and infrastructure literally falling down. I imagine 35k a year is a lot of Casino's disposable income, yet he's willing to pay it. Why?