It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
No reason why the points can't be combined: the abolition of private schools would be an intolerably brutal constraint upon personal liberty and the expression of human nature, it would vandalize a world-leading model of educational excellence that benefits everyone in the UK, AND the people who moan about them the most tend to be lefty hypocrites who find their own methods of making sure that their kids are not disadvantaged. That combination of the macro and the micro you dislike so much is why the left can never win on this issue in the UK.
@ Kinabalu. I'd add a bit to the micro argument you make. Namely, that micro good - giving kids the best start in life parents can, instills an attitude which by example can spread to become a culture of agency - i.e. the decisions and actions we take can improve our individual lives and those of others around us, which when aggregated has a beneficial macro effect.
Yes. For sure. But that's more a general point about the inculcation in children by their parents of good and robust values. The more of that the better. Paying school fees is a possible example of it but it's not a great one. Only a small minority of parents are wealthy enough to be able to have it even as an option.
It’s an increase. It may be a real terms decrease (I don’t know) but that not what the tweet says
I'm also quite convinced that no-one gives a shit about the "wasted" money on PPE acquisition. Basic issue is that we pursued all routes to ensure we didn't have a PPE shortage. We didn't, because we took a portfolio approach that got us through. Some were brilliant, some didn't deliver as they should. Overall, we got by. Massive "Phew!!".
That portfolio approach is the same one that has got us the vaccine delivery. If none of the vaccines had worked, would you have raised a stink about wasted money, Labour? If some had worked, some not - we would have got by and the idea would still have been the right thing to do. That it looks like nearly all will have come in is a brilliant result - it does not invalidate the portfolio approach.
Unless Labour are going to bitch we bought too many vaccines?
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
No. Labour's line should be to pay off debt using economic growth not austerity, and take every opportunity to remind people of the squillions of Brexit dividend promised by Conservatives.
See I like the sound of that, but I don't think I have ever heard any politician make a convincing case for how "pay off debt using economic growth not austerity" can be achieved in practice. It's one of those things we all want but nobody knows what knobs to turn or buttons to press to make it happen on demand, that it happens at all seems to be despite government rather than due to things governments do. If balancing the books was as simple as "grow the economy" that's all we would ever choose to do, any time we need to reduce debt or increase spending we'd simply grow the economy a bit more to make up the difference. I wish the world worked that way, but I see little evidence it does, so when people propose "grow the economy" as a fix I take it with a pinch of salt.
Any party that could convince me that they could grow the economy on demand, without blowing everything up a few years later, would get my vote.
But it is what did happen over several decades post- World War 2. Despite a higher Debt to GDP ratio than we now face, Macmillan was able to persuade people in the late 1950s that 'we had never had it so good'!
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Lets be honest about it.
We don't.
We don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, education or lifetime learning and training in general.
That's so much better. You are baulking at the linguistic and logical contortions required to argue with a straight face that our private schools fetish is in any sense compatible with equal opportunities in education. This saves much time and dignity. Hats off, Riccardo.
There would never have been a better time to abolish the triple lock.
I would like to see the Government look at a much more radical review of tax and benefits. Set a minimum income level, sufficient to live on without needing benefits or charity. £16,200 per year would equate to a 35 hour week at the living wage. Set that as the personal allowance. Receive a rebate if your income is less. Pay tax if your income is more. Combine tax and NI for a basic rate of 32%. Same rate for self-employed. Income based on earned and unearned income (dividends and Capital Gains) at the same rate. Higher tax rates of 52% and 57%, so no upper limit on NI contributions. Don’t know what the net cost would be. A job for a think tank, maybe?
Why should the taxpayer subsidise low paying companies? If you want to improve people's standards of living in that way then increase the minimum wage to a level where someone working a standard week is earning whatever you consider to be the living wage level. If companies cannot afford to operate whilst paying their employees a basic living wage and paying their taxes under normal operating circumstances then they do not deserve to be in business.
UBI or anything like it is merely the taxpayer subsidising the profits of companies.
No it is not. For two childless adults working full-time the minimum wage already does reach that threshold. No subsidies to any company at all.
The issue that needs to be fixed though is that if people aren't working we don't tell them "go get a job then" and let them and their children end up on the streets or starving to death if they don't. They get benefits to ensure that they have enough to survive.
So then the difference between someone not working and someone who is working full time is not the difference in income the working person earns because there is a corresponding loss of benefits to go with that.
Between loss of benefits, NIC and income tax the state can be reclaiming 90% of someone's income.
Not a penny of this goes to the company.
Rubbish. If it is the unemployed or those unable to work we are talking about then they get money from the Government already. You can debate about increasing that amount but that has nothing to do with a UBI. And yes, if companies pay less than a living wage and the Government is expected to make up the difference as it is having to do now then it is absolutely the case that you are subsidising the companies. If they are, as you foolishly claim, already paying that amount then there is no need for UBI anyway.
Sorry but you don't understand the issue so are talking rubbish it seems. Yes the minimum wage already today covers basic minimum income required for two adults working full-time with no children. Anyone in that situation is NOT entitled to any benefits.
However not everyone is in that situation. Some people work part-time. Some people don't work. Some people have lots of kids that the state has said it will help pay for.
That is where the benefits bill goes. Not to couples working full-time in secure even if minimum wage jobs.
The problem is if someone on benefits today works sixteen hours per week then they're "taxed" 90% on every pound after that 16 hours. What would you do if facing a marginal tax rate of 90%?
A UBI would smooth the transition from not working, to working part time, to working full time encouraging people to work more. Because currently they're not.
You are way out of date. That is no longer the case. Under Universal Credit the loss is 63p in the pound not 90p. And that is not even on the full amount. The first £292 of earnings per month is exempted so does not count towards reductions in UC. (£512 if you have to find your own accommodation).
If you are earning minimum wage working 17 hours a week you earn £593 a month. If you have to find your own accommodation your allowance is £512.
That means the reduction in UC you will receive is 63% of £81 or £51 in the month.
UC for a single person over 25 is £409 a month. That means if they work 17 hours a week and earn £593 a month then their UC drops to £358 a month.
That is a total income of £951 a month. They pay no tax on that as they are under the £12,500 limit and they pay no NI as they earn less than £183 a week.
By the way I am not in any way defending these levels of support. Living on such low incomes is definitely living on the edge. But your claim about losing 90% when you work more than 16 hours a week is simply untrue.
In parts of eastern Europe and in France case numbers are edging up. Worryingly today in Andalucia after weeks of falling cases we have seen week on week rises. Even now the slow vaccine progress is hampered as AZN is still only offered to under 55s and the rest is focused on the two dose /3 week rollout. All of which means we have around about 3% fully vaccinated and another 4/5% with one dose. Meanwhile down the road in Gibraltar they are almost finished. Easter we will remain closed to the rest of Spain - rightly given the circumstances. However, if figures do edge up again and the rollout does not improve I think there could be trouble ahead. On the positive side we had our first lunch out since Xmas today. It was glorious!
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Lets be honest about it.
We don't.
We don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, education or lifetime learning and training in general.
That's so much better. You are baulking at the linguistic and logical contortions required to argue with a straight face that our private schools fetish is in any sense compatible with equal opportunities in education. This saves much time and dignity. Hats off, Riccardo.
You can't have equality of opportunity in education, not because of money but because of parents. My son went to a grammar. The only two of his year to do so. The reason he passed his 11 plus when so many others didn't was because he got encouraged to read and learn by both myself and his mother. Most of his friends parents couldn't see the point, they didn't encourage their kids to do either. I met those parents so I know what I am talking about. They all took the view working hard doesn't matter because we are poor so will never be allowed to get on. Your point of view in fact. Strangely the only other one of his year that passed was his best friend who used to come round our house most days and got equally encouraged by us.
Yours is the ideology of "Its not my fault its the systems so there is no point bothering". Yes you can work hard and not make it I do not deny that but on the other hand if you don't even try you are going to fail. This is why I hate your ideology so much....you encourage the "There is no point even trying" attitude
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
Nope. It's leveling up. Real leveling up as opposed to the bullshit Johnson soundbite variety. If I didn't believe it was I wouldn't argue for it.
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Lets be honest about it.
We don't.
We don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, education or lifetime learning and training in general.
That's so much better. You are baulking at the linguistic and logical contortions required to argue with a straight face that our private schools fetish is in any sense compatible with equal opportunities in education. This saves much time and dignity. Hats off, Riccardo.
By 'we' I mean the country as a whole.
If I'm being cynical I'll suggest that people will chose a better holiday over better education or being less cynical I'll suggest that the law of diminish returns means that most people aren't interested in education as long as it reaches an 'acceptable' level.
And if people aren't interested in education in general why are they going to be interested in equal opportunities in education ?
In parts of eastern Europe and in France case numbers are edging up. Worryingly today in Andalucia after weeks of falling cases we have seen week on week rises. Even now the slow vaccine progress is hampered as AZN is still only offered to under 55s and the rest is focused on the two dose /3 week rollout. All of which means we have around about 3% fully vaccinated and another 4/5% with one dose. Meanwhile down the road in Gibraltar they are almost finished. Easter we will remain closed to the rest of Spain - rightly given the circumstances. However, if figures do edge up again and the rollout does not improve I think there could be trouble ahead. On the positive side we had our first lunch out since Xmas today. It was glorious!
Liked for mention of this strange and novel 'lunch out' thing. What on earth is that?
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
Is this the same Williamglenn who was such a fine advocate for remaining in the EU? I ask seriously because his politics seem to have done an about turn and I'm not particularly referring to this post.
My father in law has some friends in France. He's French, 92, and just gone I to a care home. She's 86 and English but lived in France most of her adult life. Neither of them have had a vaccine and she has been unable to get one at all. Their son and his wife in their mid 50s have both been jabbed.
Clearly the ban on AZ in the over 65s has had a massive impact. They have been vaccinating those massive less at risk. So it will not help much in reducing deaths.
Given now no one in France wants the AZ jab they have a serious self-inflicted problem on their hands.
I can't quite believe the cheek of the EU in stopping vaccine exports and yet demanding the US fulfills exports to them!
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries go back to semi-normal.
Politically, they are trying to sell the idea that it is all down to other people being nasty.
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries the UK go back to semi-normal goes back to normal.
Brexit Britain, waving from across the Channel. It's driving them quite bonkers.
If it's driven then bonkers now - imagine what it will be like in June / July as we host the Euro 21 championship with full stadiums full of vaccinated people happy to be in large crowds.
Careful...we're not out of the woods yet...
But we can dream.
Unlike our friends on the Continent. Best they can hope for is to suppress their nightmares.
From what I can see, various countries are planning to reopen again. That may end in tears.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
Is this the same Williamglenn who was such a fine advocate for remaining in the EU? I ask seriously because his politics seem to have done an about turn and I'm not particularly referring to this post.
I have found myself defending William a great deal over the last couple of months and am pleased to do so.
In all the arguments we ever had over Brexit I never saw William claim the EU was in any way near perfect. I can remember at least two occasions when he made explicit criticism of the EU even though he was arguing vehemently for continued UK membership.
Since we have left I have seen plenty of posts from him about how we should have stayed in and some hope and belief we will eventually find our way back. But at the same time he has been very strong in attacking the EU over its current management particularly when it comes to vaccines. This is no different from me being vehemently in favour of Brexit but attacking the Government over a whole host of policy areas at the same time.
I think Johnson is a terrible PM but support Brexit, William thinks UvdL is a terrible President but supports the EU as an institution. There is no contradiction in either of our positions.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
Nope. It's leveling up. Real leveling up as opposed to the bullshit Johnson soundbite variety. If I didn't believe it was I wouldn't argue for it.
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
The last sentence sums up Labours approach to the working class
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
Is this the same Williamglenn who was such a fine advocate for remaining in the EU? I ask seriously because his politics seem to have done an about turn and I'm not particularly referring to this post.
I think the scales somewhat fell from his eyes when he saw how indefensible the EU position on vaccines had become.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
One of your problems is that this part of the tax system was mucked up by a characteristic Gordon Brown stealth kludge, and anyone earning between 100k and about 125k has a marginal tax rate in that zone of 65%.
If you load that even more they will just work less, or trade for holidays etc.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Rich kids will tend to do well. Supported kids will tend to do well. Poor unsupported kids are stuffed, and may drag down other kids in their classes. That is why people will pay school fees - to try to get their kids to an environment with less disruption, better results and hence more chance of a better career and social advantage.
Imagine that you increased state education spending to the same level per head as the private schools. Would outcomes improve? For some kids, yes - but for many no. That is because the underlying factors that cause the poor outcomes lie outside the school gates. That is the real problem - society used to value education as a primary route out of poverty. It doesn't any more. You won't get better outcomes unless parents who currently view schools as child-sitting services value and support their kid's education more. That is a lot harder to do than building new shiny schools or attacking private schools.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Abolishing private schools wouldn't abolish elite schools which is the point you always fail to realise.
The very rich will send their kids to elite schools abroad. The fairly rich will buy up housing around good schools and squeeze the poor out then make donations to the school to fund things. They would also set up groups where they band together and hire private tutors outside of school time so their kids could still mix.
All you will in effect do is create elite comprehensives where only the well off can afford to live. Currently we have good grammars and comprehensives where they still have a percentage of the poor in the catchement. You would reduce that percentage to zero and condemn all poor kids to failing state schools.
The problem with your ideology and the solutions you propose as always is it fails to account for human nature and those wealthy enough to send their kids to private schools will always get round what you claim and inequality will be even more entrenched.
You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and also making absurdist projections about what would happen with housing moves. I mean, c'mon. Get a grip. The basic model I favour is all kids go to their local school, and this is accompanied by heavy differential investment in the less advantaged areas. No way does that condemn all poor kids to crap schools. Quite the opposite. Does it solve everything? Course not. Will some schools always be better than others due to a whole range of factors (including catchment areas). Yep. But will it make a serious dent in the correlation between life prospects and family background? Yes, it will. It's blindingly obvious that it will.
I totally accept that others don't share my values on this. That's fine. It doesn't make me a better person or anything. But that there IS a trade-off here between the right of folk to spend their money as they see fit and equal opportunities in education (and thus in wider society), this is simply not a matter of debate. It's a stone cold fact. It's all about what you consider most important. You can't just dodge the whole issue with platitudes and nitpicking.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
One of your problems is that this part of the tax system was mucked up by a characteristic Gordon Brown stealth kludge, and anyone earning between 100k and about 125k has a marginal tax rate in that zone of 65%.
If you load that even more they will just work less, or trade for holidays etc.
Yep - we have doctors who post on this forum who do that
Last year I seriously thought about going down to a 4 day week as this stupid tax situation means it had its attractions - Why knacker myself if the government wants to take well over 50% of that portion of my earnings
It’s an increase. It may be a real terms decrease (I don’t know) but that not what the tweet says
I'm also quite convinced that no-one gives a shit about the "wasted" money on PPE acquisition. Basic issue is that we pursued all routes to ensure we didn't have a PPE shortage. We didn't, because we took a portfolio approach that got us through. Some were brilliant, some didn't deliver as they should. Overall, we got by. Massive "Phew!!".
That portfolio approach is the same one that has got us the vaccine delivery. If none of the vaccines had worked, would you have raised a stink about wasted money, Labour? If some had worked, some not - we would have got by and the idea would still have been the right thing to do. That it looks like nearly all will have come in is a brilliant result - it does not invalidate the portfolio approach.
Unless Labour are going to bitch we bought too many vaccines?
I've mentioned I've spoken to the people who do the focus groups and polling.
It is something that has been brought up persistently by the voters.
They don't mind it was wasted because there was a pandemic on, what seems to annoy the voters that it appears the contracts were awarded to people and companies not experienced in PPE but who also had links and donations to the Tory party.
As the focus groups and voters have told the pollsters they think one of the reasons why the vaccines have been a success is that the money went to experienced companies and organisations who had no links to the Tory party.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Rich kids will tend to do well. Supported kids will tend to do well. Poor unsupported kids are stuffed, and may drag down other kids in their classes. That is why people will pay school fees - to try to get their kids to an environment with less disruption, better results and hence more chance of a better career and social advantage.
Imagine that you increased state education spending to the same level per head as the private schools. Would outcomes improve? For some kids, yes - but for many no. That is because the underlying factors that cause the poor outcomes lie outside the school gates. That is the real problem - society used to value education as a primary route out of poverty. It doesn't any more. You won't get better outcomes unless parents who currently view schools as child-sitting services value and support their kid's education more. That is a lot harder to do than building new shiny schools or attacking private schools.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Rich kids will tend to do well. Supported kids will tend to do well. Poor unsupported kids are stuffed, and may drag down other kids in their classes. That is why people will pay school fees - to try to get their kids to an environment with less disruption, better results and hence more chance of a better career and social advantage.
Imagine that you increased state education spending to the same level per head as the private schools. Would outcomes improve? For some kids, yes - but for many no. That is because the underlying factors that cause the poor outcomes lie outside the school gates. That is the real problem - society used to value education as a primary route out of poverty. It doesn't any more. You won't get better outcomes unless parents who currently view schools as child-sitting services value and support their kid's education more. That is a lot harder to do than building new shiny schools or attacking private schools.
Yes. If you sort poverty, you will sort education. How can kids be expected to learn if they go to school hungry, and without enough clothes to keep warm? Think if you had to go to work cold and hungry, what would it do to your productivity?
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Rich kids will tend to do well. Supported kids will tend to do well. Poor unsupported kids are stuffed, and may drag down other kids in their classes. That is why people will pay school fees - to try to get their kids to an environment with less disruption, better results and hence more chance of a better career and social advantage.
Imagine that you increased state education spending to the same level per head as the private schools. Would outcomes improve? For some kids, yes - but for many no. That is because the underlying factors that cause the poor outcomes lie outside the school gates. That is the real problem - society used to value education as a primary route out of poverty. It doesn't any more. You won't get better outcomes unless parents who currently view schools as child-sitting services value and support their kid's education more. That is a lot harder to do than building new shiny schools or attacking private schools.
Precisely. I went to one of those schools, learning was discouraged by your peers and if you tried they would disrupt it and showing any aptitude got you a beating. I left school at 16 with 2 grade c o' levels....not because I wasn't bright but it was almost impossible to learn.
I also left home at 16 which also was an evironment that made it impossible to learn. I then had to spend 3 years in 6th form the first filling in my o levels before I could move on. I had to do that while working to pay rent and feed myself so a job.
My chosen field I lasted 2 years in before being banned from labs due to a chemical sensitivity so retrained myself in my own time to write good solid C code.
Despite complaining about my wage stagnating it still leaves me in top 20% of earners. However if I had listened to people like kinablu I would be back in cornwall and been on the dole the last 30 years like many of my peers with a huge chip on my shoulder about how it wasnt my fault I just didnt have the right parents
Surely it would be just cheaper and easier to start with everybody pre 1950 was a racist, sexist, homophobe, and held a range of other views that were the norm at the time but now are seen as offensive.
In parts of eastern Europe and in France case numbers are edging up. Worryingly today in Andalucia after weeks of falling cases we have seen week on week rises. Even now the slow vaccine progress is hampered as AZN is still only offered to under 55s and the rest is focused on the two dose /3 week rollout. All of which means we have around about 3% fully vaccinated and another 4/5% with one dose. Meanwhile down the road in Gibraltar they are almost finished. Easter we will remain closed to the rest of Spain - rightly given the circumstances. However, if figures do edge up again and the rollout does not improve I think there could be trouble ahead. On the positive side we had our first lunch out since Xmas today. It was glorious!
I know that Gibraltar is a postage stamp but all the same they've done quite well; I think the UK Government may have prioritised them for supply above the other overseas territories because it's the only one that isn't an island group.
The latest reported vax rate for Gibraltar is 122.6 per 100 head of population. Assuming that their demographic structure is similar to ours, i.e. 20% are kids, then they complete their program at about 160.
My father in law has some friends in France. He's French, 92, and just gone I to a care home. She's 86 and English but lived in France most of her adult life. Neither of them have had a vaccine and she has been unable to get one at all. Their son and his wife in their mid 50s have both been jabbed.
Clearly the ban on AZ in the over 65s has had a massive impact. They have been vaccinating those massive less at risk. So it will not help much in reducing deaths.
Given now no one in France wants the AZ jab they have a serious self-inflicted problem on their hands.
I can't quite believe the cheek of the EU in stopping vaccine exports and yet demanding the US fulfills exports to them!
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries go back to semi-normal.
Politically, they are trying to sell the idea that it is all down to other people being nasty.
It's panic - they are looking at the rest of 2021 being lockdowns. While some countries the UK go back to semi-normal goes back to normal.
Brexit Britain, waving from across the Channel. It's driving them quite bonkers.
If it's driven then bonkers now - imagine what it will be like in June / July as we host the Euro 21 championship with full stadiums full of vaccinated people happy to be in large crowds.
Careful...we're not out of the woods yet...
But we can dream.
Unlike our friends on the Continent. Best they can hope for is to suppress their nightmares.
From what I can see, various countries are planning to reopen again. That may end in tears.
I posted a link a little further down thread about Belgium, where the Government is planning to get rid of most of the restrictions on May 1st, even though infections are currently running at three times our rate and they're still only trundling along at about the EU average for vaccinations.
Elsewhere in Europe some interesting things are happening as well. Italy is currently trying to battle rising cases and avoid another lockdown by use of a system of variable regional restrictions, consisting of four tiers. I wonder where we've seen that before...?
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
Nope. It's leveling up. Real leveling up as opposed to the bullshit Johnson soundbite variety. If I didn't believe it was I wouldn't argue for it.
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
It seems you have correctly deduced that I am, for the most part, a fan of the status quo. What gave it away?
As for the 'working class people' for whom you are so nobly sticking up from the safety of our erstwhile mutual manor, no one has treated them with greater contempt than the so-called Labour Party, which is probably why so few of them still support it. But I'm sure calling them suckers will have them flocking back to the red team in no time.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
Nope. It's leveling up. Real leveling up as opposed to the bullshit Johnson soundbite variety. If I didn't believe it was I wouldn't argue for it.
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Abolishing private schools wouldn't abolish elite schools which is the point you always fail to realise.
The very rich will send their kids to elite schools abroad. The fairly rich will buy up housing around good schools and squeeze the poor out then make donations to the school to fund things. They would also set up groups where they band together and hire private tutors outside of school time so their kids could still mix.
All you will in effect do is create elite comprehensives where only the well off can afford to live. Currently we have good grammars and comprehensives where they still have a percentage of the poor in the catchement. You would reduce that percentage to zero and condemn all poor kids to failing state schools.
The problem with your ideology and the solutions you propose as always is it fails to account for human nature and those wealthy enough to send their kids to private schools will always get round what you claim and inequality will be even more entrenched.
You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and also making absurdist projections about what would happen with housing moves. I mean, c'mon. Get a grip. The basic model I favour is all kids go to their local school, and this is accompanied by heavy differential investment in the less advantaged areas. No way does that condemn all poor kids to crap schools. Quite the opposite. Does it solve everything? Course not. Will some schools always be better than others due to a whole range of factors (including catchment areas). Yep. But will it make a serious dent in the correlation between life prospects and family background? Yes, it will. It's blindingly obvious that it will.
I totally accept that others don't share my values on this. That's fine. It doesn't make me a better person or anything. But that there IS a trade-off here between the right of folk to spend their money as they see fit and equal opportunities in education (and thus in wider society), this is simply not a matter of debate. It's a stone cold fact. It's all about what you consider most important. You can't just dodge the whole issue with platitudes and nitpicking.
No I am not letting perfect be the enemy of good. I genuinely believe your proposals will lead to even less life chances for people like me. Rich people will make sure there kids goto schools with the same sort of people and they will makes sure those schools have lots of funding regardless of whether its a state school or not. It already happens with those that cant quite afford private schools and to claim it won't happen if blind ideology with no more reference to reality than a unicorn
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
Is this the same Williamglenn who was such a fine advocate for remaining in the EU? I ask seriously because his politics seem to have done an about turn and I'm not particularly referring to this post.
He woke up and smelled the coffee - it was not nice.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
It’s an increase. It may be a real terms decrease (I don’t know) but that not what the tweet says
I'm also quite convinced that no-one gives a shit about the "wasted" money on PPE acquisition. Basic issue is that we pursued all routes to ensure we didn't have a PPE shortage. We didn't, because we took a portfolio approach that got us through. Some were brilliant, some didn't deliver as they should. Overall, we got by. Massive "Phew!!".
That portfolio approach is the same one that has got us the vaccine delivery. If none of the vaccines had worked, would you have raised a stink about wasted money, Labour? If some had worked, some not - we would have got by and the idea would still have been the right thing to do. That it looks like nearly all will have come in is a brilliant result - it does not invalidate the portfolio approach.
Unless Labour are going to bitch we bought too many vaccines?
I've mentioned I've spoken to the people who do the focus groups and polling.
It is something that has been brought up persistently by the voters.
They don't mind it was wasted because there was a pandemic on, what seems to annoy the voters that it appears the contracts were awarded to people and companies not experienced in PPE but who also had links and donations to the Tory party.
As the focus groups and voters have told the pollsters they think one of the reasons why the vaccines have been a success is that the money went to experienced companies and organisations who had no links to the Tory party.
Ah so that is why the polls are giving such huuugggeee Labour leads. Oh....
It’s an increase. It may be a real terms decrease (I don’t know) but that not what the tweet says
I'm also quite convinced that no-one gives a shit about the "wasted" money on PPE acquisition. Basic issue is that we pursued all routes to ensure we didn't have a PPE shortage. We didn't, because we took a portfolio approach that got us through. Some were brilliant, some didn't deliver as they should. Overall, we got by. Massive "Phew!!".
That portfolio approach is the same one that has got us the vaccine delivery. If none of the vaccines had worked, would you have raised a stink about wasted money, Labour? If some had worked, some not - we would have got by and the idea would still have been the right thing to do. That it looks like nearly all will have come in is a brilliant result - it does not invalidate the portfolio approach.
Unless Labour are going to bitch we bought too many vaccines?
I've mentioned I've spoken to the people who do the focus groups and polling.
It is something that has been brought up persistently by the voters.
They don't mind it was wasted because there was a pandemic on, what seems to annoy the voters that it appears the contracts were awarded to people and companies not experienced in PPE but who also had links and donations to the Tory party.
As the focus groups and voters have told the pollsters they think one of the reasons why the vaccines have been a success is that the money went to experienced companies and organisations who had no links to the Tory party.
Ah so that is why the polls are giving such huuugggeee Labour leads. Oh....
It's almost as if the public doesn't really give much of a toss about that issue at all...
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,
The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
It’s an increase. It may be a real terms decrease (I don’t know) but that not what the tweet says
I'm also quite convinced that no-one gives a shit about the "wasted" money on PPE acquisition. Basic issue is that we pursued all routes to ensure we didn't have a PPE shortage. We didn't, because we took a portfolio approach that got us through. Some were brilliant, some didn't deliver as they should. Overall, we got by. Massive "Phew!!".
That portfolio approach is the same one that has got us the vaccine delivery. If none of the vaccines had worked, would you have raised a stink about wasted money, Labour? If some had worked, some not - we would have got by and the idea would still have been the right thing to do. That it looks like nearly all will have come in is a brilliant result - it does not invalidate the portfolio approach.
Unless Labour are going to bitch we bought too many vaccines?
I've mentioned I've spoken to the people who do the focus groups and polling.
It is something that has been brought up persistently by the voters.
They don't mind it was wasted because there was a pandemic on, what seems to annoy the voters that it appears the contracts were awarded to people and companies not experienced in PPE but who also had links and donations to the Tory party.
As the focus groups and voters have told the pollsters they think one of the reasons why the vaccines have been a success is that the money went to experienced companies and organisations who had no links to the Tory party.
Ah so that is why the polls are giving such huuugggeee Labour leads. Oh....
I've said for the last year the polling appears to be driven by pandemic.
In April we saw huge Tory leads as the country rallied around PM and he got a bit of a sympathy vote when he caught the plague.
Then that unwound as deaths increased coupled with PPE and Test, Trace, and Isolate being fiascos, which saw Labour leads, now there's a vaccine bounce.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
I think there is shift happening, this was announced today.
Workplace Covid testing is now available to all businesses in England, the government has announced, including those with fewer than 50 employees.
Businesses of all sizes can register from Saturday to order lateral flow tests for their workers, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said.
Rapid Covid-19 testing provides results in less than 30 minutes, helping people to "isolate immediately", DHSC said.
The tests are free until 30 June, and companies can register until 31 March.
The hope is that asymptomatic cases can be detected quickly, thereby preventing workplace outbreaks.
So far, more than 3,500 businesses have signed up to offer workplace testing programmes, the DHSC said, and more than 14,000 have registered their interest in offering rapid testing.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
Using your hands to walk instead of your feet is also a greater achievement. But that doesn't make it a necessary, sensible, or popular thing to do...
It's an ok analogy because I did simply mean greater achievement as in harder to do.
I think it's because the Thatcher revolution went deep and did something to our wiring. People now believe success comes mainly through hard work and talent rather than birth circumstances. Much in politics flows from this. Indeed imo almost everything flows from this. If you believe it's mainly hard work and talent deciding life outcomes you'll be on the right. If you believe it's mainly birth circumstances, to whom and where you are born, you'll be on the left.
And what's interesting is we get an inversion of the usual 'heart v head' trope when we follow this through. Because the right's view - it's mainly about hard work and talent - is the romantic one. A dreamy idealistic vision even people on the left would love to embrace if they could. Whereas the left's view - birth circumstances dominate - is the hard headed, rational assessment, and far closer to objective reality.
So, for me, if you're not a Tory when you're 21 you have no soul. But if you're still a Tory when you're 51 you have no brain.
Hope for you yet (if I have your age right).
I seem to be doing surprisingly well on both soul and brain so far then.
I also see you've been returning to the well of Toby Senior's monitory tome The Rise of the Meritocracy - he saw what was coming long before the 80s. Thatcher was indeed a right old romantic (who knew?), but obviously Tories know all about the influence of birth circumstances; we just don't consider them to be in need of radical corrective action from the state. I like to think that our vision is appealing precisely because it embraces both meritocracy and privilege, the modern and the antique: certainly many of the proudest moments of my life have been the result of things I earned entirely through my own efforts, but many of the most enjoyable were the result of pure, unmerited privilege, and all the more delightful for it...
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
That indeed is the message of the book, "The rise of the Meritocracy" that such a scheme entrenches social inequality.
Dodgy concept, meritocracy, for me. If society remains very unequal, those at the top increasingly in a different stratosphere, and those at the bottom working all hours to keep afloat, are we "sorted" if it's the "brightest and best", regardless of school and uni and family background, who reach the heights? No. Not imo. It's better than a stultifying network of class privilege but it's hardly something to celebrate and it's certainly not the 'end of history'.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
I was feeling a bit unwell yesterday with a sore throat, etc, and tried to get a test. It wouldn’t let me unless I lied about having one of the “key” COVID symptoms...
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
Is this the same Williamglenn who was such a fine advocate for remaining in the EU? I ask seriously because his politics seem to have done an about turn and I'm not particularly referring to this post.
I have found myself defending William a great deal over the last couple of months and am pleased to do so.
In all the arguments we ever had over Brexit I never saw William claim the EU was in any way near perfect. I can remember at least two occasions when he made explicit criticism of the EU even though he was arguing vehemently for continued UK membership.
Since we have left I have seen plenty of posts from him about how we should have stayed in and some hope and belief we will eventually find our way back. But at the same time he has been very strong in attacking the EU over its current management particularly when it comes to vaccines. This is no different from me being vehemently in favour of Brexit but attacking the Government over a whole host of policy areas at the same time.
I think Johnson is a terrible PM but support Brexit, William thinks UvdL is a terrible President but supports the EU as an institution. There is no contradiction in either of our positions.
To be fair it is a bit more than that. I think there's a risk that the EU will continue to respond to Brexit in a way that validates the case for it. The EU has never been in a position before where there was a geopolitically significant modern democratic state in Europe that questioned the necessity of its legal order, and it could end up delegitimising itself by trying to pretend the UK is no longer part of Europe.
It’s an increase. It may be a real terms decrease (I don’t know) but that not what the tweet says
I'm also quite convinced that no-one gives a shit about the "wasted" money on PPE acquisition. Basic issue is that we pursued all routes to ensure we didn't have a PPE shortage. We didn't, because we took a portfolio approach that got us through. Some were brilliant, some didn't deliver as they should. Overall, we got by. Massive "Phew!!".
That portfolio approach is the same one that has got us the vaccine delivery. If none of the vaccines had worked, would you have raised a stink about wasted money, Labour? If some had worked, some not - we would have got by and the idea would still have been the right thing to do. That it looks like nearly all will have come in is a brilliant result - it does not invalidate the portfolio approach.
Unless Labour are going to bitch we bought too many vaccines?
Intderestding perspective, but it doesn't always work. It rang a bell and yes the incumbent parties were really attacked for taking a similar approach to swine flu a decade ago, buying too many vaccines etc., by the Conservatives, as it happens.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Rich kids will tend to do well. Supported kids will tend to do well. Poor unsupported kids are stuffed, and may drag down other kids in their classes. That is why people will pay school fees - to try to get their kids to an environment with less disruption, better results and hence more chance of a better career and social advantage.
Imagine that you increased state education spending to the same level per head as the private schools. Would outcomes improve? For some kids, yes - but for many no. That is because the underlying factors that cause the poor outcomes lie outside the school gates. That is the real problem - society used to value education as a primary route out of poverty. It doesn't any more. You won't get better outcomes unless parents who currently view schools as child-sitting services value and support their kid's education more. That is a lot harder to do than building new shiny schools or attacking private schools.
Yes. If you sort poverty, you will sort education. How can kids be expected to learn if they go to school hungry, and without enough clothes to keep warm? Think if you had to go to work cold and hungry, what would it do to your productivity?
You are largely right in that poverty saps the ability of families to manage their lives and support themselves. However previous generations, who experienced higher levels of absolute poverty than our society today, made education a higher priority than we do. We should meet in the middle - there should be hot food in the morning for kids who qualify, with support bursaries for kids with good attendance, effort and discipline records.
Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Isn't asymptomatic transmission a problem? IIRC up to a third may be - and remain - asymptomatic, its only when they spread it to fatty oldies that problems start. In the recent Guernsey outbreak the largest cohort were boys age 5-10 - largely identified through screening.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?
That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
It does for children who can benefit from them. And for other children, what's the point?
I think the real objection to this is not that it's small, it's that it might cream the best talent from the state sector, so that the brightest children don't serve as role models to their less gifted peers.
It’s an increase. It may be a real terms decrease (I don’t know) but that not what the tweet says
I'm also quite convinced that no-one gives a shit about the "wasted" money on PPE acquisition. Basic issue is that we pursued all routes to ensure we didn't have a PPE shortage. We didn't, because we took a portfolio approach that got us through. Some were brilliant, some didn't deliver as they should. Overall, we got by. Massive "Phew!!".
That portfolio approach is the same one that has got us the vaccine delivery. If none of the vaccines had worked, would you have raised a stink about wasted money, Labour? If some had worked, some not - we would have got by and the idea would still have been the right thing to do. That it looks like nearly all will have come in is a brilliant result - it does not invalidate the portfolio approach.
Unless Labour are going to bitch we bought too many vaccines?
I've mentioned I've spoken to the people who do the focus groups and polling.
It is something that has been brought up persistently by the voters.
They don't mind it was wasted because there was a pandemic on, what seems to annoy the voters that it appears the contracts were awarded to people and companies not experienced in PPE but who also had links and donations to the Tory party.
As the focus groups and voters have told the pollsters they think one of the reasons why the vaccines have been a success is that the money went to experienced companies and organisations who had no links to the Tory party.
That makes logical sense. You just wonder why Labour haven't found a way to draw this to voters attention at every opportunity. They won't win elections using the Trappist monk approach.
It’s an increase. It may be a real terms decrease (I don’t know) but that not what the tweet says
I'm also quite convinced that no-one gives a shit about the "wasted" money on PPE acquisition. Basic issue is that we pursued all routes to ensure we didn't have a PPE shortage. We didn't, because we took a portfolio approach that got us through. Some were brilliant, some didn't deliver as they should. Overall, we got by. Massive "Phew!!".
That portfolio approach is the same one that has got us the vaccine delivery. If none of the vaccines had worked, would you have raised a stink about wasted money, Labour? If some had worked, some not - we would have got by and the idea would still have been the right thing to do. That it looks like nearly all will have come in is a brilliant result - it does not invalidate the portfolio approach.
Unless Labour are going to bitch we bought too many vaccines?
I've mentioned I've spoken to the people who do the focus groups and polling.
It is something that has been brought up persistently by the voters.
They don't mind it was wasted because there was a pandemic on, what seems to annoy the voters that it appears the contracts were awarded to people and companies not experienced in PPE but who also had links and donations to the Tory party.
As the focus groups and voters have told the pollsters they think one of the reasons why the vaccines have been a success is that the money went to experienced companies and organisations who had no links to the Tory party.
Ah so that is why the polls are giving such huuugggeee Labour leads. Oh....
I've said for the last year the polling appears to be driven by pandemic.
In April we saw huge Tory leads as the country rallied around PM and he got a bit of a sympathy vote when he caught the plague.
Then that unwound as deaths increased coupled with PPE and Test, Trace, and Isolate being fiascos, which saw Labour leads, now there's a vaccine bounce.
Better to be seen to be getting it right at the end of the pandemic, rather than at the start....
Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Isn't asymptomatic transmission a problem? IIRC up to a third may be - and remain - asymptomatic, its only when they spread it to fatty oldies that problems start. In the recent Guernsey outbreak the largest cohort were boys age 5-10 - largely identified through screening.
In a world where the only immunity is from past infection, yes it's a problem. In a world where 13m mostly older people have reached a very high degree of immunity from symptoms it's not, and in a world where all adults have almost full immunity from symptoms whether someone gets it asymptomatically and spreads it to other people asymptomatically is irrelevant. I'm suggesting the government begin to plan for that day because we're going to get there in about 5-6 weeks.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Not yet.
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Not yet.
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
Steady as she goes.
Yes, I did say it's probably time to think about it, not actually do it. I'd suggest in 5-6 weeks if we're still ploughing £1bn per week into testing it is probably £1bn per week wasted that could have paid for frontline NHS staff to get a proper pay rise.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Not yet.
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
Steady as she goes.
Point of order: universities are not reopening. It’s only “essential” learning that is being done in person and that was by and large already happening.
I believe it’s only after Easter that all learning can return to “in person” and my university is not going to insist on students returning in any case.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
I think there is shift happening, this was announced today.
Workplace Covid testing is now available to all businesses in England, the government has announced, including those with fewer than 50 employees.
Businesses of all sizes can register from Saturday to order lateral flow tests for their workers, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said.
Rapid Covid-19 testing provides results in less than 30 minutes, helping people to "isolate immediately", DHSC said.
The tests are free until 30 June, and companies can register until 31 March.
The hope is that asymptomatic cases can be detected quickly, thereby preventing workplace outbreaks.
So far, more than 3,500 businesses have signed up to offer workplace testing programmes, the DHSC said, and more than 14,000 have registered their interest in offering rapid testing.
Looking at the updated vaccinations data for Newham.
There are 28,408 people over 65 in the Borough of which 20,162 have had a first vaccination which is about 71%.
Among those aged 16-64, we have 318,647 of which 35,448 have received a first vaccination which is just over 11%.
Overall, that's 55,610 out of 347,055 which is 16% so an advance on 14% last week and better than Tower Hamlets but I suspect that's not saying much.
I can't confirm if the 8,000 or so over-65s in Newham who haven't been vaccinated have been contacted -if so, that's a refusal rate of near 30% which is worrying.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Lets be honest about it.
We don't.
We don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, education or lifetime learning and training in general.
That's so much better. You are baulking at the linguistic and logical contortions required to argue with a straight face that our private schools fetish is in any sense compatible with equal opportunities in education. This saves much time and dignity. Hats off, Riccardo.
You can't have equality of opportunity in education, not because of money but because of parents. My son went to a grammar. The only two of his year to do so. The reason he passed his 11 plus when so many others didn't was because he got encouraged to read and learn by both myself and his mother. Most of his friends parents couldn't see the point, they didn't encourage their kids to do either. I met those parents so I know what I am talking about. They all took the view working hard doesn't matter because we are poor so will never be allowed to get on. Your point of view in fact. Strangely the only other one of his year that passed was his best friend who used to come round our house most days and got equally encouraged by us.
Yours is the ideology of "Its not my fault its the systems so there is no point bothering". Yes you can work hard and not make it I do not deny that but on the other hand if you don't even try you are going to fail. This is why I hate your ideology so much....you encourage the "There is no point even trying" attitude
Good point (about the impact of parents) but you again misunderstand me. I know that equal opportunities is impossible. For the reasons you say, and many many others. We're talking about how they can be improved. Just because something worthwhile is impossible to achieve fully doesn't mean it shouldn't be achieved partially, does it?
And I can't for the life of me see how you've managed to glean from anything I've written on this topic that I wish to discourage kids from trying to do well in school. That is a nonsense thing to say. It's like you're just thrashing around in some inchoate dislike of "the left". I don't know where you've got that from but kindly stop projecting it onto me.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
Is this the same Williamglenn who was such a fine advocate for remaining in the EU? I ask seriously because his politics seem to have done an about turn and I'm not particularly referring to this post.
I have found myself defending William a great deal over the last couple of months and am pleased to do so.
In all the arguments we ever had over Brexit I never saw William claim the EU was in any way near perfect. I can remember at least two occasions when he made explicit criticism of the EU even though he was arguing vehemently for continued UK membership.
Since we have left I have seen plenty of posts from him about how we should have stayed in and some hope and belief we will eventually find our way back. But at the same time he has been very strong in attacking the EU over its current management particularly when it comes to vaccines. This is no different from me being vehemently in favour of Brexit but attacking the Government over a whole host of policy areas at the same time.
I think Johnson is a terrible PM but support Brexit, William thinks UvdL is a terrible President but supports the EU as an institution. There is no contradiction in either of our positions.
To be fair it is a bit more than that. I think there's a risk that the EU will continue to respond to Brexit in a way that validates the case for it. The EU has never been in a position before where there was a geopolitically significant modern democratic state in Europe that questioned the necessity of its legal order, and it could end up delegitimising itself by trying to pretend the UK is no longer part of Europe.
The EU is far more likely to survive if it works constructively with the UK to stabilise geopolitics across the wider European region, and stay in creative symbiosis with each other. Boris Johnson was onto something when he said that the UK could act as a flying buttress to the EU's cathedral, although it didn't translate very well.
The only question is how long it takes them to realise this.
It’s an increase. It may be a real terms decrease (I don’t know) but that not what the tweet says
I'm also quite convinced that no-one gives a shit about the "wasted" money on PPE acquisition. Basic issue is that we pursued all routes to ensure we didn't have a PPE shortage. We didn't, because we took a portfolio approach that got us through. Some were brilliant, some didn't deliver as they should. Overall, we got by. Massive "Phew!!".
That portfolio approach is the same one that has got us the vaccine delivery. If none of the vaccines had worked, would you have raised a stink about wasted money, Labour? If some had worked, some not - we would have got by and the idea would still have been the right thing to do. That it looks like nearly all will have come in is a brilliant result - it does not invalidate the portfolio approach.
Unless Labour are going to bitch we bought too many vaccines?
However there should be some people heading for a holiday at Her Majesty's Pleasure, there were some rum deals handed out to chums and families of top Tories. No excuse for that.
Good news from Eric? Hope he’s feeling okay. Seriously though his followers are amongst the most doomster of doomsters and fingers crossed this will cause come people where it is authorised to take AZ.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Not yet.
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
Steady as she goes.
Point of order: universities are not reopening. It’s only “essential” learning that is being done in person and that was by and large already happening.
I believe it’s only after Easter that all learning can return to “in person” and my university is not going to insist on students returning in any case.
That's why I said March and April.
Young people seem to be a large spreading vector, even if largely unaffected themselves, and I think the virological dynamic of that on the wider population needs to be fully understood before we scale down testing.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
I think there is shift happening, this was announced today.
Workplace Covid testing is now available to all businesses in England, the government has announced, including those with fewer than 50 employees.
Businesses of all sizes can register from Saturday to order lateral flow tests for their workers, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said.
Rapid Covid-19 testing provides results in less than 30 minutes, helping people to "isolate immediately", DHSC said.
The tests are free until 30 June, and companies can register until 31 March.
The hope is that asymptomatic cases can be detected quickly, thereby preventing workplace outbreaks.
So far, more than 3,500 businesses have signed up to offer workplace testing programmes, the DHSC said, and more than 14,000 have registered their interest in offering rapid testing.
Yep, we've been given notice that we're soon going to start being given lateral flow tests to take home and run twice a week, if I recall the details of the proposal correctly (I work in industry and have been going back and forth to work as normal all the way through the pandemic.) Expectation is to get a PCR if you flag positive, which in my case would mean hoping I can get one through the post as I don't drive.
However - the advice we've been given suggests that you shouldn't have a lateral flow test within three months of having had Covid, because it will yield a false positive result. I don't know how many people who've had Covid asymptomatically are going to be caught out by the lateral flow devices and may end up being told to isolate over and over again as a result, or what provision is going to be made to deal with this issue, but I guess that'll all come out in the wash.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Lets be honest about it.
We don't.
We don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, education or lifetime learning and training in general.
That's so much better. You are baulking at the linguistic and logical contortions required to argue with a straight face that our private schools fetish is in any sense compatible with equal opportunities in education. This saves much time and dignity. Hats off, Riccardo.
You can't have equality of opportunity in education, not because of money but because of parents. My son went to a grammar. The only two of his year to do so. The reason he passed his 11 plus when so many others didn't was because he got encouraged to read and learn by both myself and his mother. Most of his friends parents couldn't see the point, they didn't encourage their kids to do either. I met those parents so I know what I am talking about. They all took the view working hard doesn't matter because we are poor so will never be allowed to get on. Your point of view in fact. Strangely the only other one of his year that passed was his best friend who used to come round our house most days and got equally encouraged by us.
Yours is the ideology of "Its not my fault its the systems so there is no point bothering". Yes you can work hard and not make it I do not deny that but on the other hand if you don't even try you are going to fail. This is why I hate your ideology so much....you encourage the "There is no point even trying" attitude
Good point (about the impact of parents) but you again misunderstand me. I'll be getting the idea it's deliberate if it carries on. I know (!) that equal opportunities is impossible. For the reasons you say, and many many others. We're talking about how they can be improved. Just because something worthwhile is impossible to achieve fully doesn't mean it shouldn't be achieved partially, does it?
And I can't for the life of me see how you've managed to glean from anything I've written on this topic that I wish to discourage kids from trying to do well in school. That is just a nonsense thing to say. It's like you're just thrashing around in some inchoate dislike of "the left". I don't know where you've got that from but kindly stop projecting it onto me.
Its not I think you want to discourage kids. What I am saying is your attitude does discourage kids, may not be your intent but its true.
The left has always been this way "Doesn't matter if you work hard you won't get anywhere because of class, inherited wealth etc" . Then you wonder why so many take that to heart and just give up. Then later in life they are "It's not my fault I didn't do better the odds were stacked against me".
Sorry if you don't see constantly telling people that they have no chance discourages them then you know very little about human nature
If Keir Starmer can't beat the Tories in the country, he can reform the Labour Party. That will be a success if it leads Labour back to victory in the long run.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.
There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -
Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.
BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.
And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.
That is a powerful argument.
But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.
It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
Do you believe abolishing private schools would be sufficient to erase the advantages that you perceive they confer?
No. There are lots of other things in play - some of which can be addressed and some of which can't and in any case shouldn't. "Erasure" of birth advantage is neither possible nor desirable. It's the old strawman again. Let's leave that in the realms of dystopian fiction. The actual (and imo realistic) goal is a significant reduction in the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. A society that is considerably more egalitarian than the one we have today. Leveling the school playing field will contribute to this.
You clearly believe that elite education 'works', so if your objective is to reduce the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, why not convert private schools into grammar schools?
A return to the grammar school / secondary modern dichotomy wouldn't achieve what I'm talking about. It was scrapped for a reason. It failed the majority of children. Much better imo is a more egalitarian model. Kids go to their local school. And really invest in those schools, including heavily and differentially in disadvantaged areas. Make leveling up more than a vacuous soundbite. Will it solve everything? No. Will there still be significant birth advantage? Yes. Like I say, we're not tilting at windmills. But if we are serious about equal opportunities in education - wish to truly prioritize that - this is what we should do. Everything else is just faffing around as I see it. And if we don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, that's fine too. But let's be honest about it.
Lets be honest about it.
We don't.
We don't want to prioritize equal opportunities in education, education or lifetime learning and training in general.
That's so much better. You are baulking at the linguistic and logical contortions required to argue with a straight face that our private schools fetish is in any sense compatible with equal opportunities in education. This saves much time and dignity. Hats off, Riccardo.
By 'we' I mean the country as a whole.
If I'm being cynical I'll suggest that people will chose a better holiday over better education or being less cynical I'll suggest that the law of diminish returns means that most people aren't interested in education as long as it reaches an 'acceptable' level.
And if people aren't interested in education in general why are they going to be interested in equal opportunities in education ?
Yes, I know you meant we in that sense.
I'd offer Social Care as a similar example. "We" don't really want to solve that either, for all the crocodile tears.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Not yet.
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
Steady as she goes.
Yes, I did say it's probably time to think about it, not actually do it. I'd suggest in 5-6 weeks if we're still ploughing £1bn per week into testing it is probably £1bn per week wasted that could have paid for frontline NHS staff to get a proper pay rise.
That's fair enough.
I do wonder at what point the NHS bankrupts the nation. The staff probably need a 2-3% paylift each year (and I bet staffing costs are 65-80% of the budget) and then you have people living longer each year, more conditions becoming treatable and requiring treatment, and drugs becoming more expensive, plus the wider infrastructure of estates and machinery and IT needing upgrading.
It's very easy to see why it needs 4-5% extra each and every year just to stand still.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Not yet.
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
Steady as she goes.
Point of order: universities are not reopening. It’s only “essential” learning that is being done in person and that was by and large already happening.
I believe it’s only after Easter that all learning can return to “in person” and my university is not going to insist on students returning in any case.
That's why I said March and April.
Young people seem to be a large spreading vector, even if largely unaffected themselves, and I think the virological dynamic of that on the wider population needs to be fully understood before we scale down testing.
Understood.
However it is my experience that many students have returned to their student houses during lockdown (despite it not being allowed) so we’ll be experiencing some of that inter-country mixing already, which is actually good news as it won’t be as bigger sudden bang of people moving across the country.
On my reasoning for ramping down testing - in 6 weeks ca. 33m adults (groups 1-10) will have reached a very high level of immunity from hospitalisation and of those 10m from groups 1-4 will have reached full immunity after receiving their booster doses. A very large proportion of groups 11 and 12 (30-39 and 18-29 year olds) already have some partial immunity from prior infection and we know that even in cases of reinfection the chances of severe symptoms are exceedingly low. We're talking about a scenario in 6 weeks where maybe 10-15m adults under the age of 40 won't have any kind of immunity but will be a few weeks away from either reaching immunity or getting their first dose.
It seems to me that spending £1bn per week on testing for a basically non-existent virus by then will be a huge waste of money that could either not be added to the national debt or spent on clearing the backlog of NHS patients and giving the frontline staff a proper pay rise.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
Nope. It's leveling up. Real leveling up as opposed to the bullshit Johnson soundbite variety. If I didn't believe it was I wouldn't argue for it.
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
The last sentence sums up Labours approach to the working class
Yep - a reluctance to play them for suckers even though it costs votes.
Haven't read that but it sounds interesting. I imagine it's better than anything his son has produced. But I'm more an egalitarian than a meritocrat. Things ending in "crat" are usually a bit sinister and this is no exception.
That's a misleading and jaundiced way of putting it - the state taking radical corrective action to birth circumstances. It creates images of spiriting wailing newborns off to government suckling camps. Setting up the extremist strawman to knock down. I'm not going there.
What we're talking about is reducing (not eliminating) the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects. Promoting a society with a lot less privilege of class, race and gender.
People keep asking "What are Labour for?" - Ok, so there's my answer. I haven't seen anything more convincing from anybody else.
This sounds similar to Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful.
You have lost me there, William. That sounds like a comment from somebody not comprehending the first thing about what we're discussing.
"Reducing the correlation between birth circumstances and life prospects, and promoting a society with less privilege of class, race and gender."
"Ursula von der Leyen's defence of the EU's vaccine programme on the grounds that it would have been awful if some countries had been successful."
How are these sentiments even remotely similar?
Because, like UvdL, your ideology predisposes you to prefer an outcome in which all fail equally, as long as you can avoid the intolerable prospect of some succeeding unequally.
Nope. It's leveling up. Real leveling up as opposed to the bullshit Johnson soundbite variety. If I didn't believe it was I wouldn't argue for it.
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
The last sentence sums up Labours approach to the working class
Yep - a reluctance to play them for suckers even though it costs votes.
Bollocks the left have been the bootheel on the neck of the working class for decades. See my explanation of why its your attitude that keeps poor kids down.
The left need an underclass to harvest votes from, shame you mislaid them now they wised up
Average daily death rate over the past week down to 220. Day rates for the next two days could be down to double figures.
Patient admissions down to 811 last Monday.
We just have to pray that schools opening up on Monday don't bugger up that speed of travel.
I will relax when daily fatality rates get into double figures. Hopefully by month end.
However I try and rationalise it hundreds dying a day still seems serious to me.
The Government is now on the record as saying it wants to get Covid to a place where it is as serious as flu. On average flu kills about 10,000 people a year, mostly in winter obviously, but averaged out across the year that’s 27 people per day, crudely let’s say 50 per day September to March. Still a ways to go to be round that level but we are getting there.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Not yet.
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
Steady as she goes.
Yes, I did say it's probably time to think about it, not actually do it. I'd suggest in 5-6 weeks if we're still ploughing £1bn per week into testing it is probably £1bn per week wasted that could have paid for frontline NHS staff to get a proper pay rise.
That's fair enough.
I do wonder at what point the NHS bankrupts the nation. The staff probably need a 2-3% paylift each year (and I bet staffing costs are 65-80% of the budget) and then you have people living longer each year, more conditions becoming treatable and requiring treatment, and drugs becoming more expensive, plus the wider infrastructure of estates and machinery and IT needing upgrading.
It's very easy to see why it needs 4-5% extra each and every year just to stand still.
At some point that dog is going to bark.
Yes, it is definitely something that needs to be addressed. I think NI on pension income is probably a good way out of it, especially consider that it is older people who are much more likely to need NHS services. I don't think Rishi has the cojones though. Maybe after 2024 with some tricky wording in the manifesto similar to how the fiscal drag approach doesn't break the pledge not to raise the "rates" of income tax, NI or VAT.
One of the interesting things about AZ and J&J is that they are both moderately effective at first... But that effectiveness builds and builds and builds.
It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.
The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.
But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.
Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.
TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.
Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people
Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.
A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.
The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
One of your problems is that this part of the tax system was mucked up by a characteristic Gordon Brown stealth kludge, and anyone earning between 100k and about 125k has a marginal tax rate in that zone of 65%.
If you load that even more they will just work less, or trade for holidays etc.
Well my preferred Labour position would most definitely include a wealth tax. We have an aging population but have to find a way to raise the funds needed for good public services. I can't see how we do it without taxing wealth (of which there is lots). The details are no doubt tricky but are equally no doubt solvable. But I accept the politics is difficult, people instinctively recoil, "I've worked hard all me life bla bla" and vote against. It's a bit like taxing for Social Care or dropping the triple lock. Will only be done when both parties agree a consensus on it. Otherwise the one who flunks it and says the facile stuff the public want to hear clean up at the polls. May's "dementia tax" was an example of how facing up honestly to things costs at the ballot box.
impressed with the speed and slickness of the vaccine process at my local GP. Really getting through the numbers by looks of things. At least five people doing the vaccinating plus a load of marshals and admin support.
It is humbling frankly to see the NHS in action at this time.
One of the interesting things about AZ and J&J is that they are both moderately effective at first... But that effectiveness builds and builds and builds.
The people in the UK who made the call about prioritising a single dose and deferring the second dose to 12 weeks knew what the hell they were doing — because they were applying their scientific knowledge about how vaccines work — and the people who criticised not following the trial procedures were on the whole doing nothing more than covering their arses. Oxford, AZ, the JCVI, and UK government have been completely vindicated.
I think we've reached the bottom in terms of cases now, with ~1m tests per day even the false positive rate (especially LFTs) will account for a fair number of those positive results. Honestly, I know it sounds complacent but it's probably starting to become time to think about ramping down this extremely expensive testing programme to ca. 250k per day and then down to 100k per day a few months after the reopening with the ability to scale up quickly. Right now we're simply throwing money away testing people who have no symptoms and have no need to be tested.
Not yet.
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
Steady as she goes.
Yes, I did say it's probably time to think about it, not actually do it. I'd suggest in 5-6 weeks if we're still ploughing £1bn per week into testing it is probably £1bn per week wasted that could have paid for frontline NHS staff to get a proper pay rise.
That's fair enough.
I do wonder at what point the NHS bankrupts the nation. The staff probably need a 2-3% paylift each year (and I bet staffing costs are 65-80% of the budget) and then you have people living longer each year, more conditions becoming treatable and requiring treatment, and drugs becoming more expensive, plus the wider infrastructure of estates and machinery and IT needing upgrading.
It's very easy to see why it needs 4-5% extra each and every year just to stand still.
At some point that dog is going to bark.
Hard to tell, but paying for it is going to require some hard measures. Probably means that today's twentysomethings aren't going to be drawing the state pension until they're 75, and more is going to have to be done about obesity. If that juggernaut can't be turned around by any other means then massive sin taxes on high energy density foods are going to have to be considered before too much longer.
And yes, that would be nannying, but one of the consequences of having healthcare provided by the taxpayer is that taxpayers will then feel the right to criticise other peoples' crap life choices. We've all be expected to sit and rot at home for the better part of a year to protect the NHS and save lives, which kind of puts a bit of encouragement to do more exercise and eat less rubbish into perspective.
When you think about it, it's pretty unsurprising. One the infectivity and transmission front, if flu was analogous to the bully in secondary school, covid is analogous to Mike Tyson. We've tooled up to face Iron Mike and beaten him back. That school bully, faced with the same flurry of blows, would have been utterly mullered without us even noticing him.
I took a look at the flu surveillance data and there were still a very small handful of influenza admissions to hospital (checked via sampling), but it looks like the number was too small to result in any measurable deaths.
Comments
That portfolio approach is the same one that has got us the vaccine delivery. If none of the vaccines had worked, would you have raised a stink about wasted money, Labour? If some had worked, some not - we would have got by and the idea would still have been the right thing to do. That it looks like nearly all will have come in is a brilliant result - it does not invalidate the portfolio approach.
Unless Labour are going to bitch we bought too many vaccines?
If you are earning minimum wage working 17 hours a week you earn £593 a month. If you have to find your own accommodation your allowance is £512.
That means the reduction in UC you will receive is 63% of £81 or £51 in the month.
UC for a single person over 25 is £409 a month. That means if they work 17 hours a week and earn £593 a month then their UC drops to £358 a month.
That is a total income of £951 a month. They pay no tax on that as they are under the £12,500 limit and they pay no NI as they earn less than £183 a week.
By the way I am not in any way defending these levels of support. Living on such low incomes is definitely living on the edge. But your claim about losing 90% when you work more than 16 hours a week is simply untrue.
Yours is the ideology of "Its not my fault its the systems so there is no point bothering". Yes you can work hard and not make it I do not deny that but on the other hand if you don't even try you are going to fail. This is why I hate your ideology so much....you encourage the "There is no point even trying" attitude
And given you're (wrongly) telling me what I think, I'll return the favour and smear you.
You, and most other true bluers, know full well a truly egalitarian education system would level up in a meaningful and radical way and this is precisely why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
You want to perpetuate our crassly unequal society just exactly as is. You like it this way. The only use you have for working class people is to play them for suckers.
If I'm being cynical I'll suggest that people will chose a better holiday over better education or being less cynical I'll suggest that the law of diminish returns means that most people aren't interested in education as long as it reaches an 'acceptable' level.
And if people aren't interested in education in general why are they going to be interested in equal opportunities in education ?
In all the arguments we ever had over Brexit I never saw William claim the EU was in any way near perfect. I can remember at least two occasions when he made explicit criticism of the EU even though he was arguing vehemently for continued UK membership.
Since we have left I have seen plenty of posts from him about how we should have stayed in and some hope and belief we will eventually find our way back. But at the same time he has been very strong in attacking the EU over its current management particularly when it comes to vaccines. This is no different from me being vehemently in favour of Brexit but attacking the Government over a whole host of policy areas at the same time.
I think Johnson is a terrible PM but support Brexit, William thinks UvdL is a terrible President but supports the EU as an institution. There is no contradiction in either of our positions.
One of your problems is that this part of the tax system was mucked up by a characteristic Gordon Brown stealth kludge, and anyone earning between 100k and about 125k has a marginal tax rate in that zone of 65%.
If you load that even more they will just work less, or trade for holidays etc.
Imagine that you increased state education spending to the same level per head as the private schools. Would outcomes improve? For some kids, yes - but for many no. That is because the underlying factors that cause the poor outcomes lie outside the school gates. That is the real problem - society used to value education as a primary route out of poverty. It doesn't any more. You won't get better outcomes unless parents who currently view schools as child-sitting services value and support their kid's education more. That is a lot harder to do than building new shiny schools or attacking private schools.
I totally accept that others don't share my values on this. That's fine. It doesn't make me a better person or anything. But that there IS a trade-off here between the right of folk to spend their money as they see fit and equal opportunities in education (and thus in wider society), this is simply not a matter of debate. It's a stone cold fact. It's all about what you consider most important. You can't just dodge the whole issue with platitudes and nitpicking.
Last year I seriously thought about going down to a 4 day week as this stupid tax situation means it had its attractions - Why knacker myself if the government wants to take well over 50% of that portion of my earnings
It is something that has been brought up persistently by the voters.
They don't mind it was wasted because there was a pandemic on, what seems to annoy the voters that it appears the contracts were awarded to people and companies not experienced in PPE but who also had links and donations to the Tory party.
As the focus groups and voters have told the pollsters they think one of the reasons why the vaccines have been a success is that the money went to experienced companies and organisations who had no links to the Tory party.
I also left home at 16 which also was an evironment that made it impossible to learn. I then had to spend 3 years in 6th form the first filling in my o levels before I could move on. I had to do that while working to pay rent and feed myself so a job.
My chosen field I lasted 2 years in before being banned from labs due to a chemical sensitivity so retrained myself in my own time to write good solid C code.
Despite complaining about my wage stagnating it still leaves me in top 20% of earners. However if I had listened to people like kinablu I would be back in cornwall and been on the dole the last 30 years like many of my peers with a huge chip on my shoulder about how it wasnt my fault I just didnt have the right parents
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/06/adam-smiths-grave-listed-dossier-slavery-colonialism-sites/
Surely it would be just cheaper and easier to start with everybody pre 1950 was a racist, sexist, homophobe, and held a range of other views that were the norm at the time but now are seen as offensive.
The latest reported vax rate for Gibraltar is 122.6 per 100 head of population. Assuming that their demographic structure is similar to ours, i.e. 20% are kids, then they complete their program at about 160. I posted a link a little further down thread about Belgium, where the Government is planning to get rid of most of the restrictions on May 1st, even though infections are currently running at three times our rate and they're still only trundling along at about the EU average for vaccinations.
Elsewhere in Europe some interesting things are happening as well. Italy is currently trying to battle rising cases and avoid another lockdown by use of a system of variable regional restrictions, consisting of four tiers. I wonder where we've seen that before...?
As for the 'working class people' for whom you are so nobly sticking up from the safety of our erstwhile mutual manor, no one has treated them with greater contempt than the so-called Labour Party, which is probably why so few of them still support it. But I'm sure calling them suckers will have them flocking back to the red team in no time.
https://twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1368178374523387905?s=20
This is today’s:
The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
In April we saw huge Tory leads as the country rallied around PM and he got a bit of a sympathy vote when he caught the plague.
Then that unwound as deaths increased coupled with PPE and Test, Trace, and Isolate being fiascos, which saw Labour leads, now there's a vaccine bounce.
Workplace Covid testing is now available to all businesses in England, the government has announced, including those with fewer than 50 employees.
Businesses of all sizes can register from Saturday to order lateral flow tests for their workers, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said.
Rapid Covid-19 testing provides results in less than 30 minutes, helping people to "isolate immediately", DHSC said.
The tests are free until 30 June, and companies can register until 31 March.
The hope is that asymptomatic cases can be detected quickly, thereby preventing workplace outbreaks.
So far, more than 3,500 businesses have signed up to offer workplace testing programmes, the DHSC said, and more than 14,000 have registered their interest in offering rapid testing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56302489
https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1368232715095584768?s=20
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/167602/Swine-flu-Scandal-of-the-30m-jabs-the-NHS-will-never-use
https://www.scotsman.com/health/scotland-racks-ps55m-swine-flu-bill-2473151 (IIRC it was the Scottish Tories who really moaned, but for the life of me I can't sustantiate this in a hurry and have to finish something, sorry!)
I think the real objection to this is not that it's small, it's that it might cream the best talent from the state sector, so that the brightest children don't serve as role models to their less gifted peers.
Average daily death rate over the past week down to 220. Day rates for the next two days could be down to double figures.
Patient admissions down to 811 last Monday.
We just have to pray that schools opening up on Monday don't bugger up that speed of travel.
https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1367798304428396546
We need to pilot through the March and April reopenings first (particularly reviewing the data from schools and universities) and start getting 1st shots in the bulk of the rest of the population.
Steady as she goes.
However I try and rationalise it hundreds dying a day still seems serious to me.
I believe it’s only after Easter that all learning can return to “in person” and my university is not going to insist on students returning in any case.
There are 28,408 people over 65 in the Borough of which 20,162 have had a first vaccination which is about 71%.
Among those aged 16-64, we have 318,647 of which 35,448 have received a first vaccination which is just over 11%.
Overall, that's 55,610 out of 347,055 which is 16% so an advance on 14% last week and better than Tower Hamlets but I suspect that's not saying much.
I can't confirm if the 8,000 or so over-65s in Newham who haven't been vaccinated have been contacted -if so, that's a refusal rate of near 30% which is worrying.
And I can't for the life of me see how you've managed to glean from anything I've written on this topic that I wish to discourage kids from trying to do well in school. That is a nonsense thing to say. It's like you're just thrashing around in some inchoate dislike of "the left". I don't know where you've got that from but kindly stop projecting it onto me.
The only question is how long it takes them to realise this.
Young people seem to be a large spreading vector, even if largely unaffected themselves, and I think the virological dynamic of that on the wider population needs to be fully understood before we scale down testing.
However - the advice we've been given suggests that you shouldn't have a lateral flow test within three months of having had Covid, because it will yield a false positive result. I don't know how many people who've had Covid asymptomatically are going to be caught out by the lateral flow devices and may end up being told to isolate over and over again as a result, or what provision is going to be made to deal with this issue, but I guess that'll all come out in the wash.
The left has always been this way "Doesn't matter if you work hard you won't get anywhere because of class, inherited wealth etc" . Then you wonder why so many take that to heart and just give up. Then later in life they are "It's not my fault I didn't do better the odds were stacked against me".
Sorry if you don't see constantly telling people that they have no chance discourages them then you know very little about human nature
If Keir Starmer can't beat the Tories in the country, he can reform the Labour Party. That will be a success if it leads Labour back to victory in the long run.
I'd offer Social Care as a similar example. "We" don't really want to solve that either, for all the crocodile tears.
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1368185172110229506
I do wonder at what point the NHS bankrupts the nation. The staff probably need a 2-3% paylift each year (and I bet staffing costs are 65-80% of the budget) and then you have people living longer each year, more conditions becoming treatable and requiring treatment, and drugs becoming more expensive, plus the wider infrastructure of estates and machinery and IT needing upgrading.
It's very easy to see why it needs 4-5% extra each and every year just to stand still.
At some point that dog is going to bark.
However it is my experience that many students have returned to their student houses during lockdown (despite it not being allowed) so we’ll be experiencing some of that inter-country mixing already, which is actually good news as it won’t be as bigger sudden bang of people moving across the country.
It seems to me that spending £1bn per week on testing for a basically non-existent virus by then will be a huge waste of money that could either not be added to the national debt or spent on clearing the backlog of NHS patients and giving the frontline staff a proper pay rise.
Group 6 carer.
Such a relief.
The left need an underclass to harvest votes from, shame you mislaid them now they wised up
It is humbling frankly to see the NHS in action at this time.
https://www.businessinsider.com/flu-has-been-almost-completely-wiped-out-winter-say-experts-2021-1?r=US&IR=T
You just triggered Max.
And yes, that would be nannying, but one of the consequences of having healthcare provided by the taxpayer is that taxpayers will then feel the right to criticise other peoples' crap life choices. We've all be expected to sit and rot at home for the better part of a year to protect the NHS and save lives, which kind of puts a bit of encouragement to do more exercise and eat less rubbish into perspective.
One the infectivity and transmission front, if flu was analogous to the bully in secondary school, covid is analogous to Mike Tyson.
We've tooled up to face Iron Mike and beaten him back. That school bully, faced with the same flurry of blows, would have been utterly mullered without us even noticing him.
I took a look at the flu surveillance data and there were still a very small handful of influenza admissions to hospital (checked via sampling), but it looks like the number was too small to result in any measurable deaths.