Off Topic Politics Thread

[Gregm1988]

I'm opposed to it, but mainly because it would screw over myself or people like me.

Yes, I went to a private school, but we were hardly super wealthy. My tuition fees were paid for by compensation due to medical negligence resulting in brain damage. There was a bit left over which I've used for living costs, and no I don't live in a mansion, I have a one bedroom apartment. But the fact is, as a result of the brain damage it has impacted my earnings, how do I know this? Easy, compare how successful my siblings have been in their careers down to me, and don't get me wrong I've tried, I've slogged, I didn't mess around at school but there were still some limitations. But at least I got some money which paid for my place. But the fact is, no Vat breaks means higher tuition which means even more of my compensation money would have gone to tuition fees so I'd have even less to live on.

Oh attend a state school you might say. Well I did for years, it was horrible. SEN provision was apparently not great in my area in those days. I dunno what it's like now because I don't live there anymore but I doubt it is.

Plus this whole thing is apparently about raising money for the state sector, but I swear it's ideological. Funding of the state sector is a political decision, I doubt it's dependent on increasing vat for private schools. For years people have said austerity is a choice, well so is this.

My point was mainly about what the media coverage is going to be like regardless of the merits

And an increase in state sector funding would have to come from somewhere. Either a different increased tax or a funding cut elsewhere. I’m not going to deny it’s ideological to an extent - it’s probably seen as the way of funding that is most ideologically align and likely to be successful at the same time. Cute to other services don’t really align with ideology and slightly more direct taxes on those with more usually have loopholes that many can afford to find ways around. Just this weekend I heard a couple of very well off people talking about putting their “estate” under a private company to avoid inheritance tax. Which seems wild to me and doesn’t seem like it should be legit but I expect it was mostly property so it could work as an investment property / rental business and there would be no way of knowing it was a tax fiddle. Whether you could also put other person investments and it not be obvious is another matter. I guess you could and perhaps even have the cars as company cars? There are all sorts of clever ways. But you can’t register a child as an employee and write off their education as tax deductible or anything like that (yet - I joke but America probably isn’t far off weird things like that)

 

[tomw24]

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[PompeyLapras]

Everything in life is ideological, PL. I am sorry about your brain injury, but how awful that the only way you felt you could keep up was by spending the payout intended to give you quality of life on decent education. And now you feel you still haven't hit the earnings of your your siblings despite the payout.

There are lots of truths to private education. One of them is that private education does not guarantee a good education. I know two teachers in private education and neither would ever be employed in a state school as they are simply not qualified. I also discovered a long time ago that private schools use every loophole to get the easiest grades - such as being the first adopters of IGCSE for indigenous British classes.

What private education gets you is simple. Prestige. Networking. Small class sizes. A sense you have "done right" by your child.

I am indeed ideologically opposed to private education. I don't object to your decision to use it. Or to anyone else's decision to send their kids there. I do disagree with their existence - as they perpetuate the gross imbalance in our society between those at the very top and everyone else.

7% of people go to private school. The vast majority are there because their parents have money - not for any particular intellectual reason.

Yet despite being only 7%, in 2019 they made up...

65% of senior judges
59% of civil servants
43% of the top 100 journalists
52% of junior ministers
49% of officers in the armed forces

The list goes on and on. These are not just positions that earn lots of money but also positions that decide the future of everyone in this country. The 7% who are wealthy have no right to this disproportionate stranglehold over the nation.
Chart: The UK's top jobs are dominated by the privately educated | Statista

Don't get me wrong, I am grateful for the education I had. I feel like it made a difference and is because of that education that I was able to get to where I am today, especially my time at Knowl Hill (which is near Woking in case you're interested). I just think what would have happened if I didn't have that opportunity. Based on my experience of the private sector and the state sector, having both gone there for my own education, and having worked in it in several different schools for quite a few years, as well as what I was like particularly at primary school age, I don't think it would have gone well and I certainly wouldn't have got as far as I did (at least academically).

Again based on my experience of working in the state sector I would say one of the big advantages of private schools compared to state is simply that it's a lot easier to remove a disruptive child than in the state sector, where you'll literally have kids with hundreds of BMS points (or Sims points or whatever equivalant a school might use) and whom you report every day and nothing gets done, hell nothing gets down seems to be the case not just from my experience working in such schools but also based on the experiences of some of my nephews and nieces.

I'm not sure about the intellectual reasons, they are selective. We sat common entrance exams in year 8 and I knew people who didn't get into their first choice schools so there was clearly some kind of academic rigour applied. No doubt there are probably some who are cushy with the governors and make a sizeable donation, but most people were fairly ordinary.

Anyway, maybe you have a point that a disproportionately high proportion of certain jobs attended private schools, but how does increasing fees via this VAT thing address that in any way whatsoever? The Hunts, the Windsors and the Johnsons of the world won't be impacted, they'll still be able to afford sending their kids to these schools. It's the middle class reasonably comfortably well off families who otherwise could afford such fees that will be impacted. If anything, it just makes private education even more elitist. Surely we should be trying to increase access to private education, not decrease it? Furthermore, the fact that these jobs may recruit predominantly from private schools, surely is an issue of how recruitment is carried out and needs to be addressed at the source. It doesn't help that places like the Guardian advertise unpaid internships. Great if your parents can support you, not so great if they can't.

Out of interest, what's your view on grammar schools?

 

[......loading......]

Don't get me wrong, I am grateful for the education I had. I feel like it made a difference and is because of that education that I was able to get to where I am today, especially my time at Knowl Hill (which is near Woking in case you're interested). I just think what would have happened if I didn't have that opportunity. Based on my experience of the private sector and the state sector, having both gone there for my own education, and having worked in it in several different schools for quite a few years, as well as what I was like particularly at primary school age, I don't think it would have gone well and I certainly wouldn't have got as far as I did (at least academically).

Again based on my experience of working in the state sector I would say one of the big advantages of private schools compared to state is simply that it's a lot easier to remove a disruptive child than in the state sector, where you'll literally have kids with hundreds of BMS points (or Sims points or whatever equivalant a school might use) and whom you report every day and nothing gets done, hell nothing gets down seems to be the case not just from my experience working in such schools but also based on the experiences of some of my nephews and nieces.

I'm not sure about the intellectual reasons, they are selective. We sat common entrance exams in year 8 and I knew people who didn't get into their first choice schools so there was clearly some kind of academic rigour applied. No doubt there are probably some who are cushy with the governors and make a sizeable donation, but most people were fairly ordinary.

Anyway, maybe you have a point that a disproportionately high proportion of certain jobs attended private schools, but how does increasing fees via this VAT thing address that in any way whatsoever? The Hunts, the Windsors and the Johnsons of the world won't be impacted, they'll still be able to afford sending their kids to these schools. It's the middle class reasonably comfortably well off families who otherwise could afford such fees that will be impacted. If anything, it just makes private education even more elitist. Surely we should be trying to increase access to private education, not decrease it? Furthermore, the fact that these jobs may recruit predominantly from private schools, surely is an issue of how recruitment is carried out and needs to be addressed at the source. It doesn't help that places like the Guardian advertise unpaid internships. Great if your parents can support you, not so great if they can't.

Out of interest, what's your view on grammar schools?

We are all born equal. Then a few minutes later someone comes and takes us away from that and we aren't equal anymore. Because birth is a lottery. Some of us benefit from our parents - through financial stability, care, love, intellectual discourse - and some do not.

It is the job of any decent society to do everything to level that out. Not to exacerbate it. Private education is the sly, ugly face of a society that doesn't really care about helping others. We propagate myths about comprehensive schools and those who attend them. 93% of us attend them. Yet we still hear this stuff:

Comprehensive schools are full of violent, unpleasant children who need the cane.
Large class sizes are awful, but I don't want to pay more for lazy teachers!
How dare teachers strike! They have job security!
Don't tax me more to pay for those layabouts. I pay enough! I won't be able to afford my second car, my second home, my jacuzzi, my two holidays a year, my two kids in dorms in private education!

And you might say I am exaggerating but this is the subtext I hear all the time. The sly, malign, underlying but prevalent ideas that teachers don't work hard, that comprehensives are sink holes, that private education somehow helps the rest of us. It is all lies.

I don't disagree with the idea of grammar schools. I think education in this system is mostly a mess. It was set up with archaic ideas about how people learn and it refuses to change. We could modernise the whole thing, get kids out of classrooms more, have more home learning and more non-academic study. We could try a lot of things. But what we can't do is tie familial wealth in any way to student hope.

You said the super rich will always be able to afford private education, and therefore taxing it only prices out the lowest end of private school families. I agree. But I want them gone altogether. We should take those huge sites and make them small comprehensives - or grammar schools - or satellite schools for modern learning hubs. So, taxing them now is a good step on that journey.

We should, as a society, be willing to pay for everyone to have the education they need. It makes me laugh that people will pay 7000 per term for their kids to get away from the riffraff but if you put up their taxes by £21000 so everyone could have that level of education they would refuse to pay it. Because people are selfish. They want for themselves. They believe their own hard work and success is proof of other people not being hardworking and therefore not being deserving. The underserving poor. The underserving poor.

And don't get me started on private healthcare. While going through a very long medical journey, I had 3 month waits between appointments- or I could pay £200 to see the same specialist the next day in his private clinic. That is wrong. The one system sucks from the other. The people who have money to invest for all invest instead in the few.

93% of the country are being dominated in top professions by 7% of the population. I don't accept that. I think it should make us all angry.

And yes this post is ideological. Yes there is corruption and failure everywhere, but as a society we have spent 15 years not even trying to fix any of this and it has got to a point where everyone hates everyone else, and nobody understands what society even means anymore.

 

[SR get out of my club]

This was interesting around the use of AI in policing, to free up more time for other tasks. Such as Two Tier policing - which now can be used in full force with far more hours dedicated to segregating communities even further

---

Some of the country's most notorious cold cases could be solved with the help of an artificial intelligence tool that can do 81 years of detective work in just 30 hours.

Avon and Somerset Police are trialling the technology which can identify potential leads that may not have been found during a manual trawl of the evidence.


The Soze tool - developed in Australia - can analyse video footage, financial transactions, social media, emails and other documents simultaneously.

An evaluation showed it was able to review the evidential material in 27 complex cases in just 30 hours - which it is estimated would have taken up to 81 years for a human to do.

Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council, said the technology could be used to help close some of the country's oldest and most notorious unsolved cases.


"I could imagine this sort of thing being really useful for cold case reviews," he told reporters.

"You might have a cold case review that just looks impossible because of the amount of material there and feed it into a system like this which can just ingest it, then give you an assessment of it. I can see that being really, really helpful."


It comes after Sky News reported fewer police officers from the UK's largest force are working on unsolved murder cases, while last week the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley described his force as "dangerously stretched".

Five Met officers are moving from a specialist cold case department investigating the 30-year-old murder of Atek Hussain to bolster basic command units.


Mr Hussain, 32, was stabbed in the heart as he returned from work in September 1994. He managed to stagger to his home and tell his family that his attackers were Asian before collapsing.

The Met said the case is not currently active, but no unsolved murder investigation is ever closed and Mr Hussain's case was last reviewed by its Serious Crime Review Group in August.


Mr Stephens said the Soze tool is one of "dozens of ground-breaking programs" which could soon be rolled out across the UK.

They include an AI tool to build a national database of knives, which could be used to put pressure on retailers, and a system that allows call handlers to focus their attention on speaking to domestic abuse victims.


"If all of those 64 examples were adopted all across England and Wales and had similar gains to those of the forces using them, we'd get something like 15 million hours of productivity back to spend on things like investigations or responding to emergencies, which equates to more than £350m in costs," the chief constable said.

But he said AI and other technology such as facial recognition and robotic automation procedures are "not a replacement" for police, with an officer "involved in the final decisions".

Police chiefs also recognise the pace of its implementation and use must be in line with what the public is comfortable with.

"This isn't handing over our responsibilities to technology but what the technology is helping us to do better," said Mr Stephens.

 

[ChilcoSaint]

We are all born equal. Then a few minutes later someone comes and takes us away from that and we aren't equal anymore. Because birth is a lottery. Some of us benefit from our parents - through financial stability, care, love, intellectual discourse - and some do not.

It is the job of any decent society to do everything to level that out. Not to exacerbate it. Private education is the sly, ugly face of a society that doesn't really care about helping others. We propagate myths about comprehensive schools and those who attend them. 93% of us attend them. Yet we still hear this stuff:

Comprehensive schools are full of violent, unpleasant children who need the cane.
Large class sizes are awful, but I don't want to pay more for lazy teachers!
How dare teachers strike! They have job security!
Don't tax me more to pay for those layabouts. I pay enough! I won't be able to afford my second car, my second home, my jacuzzi, my two holidays a year, my two kids in dorms in private education!

And you might say I am exaggerating but this is the subtext I hear all the time. The sly, malign, underlying but prevalent ideas that teachers don't work hard, that comprehensives are sink holes, that private education somehow helps the rest of us. It is all lies.

I don't disagree with the idea of grammar schools. I think education in this system is mostly a mess. It was set up with archaic ideas about how people learn and it refuses to change. We could modernise the whole thing, get kids out of classrooms more, have more home learning and more non-academic study. We could try a lot of things. But what we can't do is tie familial wealth in any way to student hope.

You said the super rich will always be able to afford private education, and therefore taxing it only prices out the lowest end of private school families. I agree. But I want them gone altogether. We should take those huge sites and make them small comprehensives - or grammar schools - or satellite schools for modern learning hubs. So, taxing them now is a good step on that journey.

We should, as a society, be willing to pay for everyone to have the education they need. It makes me laugh that people will pay 7000 per term for their kids to get away from the riffraff but if you put up their taxes by £21000 so everyone could have that level of education they would refuse to pay it. Because people are selfish. They want for themselves. They believe their own hard work and success is proof of other people not being hardworking and therefore not being deserving. The underserving poor. The underserving poor.

And don't get me started on private healthcare. While going through a very long medical journey, I had 3 month waits between appointments- or I could pay £200 to see the same specialist the next day in his private clinic. That is wrong. The one system sucks from the other. The people who have money to invest for all invest instead in the few.

93% of the country are being dominated in top professions by 7% of the population. I don't accept that. I think it should make us all angry.

And yes this post is ideological. Yes there is corruption and failure everywhere, but as a society we have spent 15 years not even trying to fix any of this and it has got to a point where everyone hates everyone else, and nobody understands what society even means anymore.

Finland. There must be a link between two things that fascinate me about Finland.
First, despite not having Key Stages, or a national curriculum as we know it, and despite leaving it mostly up to children to learn to read whenever they want, Finland has at least as good academic results at 18 years than any country.
Second, Finland is consistently ranked as the happiest country in the world.

 

[Gregm1988]

Finland. There must be a link between two things that fascinate me about Finland.
First, despite not having Key Stages, or a national curriculum as we know it, and despite leaving it mostly up to children to learn to read whenever they want, Finland has at least as good academic results at 18 years than any country.
Second, Finland is consistently ranked as the happiest country in the world.

Even more interesting when you consider how dark and cold their winters are. Ours are miserable enough

 

[StJabbo1]

Finland. There must be a link between two things that fascinate me about Finland.
First, despite not having Key Stages, or a national curriculum as we know it, and despite leaving it mostly up to children to learn to read whenever they want, Finland has at least as good academic results at 18 years than any country.
Second, Finland is consistently ranked as the happiest country in the world.

Even more interesting when you consider how dark and cold their winters are. Ours are miserable enough

Must be something to with leaping into ice cold lakes straight from the sauna. I wonder if the birth rate follows a climatic rhythm?

 

[Lemons and Oranges]

Finland. There must be a link between two things that fascinate me about Finland.
First, despite not having Key Stages, or a national curriculum as we know it, and despite leaving it mostly up to children to learn to read whenever they want, Finland has at least as good academic results at 18 years than any country.
Second, Finland is consistently ranked as the happiest country in the world.

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Finland, starring Michael Palin

 

[It'sOnlyAGame]

Seems to be awfully quiet on here today considering our glorious leader was making a key speech at the conference.
No one got any comment on his sizzling speech? Anyone?

Shades of Truss about Starmer but not the wurst speech.

"Release the sausages"

That should boost his international credibility no end. And you thought Boris was embarrassing.

 

[milton archer]

Seems to be awfully quiet on here today considering our glorious leader was making a key speech at the conference.
No one got any comment on his sizzling speech? Anyone?

Shades of Truss about Starmer but not the wurst speech.

"Release the sausages"

That should boost his international credibility no end. And you thought Boris was embarrassing.

When it comes to embarrassment stakes Starmer isn't fit to hold a candle for Johnson

 

[StJabbo1]

When it comes to embarrassment stakes Starmer isn't fit to hold a candle for Johnson

Right enough, Starmer wouldn't make a piccaninny smile.

 

[......loading......]

People still doing that football team political tribalism then?
Comparing Starmer to Truss is like comparing a tape measure to a stick of celery. One of them is kind of funny but utterly useless for building your extension. The other is pretty dull but essential in the measure twice, cut once mentality needed.

 

[It'sOnlyAGame]

When it comes to embarrassment stakes Starmer isn't fit to hold a candle for Johnson

Give him a chance, he's had a fair shot at it so far. At this rate he will have overtaken Boris before the end of the year.

You weren't the bookies favourite for who would be first to try a feeble excuse Milton but fair play, you have to be quick on here these days. The two favourites weren't far behind though .

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[StJabbo1]

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Not forget

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[......loading......]

Man says sausage. Another man is way too excited about it. Same man who has not managed to respond to a single argument in months wants us to engage with his tedious nonsense.

Silly Sausage!

 

[It'sOnlyAGame]

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[milton archer]

People still doing that football team political tribalism then?
Comparing Starmer to Truss is like comparing a tape measure to a stick of celery. One of them is kind of funny but utterly useless for building your extension. The other is pretty dull but essential in the measure twice, cut once mentality needed.

Very true....my father-in-law reckoned it was the difference between a bullocks foot and a scaffold plank. Think IOAG will struggle to deny that.

 

[It'sOnlyAGame]

Very true....my father-in-law reckoned it was the difference between a bullocks foot and a scaffold plank. Think IOAG will struggle to deny that.

I'm not denying anything milton because with all these comparisons going on, no one has said which is which. I'm going for 2tier is the stick of celery and the scaffold plank.

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[Archers Road]

Finland. There must be a link between two things that fascinate me about Finland.
First, despite not having Key Stages, or a national curriculum as we know it, and despite leaving it mostly up to children to learn to read whenever they want, Finland has at least as good academic results at 18 years than any country.
Second, Finland is consistently ranked as the happiest country in the world.

You have to wonder about these Scandinavian countries. ****ing cold, and you don’t see the sun in winter, yet they regularly show up on all sorts of studies as great places to live. Maybe the relatively low population means people are less inclined to be selfish and fearful toward each other?