£50k household and ten grand in savings is apparently financially unstable?!
I suppose when you're paid £100k to sit on your arse making shite clickbait articles for the BBC everyone looks poor.
Westminster Politics 2024-2029
- Thread starter Pexbo
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I suppose when you're paid £100k to sit on your arse making shite clickbait articles for the BBC everyone looks poor.
I can believe that, especially in the more expensive parts of the country.
"how dare you use statistical evidence to argue against my anectodal evidence."True, that's something the quiz fails to address.
£50k in annual household income is just two people working on minimum wage.
(The minimum wage equates to an annual full-time salary of ~£24k per person.)
This is definitely a poor household in an unstable financial position.
Also age... most people peak earnings at around 40.
95% of statistics are made up.
Yes but you would expect (and hope!) that you become more financially stable as you get older and earn more in your career.
I appreciate that doesn’t apply to everyone though.
I feel this is where things need to be contextualised further. My missus works part time and I'm only 35 hours a week (two 40 hours jobs would equate to £24k pp on minimum wage). We're just under the 50k threshold. That's through choice, not hardship. And I don't think we've ever seen ourselves as a poor household.
The point I'm trying to make is that without context these kind of analyses aren't targeting those that are truly in need. It all just feels a bit half arsed.
I .... Oh dammit.
It does not surprise me at all that you base your opinion entirely on your own narrow experience and ignore respected academic research that looks at the whole country.
Keep up the good work.
I mean all of this is simplified. And I think it is a bit .blunt to fill out a survey and be labelled 'not rich'. The number of dependents someone has matters too. I don't have kids, for example, so by default my salary goes a lot further than people with children.
But your circumstances would make your household far more vulnerable to shocks like inflation spiking or energy prices going up etc etc than a household with 100k income. You could get by, but if the government stuffed the economy like Liz Truss millions of people with a 50k household income would feel the pain.
The other point is that we are a rich country with massive wealth inequality.
Again, this seems to be untrue. The top 5% earn £87k as an individual according to the top google hit (I didn't investigate further). I couldn't readily find the top 5% of households, but the ONS has the top 20% of households earning an income of £117.5k
(ONS figures for 2022)
It isn't.
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I wish we talked more about the article number guy posted, which claimed that the 20 % inflation adjusted price increase in private school fees since 2010 is partially explained by inflation. That was great.
https://www.ftadviser.com/pensions/...the-cost-of-labour-s-private-school-vat-plan/
https://www.ftadviser.com/pensions/...the-cost-of-labour-s-private-school-vat-plan/
That's from 2013. On the economic inputs alone, it's so far out of date it's meaningless. The social inputs do nothing other than increase your score the more boxes you tick.
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It absolutely baffles me that people could be against private schools paying vat. It is obviously so important to fairness that it is the most easy to argue policy of all time.
We have private patients who get done in the cath lab during the day. This means they are using slots that could be going to patients who are in the NHS waiting lists. They are using the cath lab nurses and radiographers etc AKA all the usual NHS staff, and are using the NHS stents and balloons. Why should this not be taxed the hell out of?
Private in this country doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. It seems that a lot of private patients, at the very least when procedures need to be done, are still being done via the NHS using NHS time and NHS resources and NHS staff (Who have said they do not get any extra pay) so presumably the only people who get money are the trusts and the consultants?
Where I'm originally from, private is entirely separate from public, meaning the private hospitals have their own facilities and resources and anything they do is entirely isolated from public. This weird overlap where private runs through the NHS is very strange to me.
With regards to this private school topic, are the non private schools in England really that bad? The way some of you lot post in here you would think it's jail the kids are being sent to. A huge amount of what you get out of school is what you put into your studies as an individual.
Yeah, I agree. I was just saying it's not all using NHS resources, although I agree most of it is. I've got a friend undergoing cancer treatment though insurance at a private clinic, and some of the nurses there are private only, with all the facilities I assume privately owned. I have no idea of the percentages, and it's probably pretty low but that's a resource that's taking pressure off the NHS even if it's a low percentage. I think it should be taxed as well, but we don't want to push too much of those people onto the NHS with the state it's in.
Sounds like a well established separation of "duties".
It depends on the area and which state school you can get into. From my experience growing up, there were two private schools in my city (one boys and one girls) and there were several school that were at the very least on the same sort of standard in terms of results and ratings. I don't have kids now and haven't done a huge deal of research into the local schools but generally the Ofsted ratings and schools in my current area are generally good. Even if my income doubles and there's a private school nearby, I won't be planning on sending my kids there.
In some areas yes, mostly no though.
The comments about ruining kids lives are quite funny though. If people genuinely think that, they must think that the overwhelming majority of kids (+90%) lives in the UK are being ruined by their education. Which should be an outrage if true.
What private schools give you (or the kid) is an almost guaranteed window into the upper echelons of society. Whether it be politics, business, media, law, medicine, the arts, whatever. Part of this of course will be the network the kid builds up. The 7% or so of kids who go to private school are heavily over subscribed in all of these fields and that's really often what the parents are paying for.
Of course, nobody can begrudge parents wanting the best for their individual kid. But a government's role is to enact policy beneficial at a societal level, not individual.
I know someone who unironically told me she'd be sending her kids to private school because she doesn't want her kids getting stabbed. So......
England has some of the best educational achievement in the world. I'd argue our schools' performance is a rare success story over the dismal last decade or so.
Compared to England, only Japan, Estonia, Canada, Ireland and South Korea have better success in maths and reading at age 15 (according to the latest OECD data). And in Korea, that comes with more educational inequality.
Every other country has worse educational attainment.
Too busy smearing supposed left wing groups over decades, while leaving the far right yobs to thrive.
Listen to what she actually says, she's accepting that it's a very complex, nuanced issue. Nothing about that is 'Culture War' at all.
But, go ahead, push the narrative.
Yeah, I think that's fair. It's a very complicated issue with no easy solution.
Come off it she's appealing to a very certain side of the cultural war with a very prepared and fed line and you know it.
Politicians need to stop this nonsense, it's not in her remit or expertise she doesn't have to offer an opinion. It's a deliberate choice to play optics.
She's the Minister for Culture, Media & Sport - if it's not in her remit to comment then who's does it fall under?
Granted she is asked so answering the way she did is mostly fine, but why is our culture secretary even weighing into a debate that didn’t feature a British boxer? It’s entirely a culture war issue being ramped up by our press and Labour has plenty of MPs - notably Duffield - willing to stoke it, because as with everything there are bigotries they consider fair game and bigotries they don’t.
I don’t really mind her reply, but she also didn’t need to answer at all if she cared that much about culture wars. And I do find the idea people on the left are making a big deal of things like this rather nasty tbh. Just because straight white centrists are happy with the tone of our politicians these days doesn’t mean it doesn’t all feed into the same far right framing, which Labour are just as culpable of contributing to. It was only last week they were complaining that the Muslim independents that fairly beat their candidates were potentially illegitimate and had done so via a campaign of violent intimidation. You don’t think that contributes somewhat to how emboldened the recent rioters feel to smash up mosques?
Labour have never censored their anti-Trans MPs because it isn’t politically expedient, so it’s good actually that some people are willing to raise the dodginess of this stuff cos people like you obviously won’t.
The Algerian and Italian ones? You telling me she wouldn’t dodge it if asked about Israeli or Palestinian athletes?
Both completely fair points, but I'd go to your initial point where she was asked a question and she gave a tempered, nuanced answer to it.
For sure. I am more responding to the responding (to the responding!) but also, per my edit, she would absolutely have dodged the question if it were about Israel’s eligibility or the behaviour of Palestinian athletes towards it… which would’ve been fair, and also likely praised as such by the same kind of people saying “well she was asked?” In this instance… It’s just a shitty situation.
Isn’t that how it all works though? Regardless of who is in charge?
It’s rife for corruption but unless I’ve missed something in my 40+ years it’s always been that way.
Yeah, I've already said they weren't doing well, and were in a specific circumstance of being one of many private schools in the area but based in a relatively poor town in a wealthy area. The VAT issue is still what tipped them over the edge and will do so for many other schools especially prep schools.
What tipped them over the edge was their expenditure was greater than their income. Income was dwindling long before any discussion about VAT.
I mean there's even a parent whose kids attended that school giving some actual insight prior to any chatter on VAT.
Alton is the only beacon some pro-charity status private school supporters seem to latch on to, no matter how much that 'VAT was the cause' theory has been debunked.
I can just about remember as a young child overhearing an uncle of mine talking about 'the middle class people', and for some reason I though he was referring to everyone who lived in the middle of England and I held that belief until eventual a helpful school friend told me that was 'bonkers'.
Strange how things you overhear (and out of context) can influence your thinking
Seems to be happening to lots of people nowadays.... young or old
The class narrative is pretty nonsensical. To my mind, anyone who needs to go to work to earn a living should accept they actually are working class.
I too have heard of a number of descriptions like upper middle class.
Ridiculous.