The UK’s top 50 private schools took in a whopping £515 million in fees upfront last year to beat Rachel Reeves’ VAT raid. That’s up from £121 million in 2023. Combined with the closure of 54 independent schools and the 11,000 or so fall in pupil numbers, the Treasury’s hope of using the 20% VAT hike on fees to pay for just about everything is quickly diminishing. There are currently more than 2,600 private schools in Britain, so the total figure will be even higher…
According to the Telegraph, the richest parents will have saved £103 million by handing over the cash in advance. At Eton College alone, the total sum pumped into its prepayment scheme soared from £16.6 million in 2023 to £52.7 million last year. A 217.5% increase…
Some parents may even have prepaid five years’ worth of fees – so if the scheme is reversed by, say, a change in government, they will have avoided the raid entirely. It’s the smallest private schools, where parents can’t afford to hand over hundreds of thousands at once, that lose out the most here…
YouGov has released polling which shows the public is opposed to Neil Kinnock’s mad idea to charge VAT on private healthcare à la the school tax. Punish people who give the NHS slack, nice…
31% of 6,642 Brits polled yesterday either “strongly support” or “somewhat support” the idea – 43% either “somewhat oppose” or “strongly oppose” it. Voters realise better than Lord Kinnock that charging VAT on dentists and opticians would only shaft them…
The Law Society is now instructing solicitors to acknowledge that “race” is a “categorisation is based in white supremacy” that is “developed as an attempt to prove biological superiority and maintain dominance over others.” Useful for legal paperwork…
The Society – the professional association for solicitors in England and Wales which provides support and training to them – slipped out new guidance on “Talking about race and ethnicity at work” last week. Solicitors are instructed to “accept and acknowledge that ethnicity is an integral part of a person’s identity and treat it as such.” Confusingly a few lines later they are told “it’s okay to clarify how people describe their identity but first consider why you need to know”…
The section on race itself is straight out of a US liberal arts professor’s scrawled notes:
“Race is a categorisation that is based mainly on physical attributes or traits… People are assigned to a specific race simply by having similar appearances or skin colour. For example, black or white. This categorisation is based in white supremacy. It was developed as an attempt to prove biological superiority and maintain dominance over others. It’s now widely accepted that race is a social construct. However, because many people have been racialised and experienced racism, racial identity is important to many. It can be a basis for collective organising and support for racially minoritised individuals.”
Solicitors are told that examples of “white privilege” include: “you generally have a positive relationship with the police.” “Ethnic minority” is a bad term and alternatives are laid out:
“You could also use ‘minoritised ethnic’, ‘racially minoritised’ or ‘global majority’. These recognise that individuals have been minoritised through social processes of power and domination, rather than just existing in distinct statistical minorities. It also better reflects the fact that ethnic groups that are minorities in the UK are majorities in the global population.”
The guidance finishes: “To be anti-racist is to be an active part of the solution, whereas a non-racist is a bystander of the problem.” Got all that?
Yvette Cooper is making the dubious claim this morning that revealing how many people the government is aiming to return to France under the new one-in-one out deal would empower the gangs. A fudge intended to save face if things go wrong…
Overnight the government announced that the deal was signed and detentions with an aim to deport would begin “within days.” On Sky News Yvette Cooper was asked about wide speculation that the weekly returns will only number 50:
“So, we’re not setting out the numbers… the numbers will vary and we want them to increase and we have not set an overall figure for the programme but also secondly we don’t want to provide operational information for criminal gangs who will then use it if they think there are particular numbers of people who are going to be detained on particular days. They will then use that and operate their boats and their gang operations around that and that’s not what we’re prepared to tolerate.”
That is a poor excuse for not revealing an overall figure and if Labour is happy with a figure expect it to be trumpeted widely. It’s unsustainable not to know the results of the long-running pilot anyway…
Asked what a successful scheme would look like in terms of numbers according to government modelling, Cooper refused to specify. The deal was meant to be agreed weeks before it actually was – the French were negotiating the number down. The Home Office will have extensive modelling on what number it thinks will make an impact…
Cooper said the deal is a “joint agreement” and the UK and France will be “reviewing it continually” until June next year. At which point she admitted the French could say – au revoir…
Civil servants have spent the weekend advising each other on how to stay out of the office. In case co-conspirators thought there was any discipline in there…
Sometimes Guido looks at the Civil Service subreddit which provides rare entertainment. On Saturday one civil servant – in the office three days per week – asked for advice after his senior took issue with his novel interpretation of the 60% office attendance rule:
“I tend to do around 4 hours of a 7.5 hour day in the office, before using an early lunch to commute home. It’s not ideal, but it’s the way that works best for me seeing as I have a 40 minute commute each way and quite honestly would rather not be in the office at all. I’m an early starter, so getting in for when the office opens means I can theoretically leave by 11:00… For the past few months, I’d been being hounded by my previous manager and Director of that area, constantly asking why I’m leaving ‘early’, even though I’m achieving the 60% and following the guidance of ‘the majority’, albeit by the minimum amount… [now] the Director from my old directorate is still messaging me on teams asking why I’m leaving so early.”
Many others have chipped in since then:
- “In my department no one monitors it or cares as long as the work is done and you’re contactable during core hours (10-12 and 2-3.30).”
- “I was in the exact same situation, but now just sit on a different floor out of the way. Out of sight, out of mind.”
- “If you’re leaving early, that’s more of a “gentleman agreement” between LM and you. If you really truly want to be able to leave early without people grassing on you… sit in a completely different area in the office (if possible) and don’t out loud say you’re leaving early because of the ‘gentleman agreement’ that really doesn’t exist in official comms/docs, etc.”
- “the people that managed were the ones that quietly went about their business, had their background blurred etc regardless of location.”
- “If you are leaving at lunch you should be doing it discreetly, just leave quietly. Don’t be announcing it or making a big deal of it. All that’s tracked is office attendance, not hours in the office, as far as I’m aware.”
- “If you’re worried about your teams toggling to “away” there’s a way of adjusting the settings so that it only reverts to that after a few hours.”
- “I also exploit this loophole probably once or twice a week.”
Enough tips and tricks to keep getting away with it for a few more years at least. Some non-blockhead civil servants pointed out: “Doing 3 half days in office = 30% a week not 60%“. UK DOGE is ready to deal with this sort of thing…
Great British Energy – Nuclear (not to be confused with the inexplicably separate quango Great British Energy) is searching for a new chairman. ‘GBE-N’, as it is known in the ever growing domain of government bodies poking around in the energy industry, is in charge of delivering small modular reactors (SMRs) in the UK, among other things. That programme has been ongoing since at least 2015…
Now Red Ed is looking for a new head for the organisation – and a live job advert shows a cool salary of more than £203,268 per annum for just three days a week. Meltdown for taxpayers…
The government is banking on deploying SMRs in the 2030s. The new chair will oversee that target with a “more agile, programmatic and faster delivery approach than has been achieved previously”. That won’t be hard, because currently zero SMRs have been delivered. It’s such a civil service priority it’s a three day a week role…
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”
