Keir Starmer’s cynical class war on private schools and hereditary peers to appease the hard Left of the Parliamentary Labour Party harms us all, says Dominic Lawson in the Mail, not least as 25% of private school households earn below average income. Here’s an excerpt.
The hard-Left are preparing a campaign against Sir Keir Starmer under the slogan of ‘welfare not warfare’.
They are in an elevated state of outrage – even more so than usual – because of the cut in the overseas aid budget to fund more defence spending, and over the hastily concocted clampdown on sickness benefits.
Indeed, the Socialist Worker claimed: “The assault on disabled people is the thin edge of the wedge in Starmer’s class war.”
In reality, the Prime Minister is conducting a very different sort of class war, and one designed to keep him in the good books of the Left of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
It is being waged on two fronts – in our schools and in the Palace of Westminster. The former involves the policy of applying 20% VAT to the fees charged by independent schools, and also removing their entitlement to charitable business rates relief.
The latter is contained in the Bill which proposes to remove the remaining 88 hereditary peers from the House of Lords.
A number of parents’ groups spent last week in the High Court in an attempt to prove the imposition of VAT on education is a form of unlawful discrimination.
If there is a Labour war on the disabled it is this: there are more than 100,000 pupils with special educational needs who attend small private schools.
As Sue Peacock, a consultant in this field, said, “most of the parents I know are already struggling to meet the fees” and had turned to the private sector “out of desperation” because their children had been unhappy, or inadequately provided for, in mainstream schools.
A study commissioned by the Education Not Taxation campaign revealed that one in five of such families have already remortgaged their home to meet the fees.
The brittle Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, who claims all the money raised by the VAT will go into the state sector (in fact it is not ring-fenced at all) describes the policy as part of the plan of “ending tax advantages for the super-rich”.
Aside from the fact that such parents did not have a “tax advantage” denied to anyone else, it emerged in last week’s High Court hearing that the Treasury itself had an official briefing note which stated that “25% of households affected will fall in the bottom half of the household income distribution”.
As Lord Pannick KC, who led the case for the parents, told the court: “It is illogical for the Chancellor to say that because most of those at independent schools have parents with high incomes, a child’s attendance at an independent school means their parents are wealthy… there are parents who so value independent education for their children that they make severe financial sacrifices to be able to pay.”
Many of these are from British-Asian homes. If Labour suffers a loss of electoral support from this demographic, it will be an entirely merited punishment.
Unfortunately the policy is, in general, a popular one, so Bridget Phillipson paid no political price for her snide and even spiteful remark that “our state schools need teachers more than private schools need embossed stationery”.
Lawson goes on to oppose Starmer’s gerrymandering efforts to remove the remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords, pointing out that in the 2019-2024 Parliament “life peers attended 47% of the time” while hereditary peers “attended 49%”. He adds that “more than half of the hereditaries serve as members of select committees (which do much of the vital scrutiny of legislation – the point of the second chamber)”.
Unfortunately, there will be no electoral backlash as “the House of Lords does not much concern the public”. But, “as with the attack on independent schools, Labour’s cynical use of the rhetoric of class war, while conveniently appeasing its own Left-wing, will make the country more, not less, divided”.
Worth reading in full.
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I wonder if this is something to do with the difficulty of counting people in the occupied parts of Ukraine? I don’t understand why but it is almost bound to make it a problem even defining if someone is part of the Ukrainian population or not.
We’ve just had a census yet, as Prof Norman Fenton keeps illustrating, we haven’t a clue how many people there are in the UK.
I suspect the authorities have got a pretty good idea of how many people there are in the UK, but they pretend not to because it suits them. I expect whatever figures there are have been kept vague enough to allow for plausible deniability.
And Russia has lost at least a million citizens to emigration.
‘This exodus is a terrible blow for Russia,” said Tamara Eidelman, a Russian historian who moved to Portugal after the invasion. “The layer that could have changed something in the country has now been washed away.”
Some say many more have emigrated. More than 3.8 million Russians left the country in the first three months of 2022, according to data from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).
https://www.fedstat.ru/indicator/38480
So now some state institutions are now asking even medium-level figures to refrain from foreign travel and banned from travelling more than two hours’ drive from Moscow without official permission.
The FSB have asked former officials who previously had access to state secrets to surrender their passports, and even some who never had access.
“Now they are coming to certain people and saying, ‘please hand in your red civilian passports, because you have access to sensitive information for the motherland, so we want to control your movements’,”
Alexandra Prokopenko, former Russian central bank official
I followed that link but couldn’t make much sense of it. Any tips? It’s not clear whether these are permanent departures.
Where would 3.8 millions Russians be able to go and live, legally?
I’m not questioning the statistics particularly, but Fedstat isn’t Russian, it’s a division in the US Department of Commerce… and I suppose were Russia quoting figures for America we would be expected to treat them with some scepticism?
….the Russian comparison would be Rosstat….
Not only have Ukraine lost 8 million legally, there have been thousands of men leaving illegally, numbers vary from 12,000-15,000 depending on who you read…as this is what they are willing to admit, it could be many more?
As the population is @ 43 million V 146 million, in Russia’s favour …. Russia probably have a long way to go before they are depleted!
The Unified Interdepartmental Information and Statistical System (EMISS) was developed as part of the implementation of the federal target program “Development of State Statistics of Russia in 2007-2011”.
The purpose of creating the System is to provide access via the Internet to state bodies, local governments, legal entities and individuals to official statistical information, including metadata, generated in accordance with the federal plan of statistical work.
EMISS is a state information resource that combines official state information statistical resources formed by the subjects of official statistical accounting as part of the implementation of the federal plan for statistical work.
Access to official statistical information included in the statistical resources included in the interdepartmental system is carried out on a free and non-discriminatory basis.
The system was put into operation by a joint order of the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications of Russia and Rosstat dated November 16, 2011
No. 318/461 .
The EMISS coordinator is the Federal State Statistics Service.
The EMISS operator is the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation”.
In case of problems while working with the system, please contact us:
info@fedstat.ru , emiss@digital.gov.ru
…as usual I have no idea what this is about..
So Rosstat use a computing system called EMISS…?
You can bet your life they won’t be going anywhere near Ukraine, which actively discriminates against Russian speakers.
Those who did run away to escape the anticipated conscription were clearly listening to Western misinformation, since it was clear that the process would only involve reservists, not raw recruits. And they claim these people were the “elite”. Clearly not very bright and a little yellow.
The FSB reported a slight uptick in Russians traveling to war-torn Ukraine — 328,435 (Jan-Mar 22), up from 316,286 in January-March 2021.
That sounds suspiciously like the number of Russian troops in the liberated regions.
Or maybe something else?
‘RVC reports that it “again visited” Bryansk Oblast, where the fighters managed to perform “combat tasks”, communicate with residents, hand them their postcards and “ask them to hide during the hostilities”.
As proof, the corps released a video in which its fighters really communicate with the residents of the village of Sluchovsk and conduct combat operations there.’
06 Apr 23
Oops……!
In case of problems while working with the system, please contact us:
info@fedstat.ru , emiss@digital.gov.ru
or
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/13/russia-diaspora-war-ukraine/
Take your pick
What she says she said to the FT was “Russia’s security services have almost total leeway to interpret the rules under revisions to laws on state secrets, espionage and treason. Basically any information can be deemed secret, so the embedded FSB officers start telling you that you have sensitive information. What is it? Why is it secret and who decides that? Nobody knows,”
Not quite the same thing.
It is highly likely that Ukraine have lost hundreds of thousands of troops.
Former Pentagon adviser Colonel Douglas McGregor shared secret data on the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
“When Zaluzhny was in the US, he met with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and General Milley. He secretly told them that Ukraine had lost 257,000 people since the beginning of the conflict,” the retired officer shared.
A Turkish publication, citing Israeli intelligence agency MOSSAD, claims to show the real number of casualties for both parties in the conflict as Ukrainians killed in action reaches staggering 157,000 with 2,458 NATO soldiers dead and 234,000 injured.
Russia 18,480 dead with 44,500 injured.
US Military analyst William Schryner wrote in January 2023 that “Ukraine has now suffered approximately 500,000 irretrievable (military) casualties and virtually the entirety of their original inventories of military hardware – the equivalent of ALL the personnel and equipment (both active and reserves) with which they commenced this conflict.”
Telegram channels from the frontline show Nato heavy weapons being destroyed on a regular basis and Ukrainian troops and Nato country mercenaries being destroyed by the hundreds every day which confirm the above figures may be accurate with very little Russian losses.
In February 2022 Ukraine passed a law where they would compensate the families of servicemen killed in action.
Ukraine are so corrupt that they would rather designate those killed as “missing” instead so they don’t have to pay out the compensation.
https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/ok-doomer?publication_id=1085164&post_id=95312586&isFreemail=true
This was posted by geo-political analyst Pepe Escobar.
Ukraine have lost 387,000 conscripted soldiers killed in action.
Plus 31,240 mercenaries have been killed.
Ukrainian Telegram channel “Observer”: Open Source INTelligence (Intelligence from open sources), based on reports from funeral agencies, extracts from morgues, as well as the results of an analysis of radio, cellular and satellite exchange of forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, reports that as of October 20, irretrievable losses of The Armed Forces of Ukraine amounted to 402,000 people, of which 387,000 were killed. At the same time, to date, the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Ukraine has allegedly prepared more than 320,000 appeals “about the fate of the missing soldiers,” but the SBU has forbidden filing applications with the prosecutor’s office for national security purposes.
https://vk.com/wall578617852_26297
Even the pro-Nato propaganda merchants the BBC stated that only 16,071 named Russian troops had died in total up to March 2023.
They daren’t tell the world the Ukrainian losses which are in the hundreds of thousands.
https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-64840229?ocid=wsrussian.social.in-app-messaging.telegram..russiantelegram_.edit
The BBC have revised this figure to just 17,375 named Russian troops.
https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-64984414
..a whole generation of young men…a whole generation who won’t be father’s…it’s a fuc***g tragedy……
Peace talks NOW….….
but no the USA has just authorised (yesterday) a new $2.6 billion package of U.S. military aid to Ukraine which includes $500 million for immediate supplies…
They weren’t kidding when they said…’to the last Ukrainian’…..that’s what literally will be left……
It is a sad situation. I speak to Ukranians and Russians frequently and they seem remarkably bright and many of them have a wonderful facility for language and really enjoy learning more about English. I think people’s names sound much more beautiful in Russian and they have the patronymic and the diminutive which we seem to have lost so long ago that nobody could possibly notice anymore.
You should always be mindful of the western neurotic fear of death. Terrorist organisations and intelligence agencies all over the world know and have perceived this reality. If you are in that state, the state they want you to be in, then you have to grasp it and snap out of it. Because very shortly there aren’t going to be any comfortable options. You either apply yourself to working with others in order to survive or you don’t.
None of us really appreciate how much we need the next man, whether its taking out bins or whatever, We need to be mindful of just how fragile life is for most of the people in this country, who live in cities. We are moving into a different phase now. I don’t care what happens I know where my loyalty lies. At least in the horror to come we will find out about true character.
There is an assumption that it being encouraged here – that if you knew the reality you could control it. Believe me by the end of this year you are going to see governments showing their people some rather unpleasant tactics. Of course in the volatile times we live in, I would say that the average life expectancy of any government is about two weeks.
Look at the current trajectory in terms of econmics. The dollar based system has a couple of weeks left and the pound is totally subservient. This is a major disruption but people pretend it isn’t going to happen. I can tell you that it is going to happen very soon.
I know how hysterical people are at the moment and really worried and looking for guidance, When this situation g ets seriois you are going to have millions of people who haven’t got the faintest idea about it. A lot of people are simply going to crack up. You have to accept this reality.
It isn;t easy trying to make people understand about the reality to come. We can obviate that if we comne together. If I have one desire it is to keep our people together.