Levelling Up - more than a slogan or another Con con?

True ‘levelling up’ for Lincolnshire. As you may know Lincolnshire is just about total Nasty Party country; stick a blue rosette on a pig and it will be voted in, in fact I sometimes think they already have. This mornings local newspaper for Boston has reported that Lincolnshire has has £12m lopped off its road/transport budget. All the local councils (just about all Nasty Party) and MPs recently made representations to a transport minister but they are not hopeful of it being overturned. For people who don’t know Lincolnshire almost all roads are single carriageway even though we transport, just about, all the veg grown in the UK. Apart from the A1 which skirts the west of the county there is about 3 miles, total, of dual carriageway. I cycle most days and it is getting dangerous to do so because of the state of the roads; potholes and cracks everywhere.

Levelling up at its finest.
 
metalblue said:
Just to focus on private schools, what Labour propose is actually levelling down - it’s not a policy to improve the quality of the state education - to make private schools irrelevant - but just to make private education accessible by less people due to increased costs. What the Tories propose is just more of the same.

For me a real levelling up policy in this area would be to make private school fees payable ahead of tax - and therefore more obtainable to more families - along with perhaps something like a student loan but for the parents to help spread the costs again repaid ahead of tax. The state system will have smaller class sizes and better per pupil spend - which in theory would improve outcomes for those pupils as well (particularly if we also look at providing some skilled trades teaching at high school as well).

This isn’t about privatisation of education or even state education v private education, but about saying to those that can and want to afford it - do - and to those that can’t here are better state outcomes than we currently have. Now surely that is levelling up.
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There comes a point when a person's idealogical position and way of seeing the world becomes distorted from reality.

They are no longer wearing Royal Blue tinted sunglasses but looking through a kaleidoscope.

The above is one of them.

Where has something like that ever worked and achieved better social mobility?
 
Corky said:
Having read the document is is standard fare for a white paper, lot of initiatives will of course need legislation and even further white papers are promised, one as soon as spring. They normally role over funding, take account of recent awards like the LU funding for town centres at the end of last year, and there is reference to bringing forward changes in housing that were consulted on in 2019 and stopped by Covid, as well measures in the 2020 planning white paper with regard to developer contributions.

It does rightly point out by some measures London is a complete shit hole, high over crowding, excessive homelessness and chronic affordable housing issues. There are thriving cities in the north/midlands, but these regional city centres seem to drain the life out of their neighbours, like Leeds/Bradford, Sheffield/Rotherham, Liverpool/Knowsley, Newcastle/Sunderland, all two sides of the same coin. The paper looks to stop the disparity in growth mentioned, but I can't see it anytime soon.
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Just a linguistic thing but "disparity" now seems (in health outcomes and elsewhere) to be the government's preference rather than "inequality"...
 
Fode N The Hole said:
There comes a point when a person's idealogical position and way of seeing the world becomes distorted from reality.

They are no longer wearing Royal Blue tinted sunglasses but looking through a kaleidoscope.

The above is one of them.

Where has something like that ever worked and achieved better social mobility?
Click to expand...

So I’ve crunched some numbers and derived a policy of sorts.

Average salary is £25k. Let’s assume both parents work. So under out current system that family brings home about £3,400 a month. If we let them pay for private education ahead of tax that drops to around £2,700. £700 a month worse off, yeah I get that won’t work for many families - it will for some. So let’s also chuck in housing rent/mortgages as being payable ahead of tax - average is about £1,350 according to Google and that gets us to take home to about £2k a month but now they’ve also covered the mortgage/rent and are pretty much as they were before with take home of £3,400 and rent/mortgage still to pay. You can make the tax system progressive and remove the ability to offset 100% of school and housing costs as you move up the income ladder to the point those with the biggest shoulders get nothing.

So there you have it, two parents earning average pay, with 1 kid, can opt for private education and that should give you social mobility.

I’m sure someone will think but what if they have more than 1 kid and so on and so forth which I get but we can’t reach complete fairness and we aren’t trying to abolish state schools and by reducing class sizes the quality of their education ought to naturally improve as well. We will have a better educated population, improving social mobility, and we can do it relatively simply via tax policy.

I compel this statement to the house.
 
metalblue said:
So I’ve crunched some numbers and derived a policy of sorts.

Average salary is £25k. Let’s assume both parents work. So under out current system that family brings home about £3,400 a month. If we let them pay for private education ahead of tax that drops to around £2,700. £700 a month worse off, yeah I get that won’t work for many families - it will for some. So let’s also chuck in housing rent/mortgages as being payable ahead of tax - average is about £1,350 according to Google and that gets us to take home to about £2k a month but now they’ve also covered the mortgage/rent and are pretty much as they were before with take home of £3,400 and rent/mortgage still to pay. You can make the tax system progressive and remove the ability to offset 100% of school and housing costs as you move up the income ladder to the point those with the biggest shoulders get nothing.

So there you have it, two parents earning average pay, with 1 kid, can opt for private education and that should give you social mobility.

I’m sure someone will think but what if they have more than 1 kid and so on and so forth which I get but we can’t reach complete fairness and we aren’t trying to abolish state schools and by reducing class sizes the quality of their education ought to naturally improve as well. We will have a better educated population, improving social mobility, and we can do it relatively simply via tax policy.

I compel this statement to the house.
Click to expand...

Nice attempt mate but this is as realistic as Rascal's ideas about labour theory of value.

If you implement a policy like that you delegitimise the tax system even further by introducing a culture of opt-outs.

It would also undermine the value of good public services by encouraging and advocating people to use private provision.

What you have failed to grasp is that private school provision exists to reduce social mobility. Wealthy parents can maintain the social status of their children by buying a place at these schools.




Do you want another go at finding a real life example of something similar to your proposal?
 
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Vic said:
Just a linguistic thing but "disparity" now seems (in health outcomes and elsewhere) to be the government's preference rather than "inequality"...
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Disparity/inequity in health and inequality/inequity in economics. Just (mis)use disparity in all circumstances as it's the one that sounds least offensive to the electorate...
 
metalblue said:
Just to focus on private schools, what Labour propose is actually levelling down - it’s not a policy to improve the quality of the state education - to make private schools irrelevant - but just to make private education accessible by less people due to increased costs. What the Tories propose is just more of the same.

For me a real levelling up policy in this area would be to make private school fees payable ahead of tax - and therefore more obtainable to more families - along with perhaps something like a student loan but for the parents to help spread the costs again repaid ahead of tax. The state system will have smaller class sizes and better per pupil spend - which in theory would improve outcomes for those pupils as well (particularly if we also look at providing some skilled trades teaching at high school as well).

This isn’t about privatisation of education or even state education v private education, but about saying to those that can and want to afford it - do - and to those that can’t here are better state outcomes than we currently have. Now surely that is levelling up.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately supply and demand also come into this and good private schools are generally oversubscribed, many with waiting lists. So in reality what it would mean is that the best would just increase their prices making them inaccessible to people on normal salaries and you would end up with a second tier of not so good private schools just giving the impression that they are better than your ordinary comprehensive school but in reality are aren't.
Grammar schools based on ability are actually more progressive in my books, particular if there is no backdoor for those with money.
 
metalblue said:
Just to focus on private schools, what Labour propose is actually levelling down - it’s not a policy to improve the quality of the state education - to make private schools irrelevant - but just to make private education accessible by less people due to increased costs. What the Tories propose is just more of the same.

For me a real levelling up policy in this area would be to make private school fees payable ahead of tax - and therefore more obtainable to more families - along with perhaps something like a student loan but for the parents to help spread the costs again repaid ahead of tax. The state system will have smaller class sizes and better per pupil spend - which in theory would improve outcomes for those pupils as well (particularly if we also look at providing some skilled trades teaching at high school as well).

This isn’t about privatisation of education or even state education v private education, but about saying to those that can and want to afford it - do - and to those that can’t here are better state outcomes than we currently have. Now surely that is levelling up.
Click to expand...


Wouldn't mind private schools if they played on a level playing field. That would mean losing their charitable status and paying the right level of tax and losing the ability to provide pupils with 'softer' examinations such as International GCSEs and A Levels.

Your proposal would mean that anyone could go to a Private school ..... and theres no way the Tories will allow the ''great unwashed'' to do that.
 
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