Always amazed when discussing private schools on here how many people using them genuinely think they're "squeezed middle" or not rich. Apart from a handful of full bursaries everyone using private schools is rich.
A salary of £57k puts you in the top 10% of earners. A private secondary school will cost £20/25k out of taxed income.
You may not *feel* rich but that's not the same as not *being* rich.
Last tweet on this I promise but "I/they scrimped and saved to afford private school" doesn't mean you/they are not rich. Most people have to scrimp and save to have a nice Xmas or buy a new fridge. A fair few have to scrimp and save to heat their house.
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The best heuristic I can come up with for trying to imagine the reaction of a normal voter to stuff is thinking through the indirect ways they will experience a decision, as they're v unlikely to engage with the actual decision.
Like there's a load of spending review decisions that I can see are going to have an impact on cost of living - so even though most people won't be engaging with them now how much will they blame the Government for lower spending power in a few months?
The hardest things to spot are the very occassional moments in politics when lots of voters make a simultaneous negative judgement about character - Brown "bottling" the election being the obvious example.
Thanks to everyone for helpful responses to this. Learnt a lot. Seems like a lot of the debate comes down to how you interpret 13.57 to 13.60 of the EHRC's Statutory Code of Practice on the 2010 Equalities Act. equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/…
The NHS budget increase means it will represent 44% of all public service spending in 2024/25 up from 27% in 1999-2000. The real story of austerity is not a reduction in the size of the state but the NHS (and pensions) sucking up all the cash.
Covid will hopefully be a one off but the demographic and healthcare trends driving this aren't going away. At some point it stops being sustainable without some radical thinking or technological change.
Another way of expressing the issue. In cash terms grants to local authorities have fallen by 30% since 2010 and *before covid* the NHS budget had increase by 20% since 2010.
An army of 42 people is a shit army. That's not even going to be able to invade Andorra.
Nice example of a common maths confusion. £9M (combined salary of said army) is 0.025% of £36bn. But people find it intuitively hard to conceptualize the different between a million and a billion.
The classic example is a million seconds is 11.5 days and a billion seconds is just under 32 years.
Pedantically entertained that they started the graph in 1950 otherwise it would have shown taxes were higher a few years after the war and that the headline was wrong.
But also the Telegraph should be pleased it's like the War again when Britain was great; men were men etc etc...
Of the course the "death knell of Conservatism" line is absolute nonsense. The only consistent principle of Conservatism (not conservatism) is to retain power or get it back. From the Second Reform Act to tariffs to tax rises. Whatever it takes.