The Irony.. PM's donation was for ‘son to study for GCSEs’

Did you get this indignant about Johnson taking millions whilst rewarding donors with fat government contracts?

Well not which is why it does not happened in any other country.

You think that the son of Keir Starmer would have been left in peace to study in the library in the run up to the election? How naive of you.

OP the situations are not comparable at all
The donation was the loan of a flat so his son wasn't interested by constantly by news reporters outside the house. His child is at a state school .
Vat on private schools is fair. I have never understood why they were vat exempt anyway.

That's massively less disruptive than having to change your school, friends, GCSE courses/subjects/exam boards during Y10 or Y11! And to accept £20k to compensate for your Dad being a politician while adding 20% to school fees for thousands of children is hugely hypocritical.

I don't get the false equivalence here. He shouldn't have taken so many donations but as he was in opposition none of them influenced gov policy. And the vat thing is fine in my opinion.

Boris got more donations for decorating his flat alone than the donations keir got in 5 years.

I see stats twisted to make out he got more but he really didn't. Boris had holidays, organic food deliveries, baby stuff, the works too.

I'd say loads of people did, I mean look on here pre GE

Is it not the parents that'll be stressed rather than the kids?

If it were my child I'd be not talking about my money worries in front of them, I'd just be encouraging them to do their best.

And if they were part way through the year I'd be moving heaven and earth to find the money to finish their year.

If I'd already found £17k to pay for the year I'm sure I could find a further £4k to pay for the vat.

It's what, £300 a month for a year? That could go on a 0% credit card worst case scenario.

This thread is about disrupting exam years, and @coruscations is absolutely right that bringing in VAT on private school fees won't force the vast majority of private school parents to disrupt their children's exam years.

Well that is the point why he does the same? If you accept this why you criticised Boris? Or is ok if it is a left winger hypocrite?

It’s like they read Animal Farm as a blueprint of what to do once you’re in power. The optics of “I HAD to have a box at the football” instead of even slightly considering that maybe he just couldn’t go. “It’s normal for politicians to accept donations” - well that might be true, but if your chancellor is banging on how “we’re all in this together, we all have to bear the brunt” and then having a millionaire pay for your clothes, birthday parties and holidays? It just looks absolutely terrible.

I cannot believe there wasn’t one person there saying “accepting 100k of donations for fripperies at the same time as taking 300 away from pensioners is a bad look”

They really are. Why cause the damage to some children for such a bad policy whilst taking money because disrupting dc is difficult

Total arsewipes

Who was gullible enough to believe this though?

Are you ok? Obviously it’s not just Y11. And it’s not just the private school pupils. The issue is much wider than that. Think about it, a little more.

Thousands of children? Are there really thousands of families with children in Year 11 whose finances are so much on a knife-edge that they will take their children out of school rather than pay VAT for two terms?

I think we all know the answer to that one.

And yet Keir with his merry band of Wankers claimed to be oh so different. That's what they were saying! 'We're not like those greedy Tories', 'we're just like you'.

I read it is so many times, Labour voters wanted a man of integrity, principled, the total opposite to Boris. That's what they were voting for. Apparently.

This should have more visibility in the news - what an utterly stupid decision.

Yep. Ludicrous people

I should imagine it's more likely to be because many expected more from a labour leader, especially when a huge shift to a government of morals and principles was what was sold to the electorate by Starmer.

It's like when Trump does something awful but no-one's remotely surprised because it's Trump.

But people were promised so much from a labour government and were expecting the change they were promised. So it's more disappointing as people had higher hopes.

The greed is astounding - claiming for this and that, when millionaires with big salaries. Even if you have no morals doing this surely they have advisors who identify how bad visuals are impacted by certain actions.

I actually get what the OP is saying - some private school children will have to move during GCSE / A Level years and this also could lead in an increased class size in state schools impacting their GCSE learning too. It's is ironic that the PM is preserving his child's right to a non-distributive GCSE year. I'm sure a lot of elderly would also like an undisruptive year, where they can reside at home without worrying about the heating and having to decamp to libraries, etc for warmth.

Would all those parents carping about being happy with the VAT on education, be happy to increase their taxes to improve all state schools. No. Thought not.

From where I'm sitting 'the Keir' seems to be significantly worse than Johnson. To me, it seems like Labour comms are out robotically reciting 'grown ups' and '£22 billion black hole' and 'fix foundations' and I couldn't give a toss about some has-been from a couple of years ago, Starmer is here and now unfortunately.

Yes, however Ofqual said that loads of state school kids were learning in schools with inadequate facilities and didn’t even have teachers so if they gave special consideration to the RAAC kids then they’d need to justify not giving special consideration to all the kids disadvantaged by the various deficits in state schools.

And I guess I can see their point.

If only there were the same number of threads about those issues as the VAT one….

Also, it's pretty shitty and tone deaf to be stating that kids get one chance at GCSEs at 16 when obviously a large proportion of 16 year olds end up having to retake them or leave school without them, and lots of SEN pupils will be taking them much later or doing alternative qualifications or not taking any.

What struck me about his notion that 16 year olds only get one shot at GCSEs was the elitism inherent in that statement and how out of touch with reality it makes him look.

I get that he's talking about his own child, and obviously having a child pass GCSEs with stellar grades at 16 is the ideal for most parents, but it's interesting that he views passing GCSEs at 16 as an essential (hence the apparent necessity of the donation), whereas for most parents it's simply an unattainable pipe dream.

It seems like it was an ill-advised attempt to appear relatable to other parents, but in many cases it will have the opposite effect because it's such an elitist view that one's life is ruined if they can't achieve a perfect set of GCSE grades the first time they try.

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed over the last couple of days that as soon as Labour MPs are criticised for having their snouts in the trough the immediate response is 'it's for muh KIDS'? Starmer said he wanted to keep his children private - unless he needs a human shield of course.

(Which doesn't have anything to do with the OP so I'll just say I think private schools should be abolished because all they do is shore up unearned and unmerited privilege and lower public standards at the top as we've seen for centuries, look at the state of things. So I haven't totally tried to derail)