Starmer son finds a quiet place to study for GCSEs

You've totally misunderstood (either accidentally or deliberately). No money was handed over, they stayed in a friend's house to give the child some peace and quiet. The house is in London and the market rate is high ( just for context I live in a semi in a suburb of London and the house next door is to let for £7500 a month) He did the correct thing in declaring it. What's the problem?

Did he get any sausages when he was there?

Every person on earth has a personal life and day to day challenges. To speculate (and this is massive speculation on Starmers part) that having a few journalists taking photos outside your house is disturbing enough to affect his sons GCSEs - is being highly, highly indulgent.

I can understand free accommodation being given to a son to escape something like domestic abuse or physical violence (which by the way is what some children/women are actually dealing with and receive no help from the government). But I can’t understand accommodation to the tune of £20,0000 in a scenario such as this.

If a couple of journalists outside your house taking photos tanks your son’s GCSE grades, you haven’t got a journalist problem, you’ve got a thick son problem. To claim otherwise doesn’t give credit to all the children out there who have performed impressively well in GCSEs and A level exams despite REAL (!) problems like financial hardship, DV etc.

But of course, as with the clothes freebies, his son is more special than our sons and daughters. One set of ethics for him, another for the general public.

It’s just a different coloured trough. This one is red.

And just when you think it can’t get any worse for the PM……

Is it- or is it not allowing educational advantage to be bought? You could say it’s corrupt, given Starmer thoughts on inequity in education. What about this doesn’t wreak of corruption to you @BIossomtoes ?

Would have been less (notional) money to send him to Eton for a term. Squeezed him through before the VAT increase. Or Harrow--closer to them. Or Highgate.

Thing is, that educated people with money are ALWAYS going to find a way to benefit their children. Of course they are. If not school fees, then private tutors, educational trips, music lessons, holidays in quiet places before important exams (I know lots of Labour voters who'll rent an expensive Cornish cottage to provide quiet revision space.) They'll have friends who can offer work experience or cheap flats to rent when the offspring need it for the first, low-paid, London job.

It's human nature. You can't stop people doing it. Even having decent conversations with them at the table is a privilege that not all children have.

Unless the state takes over all child-raising from birth onwards, it will always happen, and Bollinger Socialist Starmer is no exception. They're from North London, after all. 😀

Labour are supposed to be for the people the Conservatives don’t even pretend to be do they and that why it seems so bad, the hypocrisy.

Maybe Starmer could arrange for 20k donations to be made to any child who suffers disruption to their education? He wants educational inequity to end? Correct? Or does that not include his children?

Oh come on - the Starmers are wealthy, plenty wealthy enough to pay for some quiet and private accommodation for their children. Accepting 20k worth of accommodation from a donor who is then given a pass to No 10 is exactly the kind of gifts for favours nonsense for which he criticised Johnson and others.

I entirely agreed with him on the greed and pork barrel culture of the Johnson crew but if you are going to make a big issue of corruption and croneyism you need to be double careful to keep clear of it yourself, not accept expensive favours and then try to justify for for special circumstances in the same way.

Its also stupid. Surprisingly so.

I'd also consider that when my DC were at school they had plenty of peers who had no private and quiet study space of any kind at all (at least one was in a refuge, multiple in shocking temporary accommodation). They were not gifted quiet accommodation by wealthy donors but then they had nothing to offer in return for the favour.

Surely it’s his moral obligation to cover his families costs?

Pardon? So accepting 20k’s worth of free hotels or similar isn’t bent as fuck?

🤣🤣

For someone who constantly rubbished the polls before the election you’re putting a hell of a lot of credence in them now. What’s changed?

You forgot about the donkeys!!

But but but.. his wife is an NHS worker! And his dad was a toolmaker, remember!!

🤣

I wondered when these words would start showing up in a word cloud and lo on googling there's already a savanta poll

The one word that came up the most was Liar

"The word cloud shows that "liar" is the most prominent response from the 2,000 people surveyed ahead of his keynote speech to the Labour conference."

You know he may have actually asked his children.

They aren't little any more.

There are quite a few current and former politicians who got involved in politics as younger teens than 16.

Which is fine. But it's his problem to then manage. Going on about it to the public and taking freebies, expecting us to feel sympathy for a decision he made that put his kids in that position in the first place is too much for many of us I'm afraid, especially when he could have just quietly paid for a suitable house temporarily for his child to have peace.

😂😂😂

But but but.. his wife is an NHS worker! And his dad was a toolmaker, remember!!

There is no £20,000.

🙄

If his child needed a peaceful environment, then he could have afforded to pay for that. Instead he took another freebie.

You know he may have actually asked his children.

They aren't little any more.

There are quite a few current and former politicians who got involved in politics as younger teens than 16.

Of course he had a position! He was the leader of the opposition, not some MP from a distant hamlet. You can’t seriously pursue that as a reasonable justification. Apologies, disingenuous wasn’t the word I was looking for, it was hypocritical.

Why can't his son study at home?

I'm aghast that anyone believed him.