I'm getting the impression that you're happy for the success of a child to be tied to the wealth of a parent?
If it was politically palatable obviously a better approach would be to increase income tax and use it to fund state schools so there's less of a gap but that would just be attacked from a different angle.
Less "happy" and more willing to accept that this is an inevitable situation and always will be.
My view is we're already being taxed the maximum of what the UK populace will accept, which is backed up by historic tax to GDP data; so again that isn't really an option (increasing tax from where we are will decrease tax take).
Truthfully I believe private education should be accessible to more people and that the competition of private education if it were accessible to more would drive public education to be better.
For example let's say that it costs £11k per annum to send a child to state school. Imagine a situation where the government offered an education credit of £8k (would have to be calculated to benefit the Exchequer) for parents to send their child wherever they wanted with state schools "costing" the £8k credit. Parents could use that £8k credit and top it up themselves if they wanted to add an extra £5-10k to send privately.
I'd also in tandem allow a low interest non secure loan scheme for parents who couldn't afford it but wanted to invest in education over and above the £8k state school level.
It would be modelled to be a "win-win" for the government. If an extra million students chose private school education the government is "saving" £3k per pupil which would mean a large increase in per pupil spend for those who remain in state education (straight away it would ensure smaller state class sizes)
I don't disagree with the concept of economic modelling, but you could also make a lot of businesses profitable if you get them VAT and corporation tax exemptions. It's partly a question of whether it's the ethical thing to be doing to be tax-protecting certain non-essential businesses. Should private healthcare also not have to pay taxes too, while we have the NHS? What about security firms, while we have a Police?
Secondly, a lot of these schools have built massive private assets over time. They could swallow the majority of the tax costs while protecting the net fees paid by the parents, if they were so inclined. Like I said, I agree with doing modelling but I somehow really doubt that modelling would show net drop in tax receipts.
I don't mean a specific drop in tax receipts. I mean any increase would be more than swallowed by the extra cost of paying for those children to be educated in the state system. Intuitively to me it seems the teachers, support staff etc of teaching those previously privately educated children would outweigh the tax on those who remained in private education.
In terms of charitable status I think both private education and private healthcare save the Exchequer billions. People who pay for state services and also don't use them are fantastic for the country and allow greater spending per patient/pupil for poorer families. In fact I'd go so far as to say if you can afford to relieve this burden on the state then morally you absolutely should.
In the sense that he's only promising to return to the numbers there were before Cameron decimated them you mean?
Pity crime and detection levels have swung the wrong way in between really.
It's populist not because we don't need more money investing in crime prevention... but because 20,000 Police officers is not the best way of achieving a reduction in crime.
If Johnson would have said "we're giving an extra £1.5b per annum to the police to spend how they see fit" that would be fair enough. However forcing them to use it to recruit 20,000 officers, just so he can say at the next election that he's returning to previous policing numbers is... Populist.
