Sunday 22 September 2024
UK: 80,000 could be forced to leave private schools over Labour's VAT raid
Some 80,000 children could be forced to leave private schools due to Labour’s tax raid on fees, according to a survey of parents.
From January, parents of the UK’s 620,000 private school pupils face a 20 per cent hike when the Government imposes VAT on fees.
While the Government predicts the increase will see between 18,000 and 40,000 children shift from private education into state schools – between 3 and 7 per cent – a report released this week will warn that 13 per cent – more than 80,000 pupils – could leave by January.
The Government claims that it stands to raise £1.5 billion by levying 20 per cent VAT on fees. But the findings in a new Wealth Index Report by financial planners Saltus, based on a survey of 2,000 affluent parents, will pile pressure on Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer to axe the tax raid.
The bombshell report follows calls from a leading think-tank, the Adam Smith Institute, for the Government to ‘rethink the policy’ because it could end up costing more than it raises in tax, as overwhelmed state schools are forced to find thousands more spaces.
Labour’s sums come from a disputed Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) policy paper which claimed as few as 3 per cent of pupils would leave private schools if VAT was introduced.
Some independent schools – including Eton – have said parents will have to stump up the full 20 per cent rise, but other schools will try to freeze or reduce fees to help families.
Head teachers of private schools across the country say they are already experiencing worrying falls in pupil numbers, while the Government is facing legal challenges on the policy, including from parents of special needs
Christine Cunniffe, the principal of LVS Ascot in Berkshire, had already seen pupils dropping out ahead of this school year, with at least one in ten expected to be gone by January and a fifth by next September.
She said: ‘So far I have received notice for a further 15 pupils going in January, stating the VAT charge is the reason.
‘We are estimating we will lose 20 per cent of our pupils by September 2025, but it could be a lot worse – we just don’t know what we are dealing with. It will not be a positive story for us.’
At Bradford Grammar School, headmaster Simon Hinchliffe said that ‘despite record interest in the school at open days’, there were 10 per cent fewer pupils than last year coming into Year 7.
He added: ‘We have seen a cumulative growth in anxiety about what this Labour Government is going to do to fees.’
Headmaster Nick Pietrek at Stafford Grammar School said: ‘I have heard estimates there could be a 40 per cent decline in school numbers over the next five years – these are not wide of the mark.’
Loveena Tandon, from the Education Not Taxation campaign group, said they were ‘not surprised’ by the figures while claiming the Government had still failed to meet them for talks despite their recent petition with 200,000 signatures calling on Labour to halt its plan.
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This is calculated: Israel ‘looking to take out people who matter’
Israel’s airstrike on a building in southern Beirut didn’t just kill a top Hezbollah commander - it took out an entire class of senior leaders of the militant group’s most elite fighting force, as the two foes lurch closer to all-out war.
Hezbollah on Saturday raised the death toll among its fighters from Friday’s airstrike to 16, including top military commander Ibrahim Aqil and many of the senior commanders of the elite Radwan force. The strike on top leadership followed a pair of broad attacks on the group’s rank and file, when thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies that had been rigged with explosives blew up roughly simultaneously across the country.
According to the group’s own death announcements, the week’s attacks accounted for about 10% of the 500 Hezbollah fighters to have been killed since the group started firing rockets across the border shortly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that sparked the war in the Gaza Strip.
Matthew Levitt, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute think tank, said Israel’s string of attacks is aimed at killing the militants who underpin Hezbollah’s ability to fight a war.
“They’re looking to take out people who matter,” he said. “So this is calculated.” The week has taken an enormous toll. Lebanon’s minister of health said Saturday that doctors had performed more than 2,000 surgeries on people injured in the attacks, primarily from the pager and walkie-talkie attacks on Hezbollah members. Friday’s airstrike left 31 dead, including women and children, he said. The total includes the fighters. More than a dozen people were still missing Saturday morning, municipal official Ali al-Haraka said at the blast site.
The attacks have also sharpened the already high levels of concern that Israel and Hezbollah were spiraling toward a wider war. Top U.S. military officials are increasingly worried that Israel could launch a major offensive in Lebanon.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin canceled plans for a trip beginning this weekend to Israel, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and the Pentagon announced Friday that the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman would head to the eastern Mediterranean on Monday amid the rising tensions. The USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group is already in the region.
Many of Washington’s closest Arab allies and partners in the Middle East fear a possible Israeli invasion of Lebanon, according to Arab officials, who said it could trigger unrest across the region and an opportunity for extremist groups to harness that anger and regroup.
Israel has been linked to several strikes on high-profile militants in Beirut. In late July, Israel killed top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in an airstrike on a building in a southern neighborhood of the city. Earlier in the year, Saleh al-Arouri, a founding member of Hamas, was killed in a suspected Israeli strike in the same area.
The Radwan force has trained for infiltration operations and gives Hezbollah additional offensive capabilities, making it a major target for Israel.
Nicholas Blanford, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs, said Aqil was one of the early military founders of Hezbollah with roots in other militant groups allegedly responsible for suicide bombings and attacks dating back four decades. The U.S. has linked him to the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut and the kidnapping of Americans in the 1980s.
About 25 years ago, Aqil survived an Israeli helicopter attack on his car as he drove through southern Lebanon. This time, Israel attacked Aqil and the other senior commanders with four blasts, one of which destroyed a neighboring nine-story apartment building while the other three came in at angles and hit the basement where the group was meeting, municipal official al-Haraka said.
Rescuers sift through the rubble at the scene of an Israeli strike that targeted Beirut's southern suburbs, as search and rescue operations continue, Lebanon's Hezbollah said that a second senior commander was among 16 fighters killed in an Israeli air strike on its Beirut stronghold.
Rescuers sift through the rubble at the scene of an Israeli strike that targeted Beirut's southern suburbs, as search and rescue operations continue, Lebanon's Hezbollah said that a second senior commander was among 16 fighters killed in an Israeli air strike on its Beirut stronghold.
The street where the attack occurred is lined with low-rise residential buildings and home to businesses including a money-transfer service, a chicken restaurant, a pharmacy and a barber shop. The area had been cordoned off by Hezbollah and Lebanon’s army, and emergency responders were pulling limbs out of the rubble and repairing downed electrical lines.
Ali Daher, 55, who works in a real-estate office 100 yards away, said he went to the site after hearing a loud blast and found injured people and burned-out motorcycles scattered on the ground. The strike was much bigger than the one that killed Hezbollah commander Shukr over the summer.
“We have grown accustomed,” he said, expecting more attacks. “The fear is gone from me.” Hezbollah is now struggling to recover from a week of heavy blows and plug deep security breaches, while restoring morale and order among its cadres. It also faces the prospect of further strikes as Israel steps up its military pressure and shifts its focus from Gaza to the north.
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant warned late Thursday that “the sequence of military actions will continue.”
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New Docs Shed Light on Air Force’s ‘Goal’ to Reduce ‘White Male Population’ Joining Officer Ranks
The Air Force finally handed over a trove of documents pertaining to its sweeping “goal” of reducing the number of white male applicants in a popular officer program after spending months stonewalling requests for their release.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C.Q. Brown—at the time the highest-ranking member of the Air Force—issued a memorandum in 2022 that the branch was updating its racial and gender demographic goals for applicants seeking to become officers, in a bid to prioritize “diversity and inclusion.”
Internal documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation include a slideshow from 2022 where the Air Force outlines racial and gender quotas and details how it hopes to “achieve” a reduced number of white males in its Reserve Officers’ Training Corps officer’s applicant program.
The documents reflect the Biden-Harris Pentagon’s intense focus on implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in the armed forces, even as the military continues to combat dwindling morale among its rank-and-file, recruiting and retention shortfalls, and low pay.
“The American people are rightly concerned that, at a time when our country is facing dangerous and increasing threats throughout the world, the Air Force is focused on recruitment efforts based on arbitrary racial diversity goals—not merit or increasing the force’s lethality,” James Fitzpatrick, director of the Center to Advance Security in America, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Center to Advance Security in America requested records regarding the Air Force’s new officer applicant standards through a federal transparency request in 2023. At the time, the Air Force said it couldn’t find any records, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Center to Advance Security in America then sued the Air Force for the records in April 2024 and received hundreds of documents and slides in response, which the Daily Caller News Foundation subsequently obtained.
A spokesperson for the Air Force told the Daily Caller News Foundation, “The FOIA request was being processed at multiple levels within the Air Force.”
“One of the units responded to the FOIA request with a ‘no responsive records’ response after conducting their own local search, while the remainder of the units continued to process the responsive documents that were ultimately provided,” the spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
One of the slides in question, labeled “AFROTC White,” depicts a graph that shows the percentage of white male ROTC officer applicants declining from approximately 60% in fiscal year 2019 to a projected 50% in fiscal year 2023. The graph further details how the Air Force’s goal is to reduce that percentage down to approximately 43% by fiscal year 2029, denoted by a star with the label “achieve(d) goal.”
“White male population will decline as other demographics increase,” the slide reads.
The respective slides in question also explain that the Air Force is either on track or needs to do more to hit racial and gender quotas in the ROTC’s officer applicant pool.
For example, with the African American population, the slideshow suggests the Air Force “target [the] male population through ongoing programs and marketing” and notes it has already met its “female goal” for ROTC officer applicants. For the American Indian, Asian, and Hispanic applicants, the slideshow says the Air Force is “on track to grow diversity.”
“These documents show us that the Air Force has taken steps toward implementing their new directive of specific racial quotas for officer recruitment and enrollment throughout the branch,” Fitzpatrick told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Included in the slide deck are funding requests for diversity recruiting initiatives, including $500,000 for “diversity advertising campaigns” and $250,000 for “influencer engagements.”
In a separate set of documents from as early as 2022, the Air Force outlines its efforts to modify ROTC scholarship programs, which “play an important role in accession and diversity goals.” The Air Force suggests modifying the scholarship models could remove certain “testing barriers” to entry for underrepresented groups.
The diversity plans extend to the Air Force’s Aim High Flight Academy, an aviation scholarship program for high school, ROTC, and Air Force Academy students, according to the documents. The Air Force notes that the Aim High Flight Academy applicant pool should be made up of a “minimum” of 60% underrepresented groups, further noting that it must be at least 35% minorities.
Like other branches of the military, the Air Force has struggled to keep up with recruiting and retention targets in recent years. The Navy is expected to miss its recruiting goals in 2024; the Marine Corps, Army, and Air Force are on track to meet their goals, although the latter two branches missed their targets in 2022 and 2023, according to Military Times.
Only approximately 57% of servicemembers or military families polled by the Military Family Advisory Network in 2023 said they’d recommend joining the service, compared to 74% in 2019. Among some of the reasons the respondents wouldn’t recommend service were the politically charged nature of the military, differences and divisions, and low pay, among others.
A yearlong study from the Arizona State University Center for American Institutions found that the Pentagon has turned into a “vast DEI bureaucracy” in the last four decades, a challenge that has been exacerbated by the Biden-Harris administration.
“It’s no surprise that young people are turning away from military service in record numbers … DEI indoctrination has become a core component of military training that begins for officers even at the service academies,” Matt Lohmeier, former Space Force commander, said in a statement in June.
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More black on black domestic violence in Australia
It happens all the time but it is only when the woman dies that it comes to attention/i>
A killer who claimed a knife accidentally impaled his girlfriend in the neck had a history of violence against women, including pushing another partner while in her wheelchair into oncoming traffic, the WA Supreme Court has been told.
WARNING: This story contains details some readers may find confronting and the name and image of an Indigenous person who has died.
Christopher Thomas Dimer has been sentenced to life in prison with a minimum non-parole period of 20 years for murdering his partner Shauna Lee Rose Headland at a townhouse in the Perth suburb of Nollamara in March 2022.
Ms Headland's mother Janis told the court her daughter's murder had reverberated through the whole family. (Supplied)
Dimer had claimed a knife fell from where it was wedged into a window frame to hold up a curtain and went straight into Ms Headland's neck, telling police he had tried and failed to catch it as it fell.
He was found guilty of murdering Ms Headland in a jury trial earlier this year.
In sentencing, Justice Joseph McGrath, rejected Dimer's explanation of events, finding he instead had picked up the knife and stabbed Ms Headland during an argument which turned violent.
Ms Headland, a Yamatji-Noongar woman, was only 22-years-old when she and Dimer, now 42, began dating.
The court heard she had previously suffered domestic violence at his hands, including one instance where he drank a bottle of whisky and punched her repeatedly in the face at a Perth train station in 2020.
Dimer's history of violence against women
It was revealed in the WA Supreme Court today that Dimer had a more extensive history of violence against two other former partners, including an attack on another woman in 2020 and an instance in 2015 when he pushed his then partner into oncoming traffic while she was in her wheelchair.
He then claimed that woman had made the allegation up but ultimately pleaded guilty.
Dimer was sentenced in the WA Supreme Court on Friday after being found guilty of murder earlier this year. (ABC News: David Weber)
Ms Headland's mother and brother gave victim impact statements to the court describing the loss of Ms Headland as devastating and heartbreaking, saying loss had reverberated through their whole family.
Shauna's mother, Janis Headland, told the court since her daughter was killed she suffered from anxiety attacks, at times breaking down crying as she described her love for her daughter.
"If you had known my big girl, loving, caring, kind, put everyone before herself," Mrs Headland said.
"My baby deserved everything. She was only 26, she was only a baby, still growing up.
"She didn't have the chance to be a mother, see the world, have a career."
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