Some UK hospitals with emergency services in complete state of crisis
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
yes, they are still living in a bubble: do not care at all for what they call "peasants".
From the other side I think non-rich (and the many just poor or poorer) do not get angry enough since they do realize it's hard for many others (Ukranian and Russian e.g.): I guess we still have to wait awhile until somebody wakes up and reckon "the king is naked".
btw: Nigel Farage is not sleeping well
For education, on the other hand, rich people and MPs can indeed fully opt out. And private schools still have charitable status.
Since the state system spends about 6.7k per pupil this means either (a) that the state saves 3.7b a year, or (b) that the state could spend an extra 380 pounds per state school pupil with the money.
My conclusion is that private schools are helping tremendously but are singled out for ideological reasons/politics of envy. Many families who send their children to private schools could not afford a 20%+ in tuition fees, so would fall back on state schools and the net effect on state schools/government finances would be negative.
It's different for healthcare because, first as you mention everyone has to go to NHS' A&E for an emergency, but also now the same facility/professional runs both NHS and private services. If you need to go to (NHS) hospital for potentially important checks and analyses they'll tell you the next appointment available is in 3 months on the NHS or next week privately. Dentists will say that they don't take new NHS patients but will happily see you the next day privately (that one is purely because NHS charges have not been increased in 10+ years so that dentists don't want to bother with so little money anymore).
If private healthcare had to be provided only in fully private facilities then potentially it could help. But, same as for schools, the state should not take the opportunity of fewer patients to cut spending.
All that being said, at the moment the main issue at A&Es and hospitals seems to be a massive surge in the number of patients.
* Per the comment up-thread, private schools allow the rich and powerful to insulate themselves from a failing system. If these people’s kids were at state schools, you can bet state schools would be better resourced pretty soon.
* Relatedly, private schools perpetuate social stratification and reduce social mobility and equality of opportunity. Rich parents buy better education for their kids, who get better jobs, and stay rich.
* Rich kids mix with other rich kids, rarely encountering poor kids. This gives them a distorted understanding of how the world works, and a lack of empathy for the poor. See this extraordinary paper in the American Economic Review: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20180044
* Because rich and middle class kids get filtered into private schools, poorer kids lose out on the positive peer effects those kids would have had on their education.
For these reasons, I think one could reasonably argue for a ban on private schools. But at the very least, I think we should stop providing generous tax advantages to them. In my eyes the public benefit (which is the normal test for charitability) is vastly outweighed by the public costs.
A counter, more positive take, is that if state schools actually pushed all pupils then the middle class wouldn't be looking for alternatives. The existence of private schools is not what creates the issues the state system suffers from, which is potentially lack of funding (but as per my previous comment, private schools actually help on that front) and but also too often a culture that does not promote effort and ambition (which is what those who choose private schools are after).
Education is first and foremost down to the parents and values learnt at home. The greatest filter is there and those who prioritise education will make their children succeed.
An anecdote: When my daughter was in (state) primary school she did not do that well in maths and was put in the lower set group. When we asked the school what they did in the lower set in order to push pupils up they effectively replied "nothing, we just sort pupils according to ability, some children are not very good at maths". So here you have it, they give up on 8 year old pupils. So we did what other parents do: additional private tuition (which the majority of families can actually afford) and ultimately the school self-congratulated themselves for moving our daughter to the top set because she improved so much. Obviously, we looked for alternatives for secondary school.
It's not a question of being 'rich', it's a question of priorities.
I already pointed you to a rigorous academic paper to back up one of them. I don’t have the same to hand for the others, but something like this is a good start: https://theconversation.com/why-britains-private-schools-are...
I don’t see that your anecdote has much bearing on the argument. I certainly agree that all state schools should be excellent and some of them surely have room to improve.
Banning private schools isn't going to improve state schools in the same way that purging the bourgeoisie did not help the proletariat.
The best state schools are already in good areas. This would make those state schools even better without any effect on the others.
The bottom line is again how much parents value education and the culture of effort and ambition at school.
Improving state schools is orthogonal with the existence of private schools or their charity status, and different 'classes' will always exist, they even still did in the USSR.
Yes, but you do that by actually helping them, not by hitting those who do well or already have the environment to support them.
You actually help them by changing schools' culture, and investing so as to cut class sizes and to extend school hours.
Your dismissal of the article as ‘political’ makes me wonder how far our disagreement is positive and how far it’s normative.
If I try to start from a clean slate without all of the institutional baggage our country has, I can't come up with a framing for education which doesn't make private schools a gross symbol of self-perpetuating inequality. When you add all of the cruft of the British class system into the mix, the picture doesn't improve.
Since getting private cover for myself, I've discovered that it is (at least) 3-tiered; for us plebs who can afford regular health insurance, you get all the inconvenience of dealing with your local GP as a required first-line step, plus all of the bullshit related to dealing with insurance companies who try to weasel out of paying for anything. I assume truly wealthy people get a different, considerably better standard of care and can shrug off the insurance company interaction (or get their staff to do the leg-work).
Any other private hospital may have the facilities to perform routine operations, but relies on the NHS to pick up the pieces if something goes dramatically wrong. And even the private ICUs in London probably aren't as well-equipped as a major NHS teaching hospital.
I'm actually really worried about having an accident right now because the wait times are insane at all the hospitals around me.
Anything other than acute trauma, I can pay to go private (just did, after getting a really bad bacterial infection in my sinuses) and see a GP, get diagnosed, get a prescription for whatever I need.
According to the ONS, 64% of adults are overweight and obese. To add to that, we have a more aged population than when the NHS was founded. Binge drinking and social drinking are the absolute norm, and smoking/vaping is on the increase (smoking increased during Covid because people were "bored", people take up vaping who never smoked).
People abandon the last bastions of basic daily exercise in walking and cycling, in preference of e-scooters.
A population with an apathetic view towards keeping fit and healthy. The NHS will only get better if a good proportion of the population decide to handle their own health. That seems unlikely to happen.
Go to any gym and see what the very few people who exercise constitute as a workout. Walking on a treadmill for 15 minutes or sat on machines reading their phones. However everybody seems to walk around in athletics / yoga clothing.
Go out for a run and see how many people you see running. Most people you meet do zero exercise beyond walking around.
All the while, every apartment block in our cities sees 20 Deliveroo/Just Eat takeaway deliveries per hour. Restaurant dining is a multiple-time-per-week activity. Salty and oily food dominates in fast food, takeaways, ready meals and restaurants.
This makes people angry because it's the truth.
If you want to see why the NHS will collapse, take a 5 minute walk around any built up area in the UK and look at people's (substantial) guts.
Does something similar happen in England, or are they just extremely short staffed?
UK politicians have spent the past ten years talking about "efficiency savings" (meaning real term cuts), and so now the system is running normally at 90-95% capacity. And then you have something like COVID, combined with a bad flu season, combined with a bad respiratory illness season for young people, combined with a cold snap where councils didn't de-ice pavements, combined with Brexit meaning many staff have left, combined with years of defending of social care:
All of these mean we have older, iller people in hospital, we can't get them out of acute hospital and into care / nursing homes because those don't exist anymore, we can't get them back to their own home with paid carers because all those staff left in Brexit.
That means when someone is in ED and needs a bed there isn't one, and when someone is in an ambo and needs to get into ED they can't because there's no space, and when they're on the floor at home after a fall and need an ambo there are no ambos because they're all queueing at the ED.
For years in England we've pushed risk onto ambo staff, and this year we've finally said acute hospitals have to share that risk, so we're seeing the inevitable results of over-crowding and over-full hospitals.
And this is all entirely predictable and preventable - people have been describing FOR YEARS exactly what would happen and how it would happen and even when it would happen, and now it's happening.
The blame lies squarely with a Conservative government that doesn't believe in tax funded public services and which has decided to cut as much as it can.
"The NHS is over-managed" is a tired, boring, argument that is easily debunked with a simple search.
The NHS has fewer managers than similarly sized organisations. That's not a sign of an out of control bureaucracy.