My secondary school was independent. It was hardly Eton, but it still qualifies as private. My method was to go through my Facebook friends list and pick out all of the people I knew from the school in order to look at their Political Views. See the graph:

You’ll notice a few things about the sample, the first being that it’s quite small. The reason for this is that I had 38 profiles that had not listed anything in the field. The assumption can thus be made that an overwhelming majority are either totally apathetic (highly likely) or embarrassed of their real political views (also likely). I thus had to remove them from the graph to level it out.

The graph also shows an “Aren’t I funny!” column, this is for the profiles that had something inane listed as an attempt at a joke. It’s safe to say these are similar to the Not Listed column.

The one person listed under “Labour Party” is me.

Of the people listed under “Liberal” (Not Liberal Democrat), two of the three were teachers.

So, unsurprisingly the graph shows that most of my classmates were Tories. Does private school make your right wing, or is it just that right-wing people tend to go to private school?

As with anything vaguely scientific, it’s probably some of both.

Disclaimer: Obviously this doesn’t prove anything or have any scientific basis.

The French were asking themselves about the privatisation of the postal service, La Poste. When I say “asking themselves” I mean it literally; the whole project was a mock referendum.

The mock referendum was designed to show support for a real referendum, which is turn is designed to block the government’s plans.

The project was organised by a “national committee” comprising of 62 different associations, unions and political parties and has already seen popular support. In Nice alone, there were nearly 1000 votes against the government. (I think the exact figure was about 9,634.)

The campaign poster found all over town

Since the start of the year, around 3 post offices have closed every day and 7400 jobs have been axed.

Nicolas Sarkozy has given two main arguments to justify his privatisation proposal; Europe and Finance. He pretends that it is the European Union which is imposing changes on the monopolisation on the delivery of post weighing less than 20 grams. This argument is false. The EU has in no way tried to change the status of the service-operator, much less its privatisation. Financially, La Poste has several other means available to it than privatisation to fund itself.

I don’t have the figures for the whole of France yet, but it looks like another Sarkoscheme that will be stopped dead by a self-made referendum.

Other countries should learn from this; democracy isn’t just about voting once every 4/5 years.

Education has always been a key issue for Labour because it is the foundation of social mobility, yet there still exists a huge division between state and private schools, one of the ways to break through this dividing line is to remove the compulsory charitable status from private schools.

Though education, particularly when dealing with state/private issues, is an area that easily trips up the Tories, who were in favour of grammar schools and selection, then were against it, and are now for one or another or both and neither, we should not use it in this way.

Education is something we must not be tribal about; so often Labour attaches a stigma to those from private school as having an easy ride and of being “natural Tories” but fail to appreciate that these schools provide bursaries and scholarships to non-privileged children, and ignore that parents who send their children to the private sector are not always “the snooty Eton types” but average middle class people who choose to spend all their savings to give their child a boost.

This perceived boost shows that Labour must seek to close the gap between state and private education, but it must not seek to go about it by throwing obstacles in the way of independent schools and pulling them down when it is state schools that must be improved. The gap should be closed, but not at the expense that the net quality of education decreases.

The gap is not just about results, league tables and university places; there is also a barrier because the state and private sector have operated far too separately for far too long, our attitude should be cooperative instead of contemptuous.

We should think about removing the charitable status from private schools with spiteful motives, our logic should be that the current system is in need of reform. Although charitable status gives private schools tax breaks, the amount of VAT they have to pay means they give away around 20% of their profit. If the charitable status was removed, and schools were still able to continue to give the free places that they already give, then they would not lose so much money that could be reinvested.

The charitable status has now become a burden to private schools and many would give it up if they could, but currently it is illegal. Private schools are obliged to have charitable status, and therefore are obliged to pay high VAT.

In practice, it means that the more places a school gives away (as an example of a charitable activity), the more tax it pays. Thus schools which do the bare minimum and provide very little public benefit profit, while those which give out more places lose out.

This is fundamentally counterproductive to both the schools and to us. By removing charitable status we give substantial freedom to the private schools, though to profit from this we also need to change the law so that the more charitable the school is, the more it benefits for itself as well. This will encourage smaller private schools to be more altruistic and improve its links within the community.

We should remove the compulsory charitable status for private schools and instead replace it with a fairer mechanism to reward and provide incentives to charitable education.

A commission from LabourList as part of the 25 Proposals project.