The Daily Telegraph - Features
Labour will come to regret this greedy VAT raid on private schools
Above all else, the Left claim to believe in fairness. Hence their support for socialism: a system designed to make life fairer, by taking money away from the people who have earned it, and giving it to people who haven’t.
Admittedly, few on the Left consider Sir Keir Starmer to be a true socialist. Still, they do at least approve of the Labour leader’s undeniably Left-wing plans for private schools. If, or rather when, Sir Keir becomes PM, he’s going to impose a 20 per cent tax on school fees, with the proceeds to be spent on state schools. This, the Left argue, is only fair.
Personally, though, I can’t help feeling that Sir Keir and co haven’t thought this through, because in practice, far from making life fairer, Labour’s plans will make it unfairer still.
If, thanks to this vast rise in fees, parents of private school pupils can no longer afford them, private schools will go bust. In which case, their pupils will have to go to state schools, instead. State schools, then, will need more money. But the trouble is, they won’t be getting any. Because, with private schools out of business, state schools won’t be receiving that lovely big chunk of their fees promised by Sir Keir.
So, instead of having more money, state schools will have less, because they’ll be having to spread their budgets even more thinly, to fund the extra pupils they’ll have. As a result, it’s not just the children of the rich who’ll receive a less privileged education. Everyone else’s children will, too.
Of course, this outcome won’t necessarily trouble the Left. They’ll probably be delighted. They’ll argue that, as all children are now at state school, they’re all getting an equal start in life.
Well, in theory. But again, not in practice.
It may seem unfair that some children have parents who can send them to a private school, while others haven’t. But by the same token, some children have parents who read to them, while others haven’t. Some children have parents who feed them a healthy diet, while others haven’t. Some children have parents who take them to museums, help them with their homework and encourage them to play outside in the fresh air – while others haven’t.
In each case, the first set of children enjoy clear and unearned advantages over the second. And those advantages will lead them to do better at school, and get better jobs. To ensure every child has an equal start in life, therefore, it’s not enough to drive private schools out of business. Labour must also ban bedtime stories, require all children to spend six hours a night glued to the TV, and make it illegal to feed vegetables to anyone under the age of 18.
But even then, some children will still hold a significant advantage over others – because they’ll have been born to more intelligent parents. So, to eliminate this genetic privilege, Labour must decree that, in future, every child in Britain will have the same mother and father.
On the upside, though, I do think Sir Keir’s plans will have one benefit. As is well-known, nearly all the most fanatical Left-wing activists, artists and media figures were themselves privately educated. Indeed, this is the real reason they’re so rabidly Leftwing: they’re consumed by upper-middle-class guilt. If they’d been to state schools, they would never have developed this pathological self-loathing – and would thus have formed healthy, sane political views instead.
So, if private schools are driven out of business, we’ll at least be spared the next generation of insufferable champagne socialists.