Labour ‘hypocrisy’ on private schools

LABOUR Party high-flyers have been accused of ‘blind hypocrisy’ for backing efforts to abolish private education – despite sending their own children to fee-paying schools.

At the party’s annual conference this weekend in Brighton, delegates are set to debate a motion to withdraw independent schools’ charitable status and redistribute their endowments and properties if Labour wins a General Election.

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has backed the move, declaring that ‘private schools don’t need to exist and should not exist’. Yet despite Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge to put ‘people before privilege’, a number of the party’s leading lights have spent vast sums on private education.

Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott famously sent her son to the private City of London School.

She admitted at the time that her decision was ‘indefensible’, later saying: ‘I’m a West Indian mum and West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children.’ And Shami Chakrabarti, the Shadow Attorney General, sent her son to £18,000-a-year Dulwich College, while Shadow Leader of the House Valerie Vaz’s daughter went to £18,500-per-year Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith.

In 2017, Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner blasted Theresa May’s plans for a new model of grammar schools, insisting they ‘do not improve social mobility’ and are ‘not good for our education system’.

However, this has not stopped other party colleagues from supporting selective schools. Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry sent one son to Hertfordshire’s selective Dame Alice Owen’s School and another to the London Oratory, accused of practising backdoor selection on religious grounds.

And Labour’s director of communications Seumas Milne shunned comprehensive schools near his Richmond home, instead sending his children to leading grammar schools further afield.

Tory MP Ben Bradley said: ‘This is blind hypocrisy. It’s one rule for the Corbyn few and another rule for the many.’