Britain has declared war on the middle classes
Trying not to be a burden on the state used to be applauded. Now it’s deemed to be selfish and ‘unfair’
AFirst, they came for their £50,000-plus annual wages. Now, they’re going after their school fees, too
s Sir Keir Starmer was having a go at Rishi Sunak for attending a public school during Wednesday’s Prime Minister’s Questions, another recipient of that pesky, over-entitled form of education was taking on the Government via Zoom.
You arguably couldn’t get anyone more “public school” than Dame Kate Bingham, the venture capitalist daughter of Lord Bingham of Cornhill, a former Master of the Rolls, described as “the greatest lawyer of his generation”. When Lord Bingham was a pupil at Sedbergh, a school in Cumbria that now costs approximately £28,000 a year for day pupils to attend, he was described as the “brightest boy in 100 years”.
Naturally, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree and his daughter Kate excelled at top-of-the-league table St Paul’s Girls’ School (now £9,264 per term) before going on to study at Christ Church, Oxford, where she graduated with a first-class degree in biochemistry.
There have been a lot of successful “Old Paulinas” over the years, including the actress Rachel Weisz, the chemist Rosalind Franklin and the archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon.
But in chairing the UK Government’s Vaccine Taskforce to bring Covid-19 vaccines to the people of Britain in record time, Dame Kate is arguably the Old Paulina of whom pupils should be most proud.
Giving evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into lessons to be learnt from coronavirus this week, Dame Kate was typically no-nonsense in her assessment, accusing the Government of going “backwards” in its preparation against future pandemics. “Our vaccines currently are not good enough,” she added.
Would Dame Kate have been where she is today without her highly “privileged” education? Possibly not. Would Mr Sunak be Prime Minister if he hadn’t been head boy at Winchester College? I sincerely doubt it.
But why on earth should the stellar success of their pupils be seen as a black mark against public schools?
Instead of celebrating hardworking parents like the Binghams and the Sunaks of this world, who take a load off the state by paying to educate their children, the Labour leader has decided to make an example of them.
His proposal to strip schools in the independent sector of their charitable status not only smacks of Corbynite class-spite but represents yet another assault on the aspirational middle classes, who increasingly appear to be the most politically despised group in Britain.
First they came for their £50,000plus annual wages, now, they’re going after their school fees, too.
It used to be the case that if you scrimped and saved and worked hard not to be a burden on the state, you were a hero. Now it seems that any iota of success or aspiration marks you out as a pariah.
If you are not taxed at a marginal rate of 90-something per cent (which, incredibly, the Telegraph revealed this week, some moderately high earners face), you are penalised if you own a second home, killed financially if you run a business and forced into retirement if you save too much into your pension.
The ethos of the age has turned from meritocratic to misanthropic. The secret to society’s success now appears to be everyone being as miserable as each other.
What sort of message does that send? That thrifty, prudent, careful, hardworking people might as well stop dreaming of a better life and sink to the level of the lowest common denominator.
It’s beyond depressing and is beginning to stifle this great nation’s enormous potential.
If it wasn’t hypocritical enough that a load of Labour front-benchers attended private school, Starmer claims that he has come up with this policy in the interests of “fairness”.
Yet you don’t need to have attended Eton to comprehend that the only parents who will feel the pinch of school fees losing their VAT exemption are those struggling to pay them in the first place – on top of stratospheric tax and National Insurance contributions.
This move won’t affect the Tarquins and Ophelias of this world, but the Rishis and the Keirs (Starmer’s Reigate Grammar became fee-paying when he was still a pupil). We are talking about the children of opticians, not oligarchs, here.
The private sector educates 5.8 per cent of school children in the UK. That amounts to the parents of around 650,000 pupils who are still funding state schools through their taxes even though they are not using them, for heaven’s sake.
Yet under Labour’s lunatic policy, between 150 and 200 institutions would probably have to close, forcing their pupils into the state sector, at an estimated cost of £7,000 per child, per year, potentially wiping out the £1.6billion Labour claims it would raise to plough back into the state sector.
It’s madness. And I say that as a private, but not public school, educated mother of three who sends two children to private schools and one to state school (by working multiple jobs).
The Prime Minister was right to accuse the Labour leader of “attacking the hard-working aspiration of millions of people” in the House of Commons on Wednesday, adding: “He’s attacking people like my parents. This is a country that believes in opportunity not resentment. He doesn’t understand that and that’s why he’s not fit to lead.” Yet why hasn’t he been as robust in response to questions about whether he uses private health care, when surely exactly the same principle applies?
Like parents who pay for state schools they don’t use, people with health insurance are paying for doctors surgeries and hospitals they don’t frequent (unless in an emergency).
But apparently this is also a crime against the less well-off, even though it must save the Government, and consequently some of the most vulnerable members of our society, millions of pounds a year.
Remember how Margaret Thatcher responded when she was asked, at a general election press conference in June 1987, whether she “trusted the NHS enough to use it”?
She said: “I, along with something like five million other people, insure to enable me to go into hospital on the day I want, at the time I want, and with a doctor I want. For me, that is absolutely vital. I do that along with five million others. Like most people, I pay my dues to the National Health Service; I do not add to the queue ... I exercise my right as a free citizen to spend my own money in my own way, so that I can go in on the day, at the time, with the doctor I choose and get out fast.”
There is absolutely no shame in people using what little money they have left, once the Treasury has taken its ever-increasing slice, on private schools and private health insurance. Only the politics of envy says otherwise.
Moreover, without returning to the era of “greed is good”, we do need to create an environment in this country where people are actively encouraged to get ahead rather than be demonised for it.
In the current epoch of junior common room “egalitarianism”, anyone who tries to better themselves and their family is slapped down and told their efforts are somehow unfair to other people. They are meant to simply suck it up, while those out of work enjoy a 10 per cent rise in benefits, and the number of workingage benefits claimants has shot up by 23 per cent since Covid.
And then the Government wonders why it is struggling to incentivise people to work harder or even to work at all, when they are financially punished and publicly shamed for bothering.
If anyone should feel resentful, it is those who are resented for simply trying to improve their lot.