Labour’s spiteful attack on fee-paying schools

SIR – You report (September 8) that Ian Lavery, the chairman of the Labour Party, has endorsed a campaign claiming that fee-paying schools are “incompatible” with Labour’s pledge to introduce “social justice” in the education system.

This ignores the fact that our fee-paying schools are one of our most successful exports, and in many of these schools more than half the pupils are from overseas.

As always, Labour wants to level down. When, in the 1960s, Harold Wilson’s government tried to abolish private education, it discovered that it could not afford all the extra school places that would be required. Mr Corbyn presumably intends to confiscate private property in order to fund this exercise in petty spitefulness. Jeremy MJ Havard

Chichester, West Sussex

SIR – As a 1950s child from a workingclass background who was propelled through selective education into higher education, a doctorate and eventually a managing-director position at a multinational company, I am living proof of its benefits.

The termination of the state grammar school system in the early 1970s was Labour’s single most destructive act, and disadvantaged young people have been the losers in this attempt to create “equality” in education.

Many parents save and go without in order to fund an education that stretches their children, but now Mr Lavery wants to deprive them even of this – their right to pay for choice. Are there no pragmatists among the Labour socialists who can see that the only route to success for Britain, as well as for our young people, is to educate each and every citizen to the limit of their capacity? Shaun Bokor

Loughborough, Leicestershire

SIR – Mr Lavery berates private schools while a number of the party’s own politicians grace their steps (and those of selective state institutions) merrily.

I wonder what parents such as Diane Abbott, Shami Chakrabarti, Emily Thornberry and Seumas Milne think. Harvey Ross

Barnet, Hertfordshire