Keir Starmer’s cynical class war on private schools and hereditary peers to appease the hard Left of the Parliamentary Labour Party harms us all, says Dominic Lawson in the Mail, not least as 25% of private school households earn below average income. Here’s an excerpt.
The hard-Left are preparing a campaign against Sir Keir Starmer under the slogan of ‘welfare not warfare’.
They are in an elevated state of outrage – even more so than usual – because of the cut in the overseas aid budget to fund more defence spending, and over the hastily concocted clampdown on sickness benefits.
Indeed, the Socialist Worker claimed: “The assault on disabled people is the thin edge of the wedge in Starmer’s class war.”
In reality, the Prime Minister is conducting a very different sort of class war, and one designed to keep him in the good books of the Left of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
It is being waged on two fronts – in our schools and in the Palace of Westminster. The former involves the policy of applying 20% VAT to the fees charged by independent schools, and also removing their entitlement to charitable business rates relief.
The latter is contained in the Bill which proposes to remove the remaining 88 hereditary peers from the House of Lords.
A number of parents’ groups spent last week in the High Court in an attempt to prove the imposition of VAT on education is a form of unlawful discrimination.
If there is a Labour war on the disabled it is this: there are more than 100,000 pupils with special educational needs who attend small private schools.
As Sue Peacock, a consultant in this field, said, “most of the parents I know are already struggling to meet the fees” and had turned to the private sector “out of desperation” because their children had been unhappy, or inadequately provided for, in mainstream schools.
A study commissioned by the Education Not Taxation campaign revealed that one in five of such families have already remortgaged their home to meet the fees.
The brittle Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, who claims all the money raised by the VAT will go into the state sector (in fact it is not ring-fenced at all) describes the policy as part of the plan of “ending tax advantages for the super-rich”.
Aside from the fact that such parents did not have a “tax advantage” denied to anyone else, it emerged in last week’s High Court hearing that the Treasury itself had an official briefing note which stated that “25% of households affected will fall in the bottom half of the household income distribution”.
As Lord Pannick KC, who led the case for the parents, told the court: “It is illogical for the Chancellor to say that because most of those at independent schools have parents with high incomes, a child’s attendance at an independent school means their parents are wealthy… there are parents who so value independent education for their children that they make severe financial sacrifices to be able to pay.”
Many of these are from British-Asian homes. If Labour suffers a loss of electoral support from this demographic, it will be an entirely merited punishment.
Unfortunately the policy is, in general, a popular one, so Bridget Phillipson paid no political price for her snide and even spiteful remark that “our state schools need teachers more than private schools need embossed stationery”.
Lawson goes on to oppose Starmer’s gerrymandering efforts to remove the remaining hereditary peers in the House of Lords, pointing out that in the 2019-2024 Parliament “life peers attended 47% of the time” while hereditary peers “attended 49%”. He adds that “more than half of the hereditaries serve as members of select committees (which do much of the vital scrutiny of legislation – the point of the second chamber)”.
Unfortunately, there will be no electoral backlash as “the House of Lords does not much concern the public”. But, “as with the attack on independent schools, Labour’s cynical use of the rhetoric of class war, while conveniently appeasing its own Left-wing, will make the country more, not less, divided”.
Worth reading in full.
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