The story so far: Labour plans to extract £££ from a squeezed middle class, who already alleviate the state’s financial burden by funding their children’s education. Problem is, the funds raised may not even cover the costs of taking on the education of children whose parents can no longer afford their independent schools; or are now so beset by uncertainty that they wish to save for their children instead.
When you make a bet or receive winnings, you pay no tax. Rather than putting some VAT on the gaming industry or, for that matter, several other ‘zero rated’ activities such as the construction of mansions, the government would prefer to tax independent schools. This is to help their state counterparts – help which is desperately needed. Tragically, the VAT will cause harm at the most fragile and critical time of young lives. The benefits are far less certain. As the (grammar) school educated son of a toolmaker, and a successful prosecutor, why does Sir Keir Starmer betray his abilities and wield a fiscal instrument that is so mispurposed? It smacks of the dogmatic, class-based hatred that made the twentieth century tyrants so nasty, disguising as it did their lust for power with flawed ideology.
Tangent 1: Joseph Stalin was the son of a shoe maker. Not privately educated until his teens, he benefited from Montessori-style experiential learning in the Tsarist state sector in Georgia. One field trip to watch the hanging of some unruly peasants left a big impact. There was no sales tax on his school fees: he won a theological scholarship to a seminary. The comment attributed to him that ‘one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic’ is never faraway. Ruin lives to improve more lives – that remains the unspoken justification. Stalin spent an extended gap year in Baku robbing banks. He saw with brutal crudeness that to control the crude oil of Baku was the new way to rule Eurasia and beyond. Rule everything else by unreasonable actions that promote fear. Meanwhile, Communism preached the opposite. Decoys work well in Russia.
Tangent 2: In the strange land of VAT, flawed ideas are also preached then delivered with such uncertainty as to the key definitions – some examples in this case being ‘education’, ‘boarding’, ‘academic subjects’, ‘after school clubs’, ‘learning difficulties’ – that polices flail in the sinking sands of semantics. Accounting firms are then retained to teach the VAT people further rules and exemptions that are bizarrely technical and semantic. VAT logic belongs to another dimension: child safety (5% on children’s car seats; 0% on motorbike helmets) says it all. In confusion lies power. One really has to wonder if the twentieth century is still with us.
This regressive approach is shattering confidence in UK Schooling – a key economic driver: many families will leave, including those who are not British but add soft power and wealth. Where will it end, they fear? Sure, education used to be more affordable. So was pub food. Creating a modern educational environment is costly and the super rich should probably pay more. Even if schools have overspent, that shouldn’t justify inflicting suffering on children. And having to leave midway through a two year public examination course is potentially catastrophic. Independent schools will not have the funds to sub them all. For some children, adjusting to a large state school as a minority while maintaining a middle-class identity will yield superb, positive results. For others is the fear of severe anxiety and bullying, with tragic, possibly life ending consequences. Addressing these concerns has to acknowledge the elephant in the room: that many independent schools are sheltered environments for students born into privilege, oblivious to the harsher realities of life. The fear of sounding elitist may silence such sentiment.
Public school boys stopped killing one another nearly two centuries ago. Their former schools are quite kind places nowadays. Nevertheless, there are centuries of difficult convergence ahead. The two sectors, in many schools remain very different, not better or worse – just different; and any failure to recognise the dangers of pressurised adaption to these differences may need to have criminal consequences. Children are fragile. So, why come ye not to court? We tried.
Tangent 3: Just before the pandemic, several tutoring companies were granted a judicial review regarding their inclusion under employment agency regulations. The judge found our arguments ‘wholly unpersuasive’. After our first QC, not helped by his know-it-all-tutor clients, died from a heart attack, the second advised a further judicial review on the legality of arbitrarily singling out companies, on the rather metaphysical grounds that, like independent schools, companies are recognised under the Human Rights Act 1998, with rights to equality, fairness and respect.
The litigation confirmed that The Human Rights Act 1998 must be invoked to protect independent schools from discrimination. The Crown is obligated to ensure fairness. At the same time independent schools should keep their autonomy but slowly merge into a new, national sector in which they play a part in creating. They take pride in their long evolving social cohesion, that now results in daughters of flight dispatchers marrying Old Etonians.
Education thrives when it evolves slowly. With a shared, noble goal, collaboration may arise around specific challenges. But VAT – it’s just so regressive. Just raise higher rate income tax instead. Schooling is not the sole determinant of success; as Benjamin Franklin remarked, “The world is full of educated derelicts.” Nevertheless, English based learning is so vast a national human resource, and is so dependent on choice and cohesiveness that we need fresh engagement – from both sides.
by Charles Bonas, October 2024