I have had to work out, given I do not have children in private school, why the Government applying VAT to private school fees makes me quite so cross.
It wasn’t a surprise, like removing the winter fuel allowance from ten million pensioners, so why has it bothered me so much?
I think I have it now.
It took two young boys to unravel it for me and when they had, I realised I was annoyed about a whole lot of things this new Labour Government are doing. Or, more accurately, I realised the cynicism behind why they are doing it.
Revelation did not bring respite, just more annoyance.
Let me go back a step…
One day this week, in between getting used to regularly tapping away at a keyboard for this site, my family looked after our friends’ two young children.
They are lovely, decent people, who live in a modest flat, work hard, and spend as much time as they can outdoors, letting their boisterous but charming boys have an outlet for a level of energy that would astonish physicists.
Dad is in IT support, volunteers as a sports coach to Under-8s, and when he isn’t doing that he is regularly the master of a very basic wood-fire BBQ from which he conjures up hamburgers to die for.
Mum, who has a stamina I envy, grew up abroad and works hard on top of the challenges of looking after a duo of mini dynamos.
Both are passionate about education being the biggest gift they could give their children and its power to give their boys the best start in life.
They are a family that believes in family.
They aren’t wealthy. They aren’t flashy. They certainly don’t live in luxury but do live for their kids. They want the best for them, as frankly, any parent should.
They display a number of conservative values, but I doubt they are Conservatives.
They are like millions of ordinary voters not generally as interested in politics as I am or, I suspect, you are, if you’re reading this.
Now, my wife and I were looking after their kids because they are always helping us and they had to go to a local primary school and meet the head teacher. I hope they choose this school for their kids, in January, because it’s a nice school.
However, this choice was forced upon them.
The Labour government’s decision to impose VAT on the fees they pay for the small private school they chose for their boys; has made the education they value prohibitively expensive.
I repeat they are not the super-rich, the school wasn’t Eton, and they don’t drive a big SUV. They spend most of their holidays in a shared back garden – they are ordinary parents who genuinely believe their children’s education is the right thing on which to spend what money they have.
I gather the fees were hard enough to find and now they are out of reach. So – the children must leave. The children are understandably upset.
Throughout the election campaign, we all heard Keir Starmer endlessly repeat in his blocked nasal twang, that his “changed Labour Party” was now “in the service of working people.”
People heard what they wanted to hear. I’d suggest Starmer hasn’t changed a great deal – private schools have been a longstanding target on the left.
More significantly when Labour says “working people” they don’t, and frankly never did, mean – people who work.
It’s a cynically and deliberately constructed grouping designed to give them wriggle-room to define who is, and who isn’t in it as it suits them. We’ll increasingly see by their actions what it really means:
“People we like and people who like us.”
It does not remotely include all working people. I do wonder whether they agonised about adding the word “class” into the slogan which would have been ironic given one their first acts was to force some children out of them.
Is aspiration only good now, if Labour like what it is you aspire to? If so, what can those people who work, who Labour decide they aren’t in the service of, expect?
Well, they are there to pay for it all. So far that is kids in private education and pensioners: the young and the old- you know – those that can’t fight back – or go on strike.
Because that’s the cynicism here. It’s not everybody making sacrifices.
A train driver on £60,000 a year is in the bracket of “working people” and is being well served by Labour – with pay rises.
A person working in IT support on a similar salary who sends their children to a private school is clearly not who they mean by “working people”.
In one respect Starmer has changed his party: it’s now in favour of a few “working people” not the many.
I’ve had to ask myself – am I just annoyed because I know how much my friends and their sons are upset about this?
Honestly, no.
They are far from alone in wanting to make personal sacrifices to get the best for their children. Go back a few decades and you’ll find a certain tool maker who thought the same, as the Spectator noted in an editorial his week
“The VAT change will affect parents who struggle to pay and many schools will be forced to close or to stop issuing bursaries (such as the one Keir Starmer enjoyed).
The PM will find it’s not difficult to kick away the ladder his family once used.”
And if that doesn’t make you cross, just look at the reasons Starmer keeps giving for why Labour is choosing who to reward and who to penalise.
As ConservativeHome columnist Andrew Gimson has pointed out so well in his last two PMQs sketches: Starmer has only one answer to any criticism of this initial flurry of choices he is responsible for.
It’s all the Tories’ fault.
Readers here know the Conservatives made mistakes and failed to deliver in areas they should have. The Party is starting to understand why the electorate delivered a crushing verdict on them, and why those aspiring to lead it are having to be brutally honest about what went wrong.
But responsible for everything? Really?
Again, honestly, no.
This is the final layer of Labour cynicism.
There’s been a sudden bucket of icy water down their backs since the election that’s shocked them into realising: Government is far harder than they thought, and maybe they really hadn’t thought enough about that as they entered an electoral year.
As over a thousand prisoners have been released early, some of them domestic abusers, I’d point out only in the unhealthiest relationships imaginable is it normal that one party points at the other and excuses themselves with:
“Look what you made me do”.
This defence of their own choices deserves to go very stale, very quickly.
It’s up to Conservatives to ensure that it does.I hope what all this does make Conservatives do, is fight back and not with each other.
I hope it inspires whoever becomes party leader to champion and support the aspirations of all the British people who want the best for their families and communities and a leader who protects and provides the choice of how they do that best.
Oh, and my friends’ two little boys say hello.
Sorry, I promised.
