Given that the overwhelming majority of people are state educated and receive zero, or less, benefit from private schools, there is something almost impressive – when it doesn’t look actively demented – about current media campaigns to represent the application of VAT to school fees as a burning election issue.
From the first, Labour’s proposal to end private schools’ exemption and spend the revenue on state schools had a dramatic impact on Tory-sympathising news sources previously unbothered about the private sector becoming, as Civitas summarised it, “roughly twice as expensive in one generation”. Overnight, thanks to Keir Starmer’s plan, it was understood that British private schools, far from being an ever more exclusive service for the most affluent, are dear to countless immiserated parents whom the Mail, highlighting their plight, goes so far as to call “poor”. Some of them are so hard up, journalists report, they live in modest houses, drive “old bangers” and, when they don’t “sacrifice” meals out, deny themselves West End shows. The forgoing of one possible purchase for the sake of another is invariably known, in the lexicon of pro-private school coverage, as a sacrifice.
It follows, somehow, that the public should do whatever it takes to protect this formerly obscure minority of a minority: unfortunate private school parents who have survived Liz Truss and the cost of living crisis, only to face the brutal prospect of state education. The alternative being, it is predicted, so many refugees that state schools will be overrun, unable to cope, and Starmer’s scheme will be fiscally counterproductive.
Or maybe it won’t. In the past, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies says in its assessment of the scheme, private school parents have tended to absorb fee increases.
All this has been exhaustively explored, but the impact of the election announcement in the rightwing press, if nowhere else, has been to intensify the existing passion around what might appear a relatively niche political issue, perhaps even a moderate-looking compromise. There were once hopes that Starmer would remove private schools’ charitable status, not just their tax breaks.
United in outrage, undeterred by a poll suggesting majority support for Labour’s proposal, his critics have, careless of looking obsessive, been amplifying their coverage, running more sob stories, more predictions of catastrophe, more reproaches from pained headteachers and warnings of closures: anything to make readers care about parents who may soon not be able to afford what they, themselves, never could, and take against a policy that leaves the private school system intact. Whatever Starmer does to private school enrolment, it will do nothing to protect the country from another Boris Johnson. It does not help VAT opponents that the impact of identifiable victims is apt to be undermined, as it rarely is in the aftermath of, say, earthquakes, by the very details intended to move us to compassion.
One of the Mail’s innumerable reports might have been stronger last week had it omitted the potentially “devastating effect” (reduced access to a theatre) for a 12-year-old, presumably the most affecting victim it could find, “who has already appeared in a touring production of Les Miserables and a Nintendo Switch advert”. Her parents, we learned, “already sacrifice holidays and meals out”.
In the Sunday Times, we met parents forced to “shop at Aldi, the German discount supermarket, and drive a 19-year-old Peugeot and a 10-year-old Hyundai”. As reluctant as one is to wish anyone a greater misfortune, you’d think they could have found a gaunt fee-payer outside the more resonant Lidl, pushing home her pitiful shop in an old pram.
To add to compassion fatigue, the media’s anti-VAT hobbyists might want to note the evidence, in below-the-line comments, polls and elsewhere, that even their subscribers could pick more substantial hills to die on. Especially, as some point out, when the sector’s most recognisable products, outside acting, are Sunak, Cameron, Farage and Johnson.
True, it’s the best Labour tax-horror story going, but consider the most recommended comment under the Sunday Times piece “Private school bill for two children could hit £1.2m under Labour” (that is, £1m without Labour): “The Times’s obsession with this issue is getting out of hand.” And the second: “I feel sorry those parents don’t have more intelligent children who could survive in a meritocracy.”
It was a Sunday Times journalist, after all, who discovered that a parent at St Paul’s, one of the most expensive schools in the country, had rebuked another member of a WhatsApp group, the Tory MP Greg Hands, for sharing anti-VAT material. “Can we stop assuming everyone is a Tory in this group.” And even Tories might conclude, as a Spectator columnist did last week, that private schools would be better placed to protest “had they not spent the past 30 years steadily pricing the middle classes out of private education”.
If the bizarre campaigning on behalf of private schools does not illustrate, given its remoteness from majority preoccupations, the still disproportionate influence of the privately educated and their educators, it is otherwise mystifying.
Why, in a cost of living crisis afflicting all but the wealthiest, are Tory sympathisers advertising the enormous sums they consider, minus the addition of VAT, to be reasonable? The average private school fee is £17,500 a year.
Why, given the existence of subscribers who endorse private education but oppose its tax advantages, do editors insult these readers, in column after column, for engaging in the “politics of envy”? Some, effectively, are accused of envying themselves. Reserving for others the implication that, if they were “hardworking” and ate frugally, they too could find the £17,500.
Non-users of private schools are repeatedly reminded to revisit that sometimes overlooked question: what the existence of these charitable institutions does for others.
It makes no sense. But I do hope they keep it up.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
