Why I, a socialist, cannot support Labour's tax raid on private schools

The real losers won't be the Etons and Harrows, but those much further down the scale

Photo: Exampapers Plus / flickr.com

The thing that, above everything else, drew me into political activism was the obvious injustice of our economic system – specifically the grotesque disparities in wealth and power that existed inside our nation. It always seemed to me that a person’s station in life was determined not by how hard that person was willing to toil, but largely by the hand with which he or she had been dealt at birth.

And with wealth and power having the tendency, if left unchecked, to concentrate in ever fewer hands, it was, I believed - and still do - the job of governments to use all the available levers at their disposal to redress the balance. That the Labour party appeared to understand this principle better than any other mainstream political organisation was why I planted myself on the left and have stayed there ever since.

So you might think that I would welcome with enthusiasm the proposal of this Labour government to end the VAT exemption on private school fees and to use that money to increase funding on the state sector, including for the recruitment of 6,500 new teachers. After all, aren’t private schools designed to benefit the offspring of the moneyed elites at the expense of everyone else? And, in doing so, don’t they help to embed the kind of class privilege that those of us on the left detest? Against that backdrop, doesn’t Labour’s policy represent a surefire way of remedying some of these iniquities?

If only things were so simple.