A Lesson Learned?

Fighting for his political life, the eminently purgeable Blairite Stephen Twigg has latched onto the issue of commercial schools.

There has never been any Labour Party policy to abolish commercial schools, and Harold Wilson used them as a parent while he was Prime Minister. It is altogether another question whether or not they are any good, since they are merely adept at putting pupils through the examination system that they are the first to castigate as deficient and defective.

They are often also the most anti-family institutions imaginable, founded on the assumption that the relationship between parents and children is thoroughly distant and purely financial, organised towards the living out of adolescence in single-sex residential environments, and unsurprisingly producing politicians of the sort that voted through Thatcher’s Children Act and other such legislative attacks on family life. In addition to all of that, what one now thinks of them is essentially what one now thinks of the takeover of this country by Arab princes, Russian oligarchs and global money men.

They are merely good at doing something that is in itself bad. They are not necessarily good schools in any absolute sense. They are somewhere for the global megarich, who are increasingly taking over this country in all sorts of ways, to park their progeny without worrying that they might be subjected, as they would be abroad, to export strength English examinations based on the old O-level.

Such as those very successfully sat in Saint Helena, for example. And in the West Indian schools to which British Afro-Caribbean parents sometimes send their children in order to see that they are properly educated. Commercial schools have the right to offer those qualifications rather than Thatcher's GCSEs. Very tellingly, they almost never do so. Just as, very tellingly, the global megarich do not send their offspring to schools that do so.

But there has never been any Labour Party policy to abolish them. Perhaps there now ought to be? At the very least, a policy to tax them as the businesses that they are,  unless a certain proportion of their pupils was from homes on median earnings or below, and unless a very high proportion was made up of British Citizens whose parents were resident in the United Kingdom for tax purposes.

That would be as thoroughly conservative and Tory as the articulation of any concept of English identity, and the defence of the Union as a first principle, of a universal postal service, of the Queen's Highways (again, against rule by Arab princes), of Her Majesty's Constabulary, of the National Health Service, of keeping Sunday special, of the historic regimental system, of aircraft carriers with aircraft on them, of the State action necessary in order to maintain the work of real charities and of churches, and of the State action necessary in order to maintain a large and thriving middle class, together with a free vote on the redefinition of marriage, and together with a referendum on continued membership of the EU. 

Without VAT, the commercial schools have deliberately priced out the old bourgeoisie in favour of those from the ends of the earth who were willing and able to pay vastly increased fees, and who very often preferred snob value to academic excellence. How you regard those institutions is not now about how you regard the middle class or even the upper middle class, but how about you regard that class's evisceration by global capitalism and by its consequences.

Ed Miliband and Jon Cruddas, over to you.