Independent Schools, Indeed

The imposition of VAT on school fees is intended either as a permanent means of raising slightly less than two per cent of the education budget, or as a device for closing down commercial schools. It cannot be both.

And why would Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Mohamed not have voted for a non-legislative Opposition Day motion against this ill-thought-through measure? Why should Jeremy Corbyn have turned up to vote for it? As proposed, it is a ruse to make the Government look as if it were doing something positive even as it retained the two-child benefit cap, which all five of those MPs voted to lift, and even as it means-tested the Winter Fuel Payment, the universality of which they all voted to keep.

Moreover, why should they be particularly keen on the schools where the Liberal Establishment in academia met the right-wing Labour machine in local government? Many of those schools' pricier rivals amount to the same thing, but with the much swankier social connections that they were really selling, and with the IGCSE that had been banned in the state sector for being too easy. But there are others that at far less expense, and therefore with a very different clientele, offer real philosophical alternatives. Hussain, Khan and Mohamad all spoke in defence of those, and they and Adam all voted accordingly.

All five Reform UK MPs voted with and for the public schools, because frankly that was why they did it, but the other Opposition Day motion on Tuesday was on farming and food security. The Gaza Four, if that is what you want to call them, also voted for that; again, Corbyn was not there. But Richard Tice, who is proving an assiduous parliamentarian, was the only Reform MP who voted at all. 80 per cent of the Independent Alliance joined the whole of Plaid Cymru and most of the Liberal Democrats in voting for the farmers, with none of the Lib Dems or the Independent Alliance voting the wrong way. Yet 80 per cent of Reform joined the Green MPs for North Herefordshire and for Waveney Valley in having left the chamber between 4:15pm and 6:59.