School Daze?

It was always more than a little suspicious when, desperate to appear to have any specific policy, Labour revived its perennial internal crowd-pleaser, the imposition of VAT on school fees. That one never looked likely to happen, because the promise of it was too useful for when Labour activists started to ask what their party was actually for. This policy has not been properly thought through. Is it to be a permanent, if extremely small, source of revenue? Or is it to be a means of closing down the schools in question? It cannot be both.

Even without the VAT, the fees for commercial schools are far beyond the reach of anyone in the middle of anything. You can go to school for free in this country, and most people do. But this needless expense makes very affluent people feel as if they are struggling, since they really do have to make certain sacrifices, by their own standards, in order to meet it. In turn, that makes them very vocal against, for example, a modest increase in their own direct taxation.

Moreover, school fees corrupt the parliamentary process. To pay them, the Conservatives insist that an MP has to be paid a gargantuan salary. They then take other work as well, but by then the meeting of their initial demand has drawn other, mostly Labour, candidates who have been attracted by the money. People with pound signs in their eyes also have very sharp elbows. But the present salary is the existing rate for the job. The principles of trade unionism demand that everyone who was entitled to it take it in full, and that it not be cut, either in absolute terms or by being allowed to fall behind inflation. Level up, not down.

Yet while we are seeking to make the world a better place, then we still have to live in it as it is. It is not hypocritical to do so as best we can. The hypocrites are the highly activist Education Ministers, usually Conservatives, who buy their own children out of the practical application and implications of their policies. Their hypocrisy is never, ever called out. Well, it would certainly be called out by me.

And it must be said that the schools that they favour do regularly provide left-wing figures with a platform that they are seldom or never afforded by the schools of the municipal Labour Right. By all accounts, Jeremy Corbyn turned down several invitations to speak at public schools, although he might accept them now. George Galloway regularly accepts such invitations. Yet it is impossible to imagine that a state-funded school might offer a platform to anyone from the Left.

It is in the running of state-funded schools that the Liberal Establishment in academia and the media meets the right-wing Labour machine in local government. We ought to be bypassing the weedy brains of the Liberal Establishment and the brainless brawn of the municipal Labour Right, in order to secure the representation that had never been afforded by those who had presumed to speak for our people, but never to our people. That would involve doing deals with the Conservatives. Such a deal secured the Leadership of Derby City Council for Chris Williamson. We could not possibly get less out of them than we had ever managed to get out of the Keir Starmers of the world. Sooner the bosses than the scabs.

"One size fits all" is an apt description of a system that takes people from every part of Britain, of all countries, and turns them out with the same accent, an accent that only they have. If applicants from that background are finding it more difficult to gain admission to Oxford or Cambridge, then that may be because the people on the other side of the desk were now a much more international lot, to whom class quirks of speech, dress and so on were not merely unimpressive, but imperceptible. Of course, such features still do and will matter to the people who run plenty of other things in Britain, so with or without the small extra expense of VAT on the fees, the schools that inculcated them will not be going bust anytime soon. If they were banned in Britain, then they would set up abroad.

Their favoured IGCSE, which has been banned in the state sector for being too easy, is therefore safe for the foreseeable future. That may be another reason why Oxbridge and socially comparable institutions no longer found their products attractive. But having been denied admission to the universities that they did not quite consider beneath them, the intense ideologues who had hitherto gone straight into overtly political roles at 22 will henceforth be going straight into them at 19. They will retain those roles no matter who had won anything so vulgar as an election.

Those roles include the positions of the Labour Party's almighty staffers. Anyone who has ever dealt with the Labour Party's staff will have noticed both their extreme youth and their extreme poshness. As the Forde Report set out forensically, that combination makes them dazzlingly arrogant and uncouth. Such are the people who always really run the Labour Party. And here we are.