Of Rates and Ratings

Since commercial schools are business, then why the hell should they not pay business rates and VAT? All attempts to answer that boil down to the fact that they never have, and that is not good enough. But this needs to be gone about carefully.

This summer, all pretence finally ceased. By their own admission, commercial schools are no longer good at getting pupils through an examination system that is rubbish, anyway. They now actively offer inferior qualifications, academically speaking. Put bluntly, their exams are easier.

Yet the swankier universities treat those qualifications as equal for admissions purposes, thereby giving commercial school pupils a huge advantage. Those universities are routinely represented on the governing bodies of those schools.

None of this comes as any surprise. The advantages offered by commercial schools are not academic, but social, and thus socioeconomic and political. Most people who were at Oxford with David Cameron and Boris Johnson had not been to Eton, and fewer than half will have been commercially educated at all. Yet look who became Prime Minister, and who did not.

The condition of a commercial school’s continuing charitable status should be its having been adjudged good or better by the same means as a state school, using the same criteria as for a state school, with the report published, and with the value-added measure applied, thereby requiring that school to have demonstrated how it had improved pupils’ abilities. 

And commercial schools do regularly provide left-wing figures with a platform that they are seldom or never afforded by the schools of the municipal Labour Right. Jeremy Corbyn no doubt turns down numerous invitations. George Galloway regularly accepts them. As would I.

While we are seeking to make the world better, 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, usually Conservative, Education Ministers 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. 

The Left and the working class, and perhaps especially the rural working class, need to bypass both the municipal Labour Right and the Liberal Establishment both in education and in the media. The EU referendum result has confirmed that the workers, and not the liberal bourgeoisie, are now the key swing voters who deserve direct representation on local public bodies, on national public bodies, in the media, and at the intersection of the public and media sectors.

Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. A new party is now in the process of registration. After nearly 30 years of suggestion, speculation, and even a sort of preparation, I will stand for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.