Upon Examination

42 per cent of pupils at commercial schools receive extra time in exams. The figure for everyone else is only 26 per cent. Moreover, those exams are often the IGCSE that has been banned in the state sector for being too easy. Anyone would think that the social connections where what the people selling "education" were really selling.

Yet 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 what are still colloquially called state schools, although in England they are all now private contractors and no main party suggests changing that, are where the Liberal Establishment in academia meets the right-wing Labour machine in local government. What is there in any of that for the Left to love?

Accordingly, on Wednesday, Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Mohamed all voted against that ruse to make the Government look as if it were doing something positive even as it retained the two-child benefit cap, which all four of those MPs had voted to lift, and even as it means-tested the Winter Fuel Payment, the universality of which they had all voted to retain.

Doubtless, they and Jeremy Corbyn will all vote against the 50 per cent increase in bus fares, and all five will vote against the assault on farming. They should offer to address the farmers' demonstration, which, by the way, there was never the slightest suggestion of banning.