Britain’s Education Tax

Taxing education

The UK’s Labour government has abolished the charitable status of private schools, requiring tax to be added to school fees. As Education Minister Bridget Phillipson put it:

The PR benefits of punishing Britain's elite are always misjudged but this policy will fail even to do that and, worse, strip Britain of a major brand asset.

Why this won't help anyone

Britain’s social rules forbid people to defend their own perceived higher status, so the loudest voices of protest come not from the private school lobby but from the state sector which will now have to accommodate an anticipated influx of 37,000 pupils whose parents will no longer be able to afford school fees. The nation's interlocutor here is Katharine Birbalsingh, ‘Britain’s strictest headteacher,’ known for her ruthless, disciplinarian, reforms of state schools.

“The tiny bit of money that you’re going to save from the tax is not going to be enough to cover all the extra places which we’re clearly going to need,” she told GB news.

Once savvy parents triage how to allocate their resources to the maximum possible advantage of their children (spending school fee savings on, say, university accommodation and supplementing unpaid internships), it may lead to an even greater exodus to the state sector than the government was banking on.

In other words, the entire policy is disastrous for children from poor backgrounds, whose resources will now be shared out among the children of the rich.

Class War

There will always be room for at least one institution in the world which caters to those who believe that it is best to grow up alongside the sons of Dukes and Prime Ministers and for whom money is no object. It currently exists not in the Hamptons, Hollywood or Hong Kong, but in the shadow of Windsor Castle. Eton College, for decades the crucible of Britain’s political power base, charges parents around £60,000 per child per year. By comparison, Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School achieves similar exam results to Eton while educating children at a cost to the taxpayer of around £7,500 per child per year - less than the margin of Eton's fee tax hike.

So it is true that the school fees of a tiny power-elite seek a networking, rather than academic, premium - albeit with some plausible deniability. But the Labour government is just as dependent on this omertà, which allows them to trade on the politics of class envy while maintaining the illusion that social mobility is defined by academic credentials.

The caricature of a private school elite that Labour is attacking is, however, mostly inaccurate because, beneath the highly visible but demographically negligible elite, are all the other private school pupils—making up about 6% of all of Britain’s schoolchildren.

Astonishingly, 90,000 households whose incomes are below the national average are paying for private education. These are often families who forgo international holidays, take out loans, and have children working weekend jobs to keep up with the enormous expense of their tuition. Britain’s 300 or so private schools often cater to specific religious and linguistic groups. Children from military families are sometimes covered by their parents’ contracts (with the ‘tax boost’ to the exchequer being paid for by the armed forces). And, of course, there are exceptionally gifted children who are granted scholarships at private schools and attend for free. Those children were the reason private schools had tax-free charity status to begin with. They will now lose their places.

All these groups are part of the ‘privileged few’ that the Labour government is taking aim at.

There is also a final group I should mention: Labour’s policy is likely to have strong social appeal among those who realised too late that the average private education doesn’t grant automatic entry to the ruling class. George Orwell made the observation that there is no greater class hatred in Britain than that of the minor private-school child of the major private-school child. When Gordon Brown blurted that the Conservative Government's inheritance tax policy ‘seemed to have been dreamed up on the playing fields of Eton,’ his remark probably held more pathos with his own, privately educated, inner circle than with the rest of the country.

It turns out you don’t have to be educated at Eton to loathe death duties and, in their excruciatingly petit bourgeoisie attempt to cater class hatred to the widest possible audience, Labour are blinded by to the fact that their pet grudge is part of a major cultural export. Even the true elites need to be defended if they won't defend themselves.

Among the influx to the country there are a few billionaires - and their children - who wish to settle and become British, or take with them a part of whatever it is to be British. Exactly what ‘British’ may mean to 160 million Chinese who watch Downton Abbey, or the 2.5 billion Commonwealth citizens who regard the British Royal family as their own isn’t up to any insular government to speculate. But not even our best scholastic brands are immune from the modern ideologies which threaten to regulate them.

Britain is now poised to sacrifice its global standing by dismantling the Iron Curtain of scholastic elitism from both sides.

Levelling down

The fish rots, as they say, from the head. Desperate to adopt the sanctimonious egalitarianism of those beneath the social mean, the ruling class have submitted themselves to jump through the same hoops as everyone else. With the sprezzatura of the global elite, Jacob Rees Mogg (foremost brand ambassador for whatever 'British elite' is taken to mean), chortled that he wouldn’t get in to Eton today. This observation is disastrous. Once Britain’s top institutional schools stop catering to the recognised elite, they become irrelevant to the world which once aspired to them.

I fear that tomorrow’s ruling class won’t have found their company in England’s dark mills of soulless, compliant, technocrats and right-on political apparatchiks, but rather the cocktail circuits of Singapore, Dubai and Mar-a-Lago.

But we can thank Eton’s mismanagement for that, not Phillipson's.

Alexander Shaw

Journalist