Labour's VAT on private school fees is killing the dreams of taxi drivers' sons like me

A place in the New Year’s Honours was a fitting way for the now retired head of Edinburgh’s Boroughmuir High school David Dempster to sign off after 35 years’ teaching, in which time he led the flit to its new Fountainbridge site.

Amongst the many plaudits, the Edinburgh Evening News credited him with introducing Mandarin teaching, which indeed he did. But it didn’t say the teaching is provided by the Swire Chinese Language Centre, which is based at the private George Watson’s College and most of the teachers, including the centre’s head Maggie Sproule, are employed by Watson’s.

The simple truth is there would be no Swire Centre if there was no Watson’s, because Maggie Sproule was already employed by the school as a librarian, was instrumental in establishing Mandarin teaching, which led to the collaboration with Boroughmuir and James Gillespie’s to create the Swire centre, which now has six other associate secondary schools, including Castlebrae, Liberton and Tynecastle in Edinburgh and Knox and North Berwick in East Lothian.

Labour’s bitterness

The UK’s relationship with China may be somewhat strained these days ─ a political lobbyist currently charged with spying for China is a Watson’s FP ─ but knowledge of Chinese languages is unquestionably a highly valuable skill, especially if it’s to join the intelligence analysists at GCHQ. While Edinburgh councillors bickered about setting up a Gaelic medium secondary school, Watson’s got on with providing something for the whole Edinburgh community which, in global terms, is of far greater significance.

In the week that VAT on private school fees came into force, it's against this background that remarks by UK Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson should be set. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, she said “we risk a generation of state-school kids growing up without specialist teachers”.

Does she really think this will be addressed by sticking 20 per cent VAT on fees? The article went on to claim that private education is a luxury, but in Edinburgh, at least, it is demonstrably bringing a free-of-charge benefit to council schools across the region which otherwise would not exist.

As if her bitterness towards the sector wasn’t clear enough, she told the Sunday Times that middle-class parents supported the VAT imposition because they had been priced out of private education, as if anyone is happy that something they would like but can’t afford is suddenly even further out of reach, or which might have been possible but is now beyond their means because of a new tax. It was a perverse argument, but also a revealing illustration of how notions of envy have driven the policy.

Increased elitism

Sir Keir Starmer this week insisted any money raised would mean higher standards, as if a Labour government throwing cash at any unreformed service results in anything other than higher wages. However much comes in, education standards in Scotland’s state schools won’t rise a millimetre, not least because there is no guarantee the SNP government will pass on any extra cash from Barnett consequentials of increased UK Government education spending to the councils which run state schools, or that local authorities will not spend it on other priorities like housing.

Even if it does reach local education budgets, it will be hoovered up in the usual one-size-fits-all approach which has relentlessly driven standards down over the past 20 years while the private sector becomes smaller and without any incentive to increase engagement with the communities in which they are based. For a policy designed to attack elitism, the result will be the exact opposite.

Barring any attempt to make private education illegal ─ as many of its members would dearly love to do ─ this week marks the final assault of a Labour party which has long set its face against the aspiration embodied by Scotland’s finest schools, including state-funded ones.

Under Glasgow Corporation in the 1970s, Labour tried to kill off the High School of Glasgow but succeeded in destroying Allan Glen’s, and turned St Mungo’s, Hillhead and the Girl’s High into underperforming comprehensives. Jordanhill School only survived because it was still a teacher training facility under the control of the old Scottish Office.

For the likes of me

The withdrawal of assisted places was one of the first acts of Old Fettesian Tony Blair’s government and while the SNP was responsible for stripping Scottish private schools of charitable rates relief on the preposterous pretext that it was only fair because state schools paid it ─ to the councils which ran them ─ the imposition of VAT now puts historic institutions providing educational benefit on the same tax basis as Wetherspoons and the Genting Casino.

Labour’s message to the middle classes it claims support the move is that those places aren’t for the likes of you. To those with generations of association with a particular school, if you are now priced out of your heritage, tough. To the taxi driver who wants his kids to go to the best school possible, know your place, little man. Whatever the local school provides, whether it has a football pitch or not, it will do you just fine.

To those pushy parents which Bridget Phillipson now claims as her allies, check out Right Move and see how much it costs to live in the catchment area of your choice, take out an interest-only mortgage and pray Labour doesn’t preside over another banking crash. And for those Champagne socialists who wouldn’t dream of private education for their little darlings, well those maths and English tutors don’t really count, do they? They’re just like piano lessons really.

Of course I’m biased. My three kids went to George Watson’s and, no, I couldn’t find the £60,000 a year the fees alone will now cost. And yes, I went to Hutchesons’, the same private school as millionaire Anas Sarwar and his kids. And that taxi driver was my dad.

Sod you, Starmer, Phillipson and Sarwar, those places are for the likes of me, whether you like it or not.