What does it mean to be “wealthy”? It is perhaps this question more than any other that haunts British society. The public’s definition can be glimpsed in the reaction to Labour’s mansion tax idea for properties worth more than £2m in 2015, or its proposal for a 45p tax rate on earnings over £80,000 in 2019: a revolution of polite but pushy well-to-do Britons (and a Conservative election victory) never seemed to take long to follow.
Like expensive Swiss clockwork, it’s happening again. At the time of writing, more than 70,000 parents of private school pupils have signed a petition to stop Keir Starmer’s plan to charge private schools VAT. Tony Perry, an NHS data analyst on a £60k salary and leader of the Education Not Taxation: Parents Against School Fee VAT campaign – who sends his 10-year-old son to a £21,000-a-year school in Berkshire – describes himself as “a non-wealthy parent”. Go through the comments on the petition and many others chime in to protest just how wealthy they aren’t.
