Given that the overwhelming majority of people are state educated and receive zero, or less, benefit from private schools, there is something almost impressive – when it doesn’t look actively demented – about current media campaigns to represent the application of VAT to school fees as a burning election issue.
From the first, Labour’s proposal to end private schools’ exemption and spend the revenue on state schools had a dramatic impact on Tory-sympathising news sources previously unbothered about the private sector becoming, as Civitas summarised it, “roughly twice as expensive in one generation”. Overnight, thanks to Keir Starmer’s plan, it was understood that British private schools, far from being an ever more exclusive service for the most affluent, are dear to countless immiserated parents whom the Mail, highlighting their plight, goes so far as to call “poor”. Some of them are so hard up, journalists report, they live in modest houses, drive “old bangers” and, when they don’t “sacrifice” meals out, deny themselves West End shows. The forgoing of one possible purchase for the sake of another is invariably known, in the lexicon of pro-private school coverage, as a sacrifice.
