Good morning. Keir Starmer’s policy of ending the VAT exemption for private schools is not all that new, and not all that radical: it’s been Labour policy for five years, Michael Gove suggested the same thing in 2017 (£), and Gove’s former policy adviser Sam Freedman says that a tiny number of independent schools would be threatened by the change. It’s a popular, progressive idea, but it’s not going to transform the UK’s education system.
It has, nonetheless, come under furious attack. First, the Daily Mail conjured two front pages about it from thin air. Then Starmer leaned into the row by bringing it up at prime minister’s questions. This weekend, the furore reached its predictable zenith: a search for hypocrisy on Starmer’s part by the Mail on Sunday. The resulting story felt, in all honesty, pretty thin: Starmer sends his children to … state school. But that school, in the Mail on Sunday’s telling, is a “state-run prep school for the middle class”. Gotcha!
