The answer to the most complex of life’s questions can often be found by simply putting a few news stories together.
Take this debate over Labour’s plan to remove charity status from private schools which could divert £3billion into the crumbling state education sector. Opponents call it a “tax on aspiration”, claiming it would force hundreds of smaller schools to close, thus dashing the dreams of middle-class parents who simply “want the best for their children”.
Which is one way of looking at buying your little darling a leg-up to Oxbridge and a fast-track pass in the life-chance queue. But back to the news.
A man who believes he was born to rule is currently whining about the cruel hand life dealt him while helping his estimated £50million fortune rocket. Prince Harry – whose school you don’t need to guess at because of his unshakeable belief that his country should be doing a lot more for him – has the Eton ring of arrogance stamped on his every utterance.
For the last few years, another old Etonian, who also believes he is above mortal judgment as he was sent by the gods, has been rarely out of the news. Boris Johnson.
Like Harry, he keeps being given a free pass as his wealth soars. He lives in a £20million London mansion he cadged off the same Tory billionaire donor who paid £24,000 towards his wedding and who lets him holiday in his Cotswolds cottage.
Johnson rents out three properties, and sold his London home for £1.4million in November. Oh, and he’s earned £1million from four speeches since leaving Downing Street, where he received an £18,860 severance payment to add to his £84,144 a year MP’s salary.
We know this because journalists at Sky News and Tortoise Media discovered that MPs have earned £17.1million on top of their salaries in this parliament alone, with £15.2million being pocketed by Tories. The six highest earners are Theresa May, Johnson, Sir Geoffrey Cox, Fiona Bruce, John Redwood and Andrew Mitchell.
Between them these Tories have earned, in just over two years, £7,864,031 above what they already received for working as an MP.
Which raises a few questions. Why are they allowed to have second jobs when surely their hands are already full looking after constituents’ needs? If the answer is their main job is not too taxing, why are we paying them £84,144?
Also, how can people earning such mind-boggling sums for part-time jobs dare to tell life-saving NHS staff who are working themselves into the ground in their only job, that they don’t deserve to have their relative pittance protected from inflation?
And finally, with all six of those MPs at some point privately educated, do they provide a possible answer to the funding shortfall that may occur if independent schools stopped being classed as charities?
Why not make the parents of the privately educated sign their kids up for a graduate tax whereby, if they earn over a certain amount, they pay a percentage to the school that gave them the fast-track pass to wealth?
I’m sure the many thousands of rich Old Etonians, Rugbeians and Harrovians would see the moral
rectitude in giving something back for the greater good.
Because they will surely have been taught in their Victorian literature lessons Mary Wollstonecraft’s belief that “it is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.”
