Never mind ‘tax raids’, Labour – just abolish private education

As drivers of inequality, private schools are at the heart of Britain’s problems. Labour must be bold and radical on this writes Owen Jones in The Guardian

 

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at the TUC Congress in Brighton. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images


The British class system is an organised racket. It concentrates wealth and power in the hands of the few, while 14 million Britons languish in poverty.

If you are dim but have rich parents, a life of comfort, affluence and power is almost inevitable – while the bright but poor are systematically robbed of their potential. The well-to-do are all but guaranteed places at the top table of the media, law, politics, medicine, military, civil service and arts. As inequality grows, so too does the stranglehold of the rich over democracy. The wealthiest 1,000 can double their fortunes in the aftermath of financial calamity, while workers suffer the worst squeeze in wages since the Napoleonic wars. State support is lavished on rich vested interests – such as the banks responsible for Britain’s economic turmoil – but stripped from disabled and low-paid people. The powerful have less stressful lives, and the prosperous are healthier, expecting to live a decade longer than those living in the most deprived areas.

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Unless this rotten system is abolished, Britain will never be free of social and political turmoil. It is therefore welcome – overdue, in fact – to read the Daily Telegraph’s horrified front-page story: “Corbyn tax raid on private schools”.

The segregation of children by the bank balances of their parents is integral to the class system, and the Labour Against Private Schools group has been leading an energetic campaign to shift the party’s position. The party is looking at scrapping the tax subsidies enjoyed by private education, which are de facto public subsidies for class privilege: moves such as ending VAT exemptions for school fees, as well as making private schools pay the rates other businesses are expected to. If the class system has an unofficial motto, it is “one rule for us, and one rule for everybody else”. Private schools encapsulate that, and forcing these gilded institutions to stand on their own two feet should be a bare minimum.

More radically, Labour is debating whether to commit to abolishing private education. This is exactly what the party should do, even if it is via the “slow and painless euthanasia” advocated by Robert Verkaik, the author of Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain. Compelling private schools to apply by the same VAT and business rate rules as others will starve them of funds, forcing many of them out of business.

Private education is, in part, a con: past OECD research has suggested that there is not “much of a performance difference” between state and private schools when socio-economic background is factored in. In other words, children from richer backgrounds – because the odds are stacked in their favour from their very conception – tend to do well, whichever school they’re sent to. However unpalatable it is for some to hear it, many well-to-do parents send their offspring to private schools because they fear them mixing with the children of the poor. Private schools do confer other advantages, of course: whether it be networks, or a sense of confidence that can shade into a poisonous sense of social superiority.

Mixing together is good for children from different backgrounds: the evidence suggests that the “cultural capital” of pupils with more privileged, university-educated parents rubs off on poorer peers without their own academic progress suffering. Such mixing creates more well-rounded human beings, breaking down social barriers. If sharp-elbowed parents are no longer able to buy themselves out of state education, they are incentivised to improve their local schools. 

Look at Finland: it has almost no private or grammar schools, and instead provides a high-quality local state school for every pupil, and its education system is among the best performing on Earth. It shows why Labour should be more radical still: not least committing to abolishing grammar schools, which take in far fewer pupils who are eligible for free school meals.

Other radical measures are necessary too. Poverty damages the educational potential of children, whether through stress or poor diet, while overcrowded, poor-quality housing has the same impact too. Gaps in vocabulary open up an early age, underlining the need for early intervention. The educational expert Melissa Benn recommends that, rather than emulating the often narrow curriculums of private schools, there should be a move by state schools away from exam results: a wrap-around qualification could include a personal project, community work and a broader array of subjects.

In the coming election, Labour has to be more radical and ambitious than it was 2017. At the very core of its new manifesto must be a determination to overcome a class system that is a ceaseless engine of misery, insecurity and injustice.

Britain is a playground for the rich, but this is not a fact of life – and a commitment to ending private education will send a strong message that time has finally been called on a rotten class system.

Why I want to see private schools abolished

Tim Lott in The Guardian

I am inclined towards equality of opportunity for all children. I am also aware that such a phrase is open to multiple definitions – and with most of them, such equality verges on the impossible. For instance, we can all hold up our hands in pious disapproval at the unfairness of, say, familial nepotism – such as that seen among Donald Trump’s brood – yet most of us are not much better. Anyone who is educated, or from a middle-class background is also operating on a manifestly unequal playing field.
This is largely because of the workings of social capital – of which nepotism is simply an extreme example. At a mundane level, it means having parents who are educated, interested in education, connected within the professions and happy to use those connections – what you might call cultural nepotism. I am not innocent of this. Conscience takes a fall when one’s children are involved.
This kind of inequality is difficult to legislate against. The divide between rich and poor families is growing, and largely inescapable. A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank shows that the number of internships has risen 50% since 2010 – another leg-up for those who can afford to take low-paid or unpaid positions.

Add in decent housing, good nutrition and the imparting of confidence and the middle classes have a huge advantage, even before you talk about schooling. There are other ineradicable forms of inequality – genetic capital for instance, since intelligence, is, according to most scientific sources, at least 50% hereditary. But social capital is the most visible.


Middle-class kids will, on aggregate, still come out on top because of their pre-existing advantages

This entrenched and inevitable advantage is, perversely, why I oppose private schools far more firmly than grammar schools (which, at least in theory, could be meritocratic). It is not that I hope to take away from privileged children any unfair head start. I just want to take away the only advantage that is purely down to money and entirely subject to legislation.
Private schools add insult to injury. If you get rid of them and shift all the pupils into the state system, nothing will guarantee the latter’s improvement with more certainty. And the middle-class kids will, on aggregate, still come out on top because of their pre-existing advantages – so it is especially egregious that so many people so staunchly oppose their abolition.

Grammar schools, as envisaged in the 1944 Education Act (with selection based not solely on tests but also on aptitude and past performance) might be the answer to those who suggest the abolition of private schools would result in “dumbing down” – as long as they were a resource for the clever and motivated rather than the privileged and tutored. There would still be inequality, but it would be minimised. Absolutely level playing fields are, and always will be, a myth. However, we can make the fields less ridiculously skewed than they are at the moment.

It is doable, practically. Shame that it just appears impossible to do politically. The fact that Jeremy Corbyn is suggesting charging private schools VAT is a step in the right direction. A few more steps in that direction and he might establish a policy that would make me vote for him.

But I’ll take a (state-educated) guess that it won’t happen. There are too many people with too many fingers in the private-schooling pie – among them a fair number of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. Because when those who stand against inequality simultaneously take advantage of it, their motivation is sorely undermined – whether or not it would be a vote winner.

Such is the insidiousness of educational inequality – so long as it works for the policy-makers themselves, it has little or no chance of real reform. Those responsible can always tell themselves that it’s just for their children’s sake. It is understandable. It may even be forgivable. But it is a total cop-out.

Forget austerity – what we need is a stronger state and more taxation

The income tax system needs reshaping. This is not easy. But nor is reducing the state to its smallest level for 80 years

• 
• • Will Hutton
  • The Observer, Sunday 7 December 2014

The March of the Unemployed from the Thames Embankment to County Hall, Westminster, during the Great Depression. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

If the Conservative party forms the next government, by 2020 the state will probably be the smallest it has been – in relation to GDP – for 80 years. So declared the Office for Budget Responsibility last Wednesday, in the wake of the autumn statement. By 2020, spending per head of population will have fallen by around a third in 10 years. In some areas – in our cities and our criminal justice system – the reductions will be even more draconian. This is the most dramatic change in state capability that any British government has ever engineered.

The chancellor may complain about the “hyperbolic” tone of some BBC reporting. But surely only in a one-party state would this dramatic plan not be discussed in appropriately dramatic terms. Britain is to become the site of a massive experiment in economic and social libertarianism whose authors have never fessed up to the sheer audacity and scale of what they are doing. They have just dumbly insisted there is no alternative. The autumn statement was the moment the implications became clear.

A financial crisis has been allowed to morph into a crisis of public provision because the government of the day will not lift a finger to compensate for the haemorrhaging of the UK tax base. What the state does is not the subject of a collective decision with concerned weighing of options. Instead, it’s an afterthought, with the greater priorities a reduction in public borrowing and freezing or lowering tax rates.

All the state can spend is what is left after those two greater priorities are met, and if it has to shrink to pre-modern levels then so be it. The market will provide: charity will alleviate suffering; people will get by; the roof will not fall in. Lifting taxation can never be considered to close the gap. It is, it is alleged, both economically self-defeating and immoral.

A cool £54bn has gone missing since 2010. Then the government projected that in 2014/15 its total tax revenues would be £700bn. In fact, they will be £646bn, according to the OBR. Public spending, on the other hand, has behaved almost exactly as forecast. In 2010, the government projected that its spending would be £738bn in this financial year. The Treasury is to be congratulated on its capacities as national book-keeper in chief. The actual figure is £737bn, an accuracy I doubt many private companies could reproduce – or even individual readers of the Observer. It is not runaway public spending that is causing borrowing to stay stubbornly high, thus triggering the extreme shrinkage of the state: it is the hollowing out of the tax base.

There are three principal causes. The first is that the structure of the economic recovery is delivering a reduced tax yield. There are too many low-paying jobs and pay on average is stagnating, so that aggregate income tax revenues are growing much less rapidly than in previous recoveries. We are drinking and smoking less, so there is less revenue from alcohol and tobacco duties. Altogether this accounts for around a third of the shortfall.

Another third is a result of the chancellor wanting to show his tax-cutting credentials as a true Thatcherite man: he has cut corporate tax rates, frozen the business rate, not adjusted council tax bands upwards, not increased petrol duties, lowered the top rate of tax and increased personal allowances. The last element is down to our living with an epidemic of tax avoidance and evasion, as the last G20 summit recognised – and which even Osborne says he deplores. Too many companies and rich individuals are gaming the system.

Put all this together and Britain has lost that £54bn. But matters are made worse by the interaction of Britain’s highly centralised Treasury and a chancellor with Osborne’s instincts. Giles Wilkes, former adviser to Vince Cable, and Stian Westlake, research director at Nesta, write in an important paper, The End of the Treasury, that the Treasury inverts the way that spending and taxing decisions should be made. It starts with a target for borrowing, not differentiating great capital projects such as London’s Crossrail from spending on the NHS. Then it projects tax revenues assuming no changes, and sets aside money for fixed obligations, such as pensions.

Finally, departments fight over the left-overs on a year by year basis, with the Treasury policing spending with a ferocious rigidity. The benefit is that it can control spending to the last billion. The cost is that there is never a weighing up of the benefits of raising taxes against a particular use for public spending, nor any strategic long-term programme of investment.

This is bad enough in ordinary times, but when a chancellor refuses to consider raising taxes as the tax base collapses it is a recipe for disaster. It results in a minimal state, with implications for prisons, schools, courts, policing, legal aid, care, security and defence that are profound. Some of this could be avoided if, as both Labour and the LibDems propose, capital investment was not lumped in with current spending so that virtuous borrowing could be separated out. The country may also get lucky: wages stop stagnating and income tax receipts rise.

But the bigger truth is that if Britain wants the scale of public activity congruent with a civilised society, it has to be paid for. The reaction will be hysterical, but lifting taxes by 3% of GDP to 38.5% to find the missing £54bn will still leave Britain below the crucial 40% benchmark, thus undertaxed by comparison with most advanced countries. The whole system of property taxation needs overhauling. The VAT base can be broadened. Environmental taxes can be extended. Osborne’s proposals to ensure companies pay tax on UK revenues need to be tougher and introduced earlier. The income tax system needs reshaping.

None of this is easy. But neither is reducing the state to its smallest level for 80 years. Reducing spending on schools further is surely short changing our children. How much smaller should the army, navy and air force become? Is the welfare system to return to a system of discretionary poor relief? Do we share the libertarian view that the state is worthless – and there is no co-dependency between public and private? What role do we want the state to have in our civilisation? The right would have it that none of these questions can be asked because all involve an increase in taxation: our only future is a 1930s scale state.

There is a different future, and our politicians of the centre and left have to argue for it, but they must accept it has to be paid for. This has become an existential divide. Politics and political argument have never mattered more.

Reasons why the Green Party should not be allowed on TV debates

Mark Steel in The Independent

If the Green Party isn’t allowed into the TV election debates, there should be a compromise, such as its MP, Caroline Lucas, being allowed to present an episode of Top Gear.

She could zip through the Lake District, saying: “But while it HANDLES like a DREAM, the new Alfa Romeo 2.3 litre XL Deluxe has just one problem. It’s an UNBELIEVABLY inefficient way to use energy compared to a reasonably priced re-nationalised rail network.”

Or the leader of the Green Party, Natalie Bennett, could be offered a different slot, such as commentating on an international rugby match. “The New Zealand pack is absolutely immense,” she could say, adding: “But even if it rucked across Sussex for two months it wouldn’t endanger natural resources as much as fracking.”

The party might have to try this, because the debates proposed don’t include the Greens at all, despite some polls showing it ahead of the Liberal Democrats. The BBC explained this was because, “We take into account electoral results from past elections”, in which case there must be an argument for including the Whigs, which remained high in the polls up to 1850.

Its leader could promise to reduce the deficit by colonising Africa, before becoming involved in a heated discussion about immigration with a Saxon warlord, who had been invited as he was part of a coalition government throughout much of the 10th century.

The Liberal Democrats have agreed the Green Party shouldn’t be allowed to take part, although it came ahead of the Lib Dems in the European elections and many recent polls. Maybe party members feel there should be a different set of rules for who’s invited, depending on the number of letters in a party’s name. So the debate on Channel 4 should only include the Liberal Democrats and the Reclassify the Brontosaurus as a Type of Diplodocus Party.

You can understand the Liberal Democrats feeling jittery about the TV election debates. Because in the last ones the party leader persuaded many people to vote for him, by confirming his pledge to abolish tuition fees. But in all the stress of a live debate, he got the words abolish and treble mixed up.

And he harangued the Conservatives for planning to put up VAT to 20 per cent, which the party angrily denied. But happily a few weeks later they’d sorted out this disagreement, by both putting it up to 20 per cent together. It’s a heart-warming tale of friendship overcoming silly squabbles that should be made into a romcom with Clegg played by Jennifer Aniston.

The problem now is no sane person can believe anything Nick Clegg promises, pledges or vows again. So there’s no point in him being there at all, as he’s like the bloke in the pub who tells ridiculous stories no one listens to. Dimbleby can ask whether he’d renew Trident, and he could reply: “I know Ronnie O’Sullivan. I always beat him at snooker, only the Government doesn’t let me in the tournaments ‘cos I’ve been shagging Michele Obama.”

Despite this, no one would suggest Nick Clegg shouldn’t be allowed in the TV debates. But it might be best if he was given a separate slot, like the act that comes on half way through the Super Bowl. He can dance to his latest apology, maybe in a provocative dress, and that way he doesn’t make such a fool of himself but the honour of the democratic process is preserved.  

Another reason given for excluding the Greens is that once you have five people in a debate, it becomes too unmanageable. And you can see how it might become difficult for the viewer to even remember who was who. When there are just four white men between 40 and 50 in suits and ties, it’s easy to tell everyone apart. But the Green Party leader is an Australian woman, and if you add her in, people watching at home would get her mixed up with Nigel Farage, or become confused and think they were watching an old episode of Neighbours.

There’s another reason why the Greens could spoil the evening. If the debates are just between the four leaders, there will be a soothing pattern to the discussion. For example, on immigration each leader in turn will say: “I deny we’ll let in more immigrants and that swe like immigrants and accuse all of you of liking immigrants, and you say you hate immigrants but we really hate immigrants and we’ll ban immigrants from eating biscuits until they’ve been here three years, and won’t let them into doctors’ surgeries unless they drink a tin of paint for the amusement of other patients.”

So if someone answers by suggesting immigration isn’t the main problem, it will ruin the whole event, like if someone turned up for a game of cards and insisted on playing tag-team wrestling instead.

You can understand why the three old parties are worried about letting in anyone from outside, as they seem honestly to believe they’re the main, proper, real parties and everyone else is still “others”. Their most persuasive argument against voting for anyone else is “they can’t win”, or “don’t all vote for them, they’re unelectable”.

The answer could be to allow the five leaders to take part in the debates, but allow each one to nominate a programme the others have to appear in, starting with David Cameron on Made in Chelsea, spending the whole show saying “Sorry, do I know you?” as he pretended not to know all his old mates