So we move into the New Year with a blazing row about some fool of a Cabinet Minister shooting her mouth off over an educational policy they don’t understand and are dogmatically devoted to.

I can’t help but feel I could have written that at any time over the last 80 years and I wouldn’t have been wrong except for sometimes having to change the pronoun.

This year it is the turn of Bridget Phillipson and Rachel Reeves, who have decided from this month onwards to put VAT on private school fees and charge all private schools business rates.

In an article in the Telegraph, which I presume given the audience and the tone was designed to be deliberately provocative, Phillipson declared that private schools not buying business rates was ‘a luxury’ and that levying further taxes would raise £1.7 billion and pay for 6,500 extra teachers.

Was she telling the truth? Of course not, for one simple reason. We don’t know what it will, or won’t, raise, or what it will pay for. As Benpointer’s competition graphically demonstrated, not being the Prophet Isaiah none of us are able to foretell the future.

Was she telling what she believes to be the truth? Quite possibly. But if she is, that’s a bit worrying because it suggests she has but a shaky grasp of reality. Let’s unpick some detail.

1. She keeps referring to ‘tax breaks’ or ‘tax exemptions.’ The reason why a largeish chunk – not by any means all – of private schools do not pay standard business taxes is because they are not businesses. If we decide business taxes should be levied on any service for which charges are made regardless of their legal status, why single out schools? Why not churches, youth clubs, the CAB or indeed political parties?
2. We also keep hearing about ‘VAT exemption.’ VAT is levied on specific activities at specific rates. Education has not been one of them up to now. From this month, it is for those persons studying up to A-level (I picked that carefully, because I teach a number of A-level courses to people over 18). Not levying it is a choice, not an exemption. Again, if we say that things are ‘exempt’ perhaps we should ask whether food and fuel need to be ‘exempt?’ After all, both are, in effect, available for free if you cannot actually afford them through various odd loopholes.
3. She says this programme will raise £1.7 billion in total. Well, if everything goes right, and the loss to the sector is what is expected, and the VAT is levied at full rates in every school (a la Eton) and surpluses are therefore maintained, and nobody claims back VAT on purchases for the last ten years, it might. Trouble is, in addition to that it’s based on the assumption that the loss of children won’t make schools unviable, which it very well might given the tightness of margins at the moment. In an area with many private schools, such as London or Bristol, that likely won’t be an issue. They’ll go to another school. But supposing the one private school in an area shuts? What then? Do the children magically decamp to one fifty miles away? Or do they swap en masse to the state sector?
4. She notes school fees have risen dramatically in recent years without impacting on numbers. Yes, that is true. House prices have also risen dramatically in recent years. Does that mean that increasing prices by another 20% overnight and (in effect) applying it retrospectively to every sale since September wouldn’t cause serious problems? There is a difference between a gradual rise over the long term and a sudden spike.
5. ‘It will pay for 6,500 new teachers.’ Well, quite possibly it would. The numbers at least are not Diane Abbott style nonsense. But given that we are facing critical shortages of teachers for pretty much every subject (which is not her fault) and the situation is about to get much worse (which is her fault) that’s not actually going to be of much relevance either way. If Labour maintain teacher numbers over five years they’ll have done much better than I expect, and given changing demography may actually not need the extra numbers.

So, has this policy been a success? Undoubtedly. It has said to all the imbeciles on the Labour left who have the same shaky grasp of reality as Ms Phillipson herself that notwithstanding WFA furores the government is out to soak the rich. It’s also designed to upset the ISC, which so far is very much playing her game by applying for an entirely vexatious judicial review and therefore reassuring the Left that she is annoying all the right people. And that’s all it’s for. From that point of view, it’s positively Trumpian.

It is also a bad policy (again, positively Trumpian) because it won’t hurt those schools which genuinely do entrench social division by allowing rich idiots (Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Cummings, Tristram Hunt etc) to get an education and therefore economic and social status that is far beyond their intellectual merits. These schools will be able to levy VAT as their parents can afford it. It’s the smaller schools taking children whose parents can just barely afford the fees that will go under. (This incidentally makes Phillipson’s claims the ‘middle classes’ support her policy disingenuous if not dishonest bullshit and makes me wonder if she’s an idiot).

Given the enormously important role of those schools in taking SEND children out of the state sector, this is likely to prove a highly Pyrrhic victory. But a victory Phillipson clearly thinks it will be. Time will tell whether she is wrong.

Y Doethur

Y Doethur has taught in three universities, four schools, and worked for two exam boards. He now runs a highly successful tutoring business based in Staffordshire with a clientele on five continents. He would respectfully advise everyone to remember he hates the DfE with a passion, but that his hatred is entirely rational and based on their stupidity and incompetence.