via Yahoo News
Sir Keir Starmer’s attack on the Conservative Party manifesto brought into sharp relief a question many have been brooding on for some time. Speaking in Middlesbrough, the Labour leader described the document as “a Jeremy Corbyn-style manifesto” full of unfunded pledges.
Set aside the fact that Sir Keir campaigned on precisely such a manifesto as a shadow minister in 2019, praising Mr Corbyn’s plans for offering “hope to the millions who have suffered after nine years of the Tories”. Set aside, too, his decision to run for the Labour leadership with a set of Corbynite pledges “based on the moral case for socialism”, or the questionable implication that his own plans are fully funded.
Instead consider the following question: Starmer has forcefully articulated what he is against. He is against Rishi Sunak, against Liz Truss, against Jeremy Corbyn, and against Sir Keir Starmer (2019-2021). But what is he actually for?
The assault on private schools, for instance, appears to be motivated by little more than class envy. The British tax system bends over backwards to avoid levying charges on education, which makes sense if you see education as a way of building skills: rather than tax the initial investment, you tax the eventual return (in this case, income).
Charging VAT on private school fees gets this perfectly backwards. It will discourage spending on education beyond the minimum provided by the state, push students back into state schools, and quite likely destroy the jobs of teachers who had the audacity to prefer the pay and conditions offered by private schools.
The curious thing is that Labour is clearly aware of these costs. Emily Thornberry admitted on air at the weekend that state school class sizes might have to increase, while teaching unions have issued public warnings about the potential effects on jobs. There are clearly less disruptive ways of raising revenue, if that’s the aim of the policy.
There are better ways of improving equality of opportunity, too. Access to good state schools – of the sort that many prominent Labour figures have attended – is still governed by the ability to pay. If you wanted to live near a top primary school in 2019, you could expect to pay £27,000 more for your home, for a top secondary, an extra £25,000. As a bonus, you would benefit from the efforts of elite universities to recruit state school pupils, and avoid having your child mix with scholarship boys from the lower orders.
To paraphrase the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, the Labour Party is driven less by its great love of working Britons – who its MPs appear to suspect of holding inappropriate views on a swathe of social issues – than it is by its dislike of the rich. The assault on private education fits perfectly into this schema, and the suspicion is that the party’s other tax policies will, too.
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Starmer's politics of envy will trigger a class war
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