Have you had the school gate VAT chat?

Another day closer to the general election and I’m at my daughter’s prep school in Oxfordshire. As has come to be the norm, I’m having a ‘VAT chat’ with a fellow mother.

Of course, we’ve known about Labour’s plan for months. It will lead to a likely 20 per cent rise in private-school fees. Recently, however, these VAT chats have intensified and become louder.

‘To think that other parents would vote Labour given what’s coming enrages me,’ a friend says

I begin with my usual opening gambit. ‘Isn’t it awful?’ I say, trying to convey my real sense of desperation that I will have to take my daughter out of the school that she loves, that our way of life is for the chopping block. My VAT chat buddy agrees vigorously, telling me that she doesn’t know what she will do either. We shake our heads before ending, as we always do, with the observation that the state sector will in no way be able to absorb the droves of children (estimated at 17.1 per cent) moving from the private sector into state schools. It is a soothing, if totally ineffectual, conversation.

Not all VAT chats are alike. Sometimes, I judge my interlocutor poorly. One mother is different: she is not, I sense, that bothered about the rise. It will not affect her children in the same way. She smiles and we trot out the same platitudes, but her heart isn’t in it. I smell no desperation and instead I feel rather embarrassed for bringing up the subject. I notice her loading her offspring into a brand-new Land Rover Defender at pick-up and am reminded that we are not in the same boat.

This is a strange reality. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t dream of starting an idle conversation at the school gates about politics, the cost of living, or indeed tax.