The left is once again turning its guns on private schools ahead of a possible forthcoming election. Scotland’s SNP government has already announced, in its December budget, that it will charge Scottish private schools business rates, while the Labour-affiliated group Labour Against Private Schools (its Twitter handle is @AbolishEton) is seeking to carry a motion at the party’s conference this month to integrate private schools into the state system. The campaign has the support of leading figures, including Labour’s Ed Miliband and the shadow Treasury minister Clive Lewis. ‘We cannot claim to have an education system that is socially just when children in private schools continue to have 300 per cent more spent on their education than children in state schools,’ Lewis has said.
Of course, the people who feel most keenly the disparity between private school fees and the expenditure in state schools are not left-wing politicians, but the hard-pressed middle classes who send their children to private schools.
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