How passively we respond to revelations of Labour’s real direction of travel. As millions of pensioners brace for the confiscation of winter fuel payments and other Budget tax raids, shouldn’t they be pinning on their medals, raising their banners and marching down Whitehall – alongside columns of private school parents, furious at the imposition of VAT on fees? Yet so far barely a whimper of protest, as though those affected are racked with guilt at having kept the Tories in power for so long.
In response to the school-fee fait accompli, Eton with its mile-long waiting list will hit parents with a full 20 per cent VAT hike from January, taking the annual cost per pupil to £63,000. The Girls’ Day School Trust, representing 23 schools, will hold the increase to 12 per cent (£20,000 for day pupils) by squeezing pre-VAT fees. As 2,500 other schools fall into line, parents must either pay up or give up their aspirations for their offspring. But as the last VAT-free term begins, there’s still a moral case to be made against this Corbynist measure and plenty to play for before the legislation passes. So here’s my question sheet for your Labour MP.
If parents are admired for spending taxed income on piano lessons or maths tuition for their children, how can it be acceptable to penalise them for paying fees? Isn’t there a principle that essential goods – food, medicine, books, children’s clothing and hitherto education – are not subjected to consumption taxes such as VAT? Indeed, wasn’t the only known example of a tax on school fees, in Greece under the hard-left Syriza regime in 2015, swiftly scrapped as a disaster?
Then again, how fair is it that only 8,000 pupils with ‘education, health and care plans’ will be exempt from VAT while 100,000 others with special needs, and indeed whole specialist schools providing for them, will not? Shouldn’t someone take that straight to the European Court of Human Rights? And why argue (as the Adam Smith Institute did last week) over Labour’s thin-air fiscal arithmetic, which says £1.7
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