Private school VAT rhetoric seems to betray the government’s approach to property: everything belongs to the state.
I would hope that the government acts upon thought-through policies backed up by rational arguments – and there are plenty of those both for and against levying VAT on independent schools. Despite this, the arguments made by ministers and MPs are more emotional than they are economic. And, unless you take a rather illiberal approach to private property, they do not make sense.
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, recently wrote in defence of the government’s intent to introduce VAT on independent schools, stating that: “Our state schools need teachers more than private schools need embossed stationery”. She went on to talk about swimming pools and AstroTurf pitches. This is a true statement: all schools need teachers and no schools need the sort of ‘frills’ that many independent schools are cutting.
The commentary surrounding this has been that Phillipson is talking in terms of the politics of envy – or stoking class divide. I am not going to claim either of these things: the main problem with this argument is that it does not work: a true statement followed by a conclusion does not make a coherent argument.
I may as well say that I need toothpaste more than the King of Sweden needs a new carriage. In terms of the individual human flourishing of both myself and the King of Sweden this may be the case, but there is no link between my lack of toothpaste and his wish for a new carriage (assuming there isn’t a very unlikely supply chain failure). The carriage may be less essential than the toothpaste – just as swimming pools or crested notepaper are less essential to schools’ needs than teachers – but this does not mean that I lack toothpaste because the King of Sweden has ordered a new carriage.
It is bewildering that a Secretary of State should be allowed by their communications team to post something so fallacious. And it is a genuine fallacy: that of zero-sum gains, which is, in the words of Roger Scruton, “the belief that every benefit received by one person is a loss felt by another”. Unless one applies zero-sum thinking, the fact that an independent school has a swimming pool or an AstroTurf pitch or even embossed stationery is simply irrelevant to the fact that a state school might not.
Imagine flipping the argument. Despite the rhetoric, there are state schools with incredible facilities. Would Phillipson agree that a state school with an AstroTurf is somehow depriving a private school of teachers? If this feels absurd, then so must the original argument, the apparent cogency of which relies on the heavy lifting done by the emotive “our” state schools. State schools do not even really belong to the state (and increasingly so) and likewise, teachers are not civil servants like they are in France.
We have seen this from Labour before. It was this sort of thinking which led to the abolition of grammar schools from the late 1960s, even though they were competing extremely well against the private sector. At least the utopian comprehensive idea was a cogent aim, Anthony Crosland’s expletive outburst aside. The rationale here seems less certain.
The line of argument was extended in a hot take from James Frith, Labour MP for Bury North, in the Commons recently, who claimed that not imposing a tax on independent schools was a form of “state subsidy”. It is possible, but unlikely, that Frith is under the impression that the state funding of private schools through a direct grant has returned. The zero-sum calculation has now been fed through the mechanisms of the state and mangled further on the way out.
Phillipson’s argument might assume a single source of funding across every school in the country. Frith’s “state subsidy” seems to double down on this idea: if money is coming into an independent school then it must then be withheld from a state school – ergo an effective subsidy. That not taxing something is the same as subsidising it is a bold economic position. Again, the problem here is not that applying VAT to private education won’t raise enough money to fix the state sector (however doubtful the claim). The problem is that the only way to understand many of the arguments being made for it is to first assume that everything in the country belongs to the state.
There is some humour to be found. Benjamin Franklin missed one inevitability: nothing is certain save death, taxes, and Eton College. I can think of little else more British than the government admitting to state collectivism through an announcement of public school tax policy.
