According to David Davis MP, putting VAT on private school fees is “class war”. People “scrimp and save” to afford the £52,749 fees charged by Eton College and now, thanks to this cruel government, these poor people will now have to fork out £63,000 a year instead. Hand me the world’s smallest violin.
You may not believe this, but the sheer unfairness of the government’s decision to impose VAT on private school fees was first raised with me by a food bank user just last week. Said the user: “This is just typical of the Communist government we have elected. People like me struggle with private school fees so much that I have to come to this food bank. I work in a minimum wage job, I have a serious medical condition, my children go without breakfast on a regular basis and now this. It’s so unfair on hard working people like me.” You literally may not believe this because, very obviously, it’s all made up.
The likes of Davis, along with the pound shop populists of the gutter press, seem to inhabit another world, certainly not one in which a third of British children live in poverty. And because we now have a government that is actually committed to reducing and hopefully ending poverty, as soon as it asks for those with the broadest shoulders to bear the heaviest weight, the affluent illiberal elite calls it class war. Class war? How so?
The horrible inequality that plagues our country doesn’t seem to matter to some who have more money than they know what to do with. Take Davis himself who reveals in the MPs Register of Interests that he trousers a fortune from numerous gigs. And he has the brass neck to whinge about a policy that will have a minimal or no effect on the choices of the rich who can afford to send their kids to private school. The very idea that people are “scrimping and saving” to afford to send their kids to elite private schools is actually offensive to those of us who work or volunteer on the poverty frontline.
Not only that, the Conservatives spent 14 trashing Britain, with a decade and more of austerity which was inflicted upon the poorest people in the land and then by Liz Truss crashing the economy in 2022. Add to that the corruption under Boris Johnson and the irresponsible unfunded spending by the pint-sized loser Rishi Sunak and you either carry on down the road of breaking the bits of Britain that aren’t broken yet or you front up and do what has to be done. The well-off did well as Britain wilted under the Tories. This is not a revenge attack on the rich: it is simply asking the better off to pay a bit more. And frankly, if that means one skiing holiday for the well-to-do and a few more quid for those with next to nothing, what’s not to like?
