Tristram Hunt’s modest suggestion in Monday’s Guardian that Britain’s 2,570 fee-paying schools make a larger contribution to the wider community or risk losing their charity tax rebates roused predictable fury from the usual suspects, not least in Fleet Street which, like many of our institutions, is less meritocratic than in post-war generations past.
The Daily Mail called Labour’s education spokesman “the privately educated expensively coiffed son of a baron” – Hunt’s father is a Cambridge scientist, councillor and life peer – who is also a “hypocrite”. It is a charge we can all level against each other, as Polly Toynbee briskly notes here – so Hunt Jr must be doing something right. Wednesday’s Guardian letters page says he’s not doing enough.
Losing their share of an annual £164m of business rate rebate won’t kill off powerful and prestigious schools, though it may harm some smaller ones – many of them pretty poor schools, I suspect, those that survive on middle-class fear of their children being educated alongside the majority of their fellow citizens and losing status in towns and cities up and down the country
If enacted – always a big if – it means that parents will probably have to pay more, though one Guardian letter writer points out that they already pay twice through their taxes – saving £800m a year on state school places they don’t take up – and benefit society and the Treasury in other ways. The fact is, as widely noted in these unsettled times, the private schools do trouser a disproportionate share of Russell Group university places and good jobs later on.
It’s not all on sheer merit, don’t kid yourselves, though we should pause to note in passing that most modern states retain elitist educational fast streams of one kind or another – including such self-consciously egalitarian republics as France and, differently so, the US.
To judge by their private lives and attitudes, meritocratic graduates of France’s “grandes écoles”, the likes François Hollande (who out-Mellors David Mellor) and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the rival who should have got his job, Eton turned our Dave into a model citizen. Phoney Texan, George W Bush (Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School) ? Don’t even ask.
There are a lot of clever underused young people out there which the comprehensive school system has done a lot to nurture, but too many still slip between the cracks.
But, just like Labour’s mansion tax plans, Hunt’s modest proposal highlights another feature of contemporary British life which is gradually surfacing into public consciousness. It is the extent to which life’s prizes – which our own upper and aspiring upper middle classes once took to be their entitlement – are under challenge from immigrants of one kind or another. It’s a comfier version of the struggle which motivates Ukip voters who want quicker GP appointments and good primary school places, but it’s real too.
Only last weekend the Sunday Times, quasi-bible for many materialistic aspirants, quoted on page one a private school head (paywall) warning that layers of middle-class doctors, lawyers and teachers accustomed to sending their kids to private schools were being priced out of the market by fast-rising fees, quadrupled in 20 years. It risks such schools becoming “finishing schools for the children of oligarchs”, the sort of foreigners (and Brits) who can still afford the bills, he says.
You might laugh and say “tough luck”, especially if you don’t live in London or other major cities with prestigious private day schools, or aspire to boarding schools which sometimes dominate market towns (and boost employment in them).
But a few weeks earlier, the same paper reported (here’s the Times’ (paywall) version) that state grammar schools have also become a magnet for striving newcomers who value the importance of a good education more than some of us natives do. It’s not just well-heeled Indian or entrepreneurial Nigerian and Iranian families either, poor Somalis are in there too, so it is reported.
Tricky, eh? A young man I’ve known all his life, who attended such a school, surprised me recently by saying it was similarly configured when he was a teenage pupil 20 years ago. The sectarian and religious abuse exchanged between his ethnic-minority peers was spectacular, he said. I hope state and private schools now have a better grip on that.
I imagine there are all sorts of goodies, the kind I don’t know much about, which face such competition, exclusive sports facilities, yachts, ski chalets, country estates. The one I am most aware of is expensive housing in central London. Why? Because I live in the western suburbs and meet people whom I regard as “refugees” from Kensington or Notting Hill.
With their worldly goods and pianos piled metaphorically on a cart they trundle down the Cromwell Road in search of cheaper homes and schools. “ I was the last English speaker in my street where Russians now hold parties where the staff wear long white gloves,” one such individual explained to me at a grubbier suburban event. I know, it’s exactly what much poorer people feel about their own neighbourhoods, a sense of displacement. I feel it a bit myself.
As widely noted, some central London neighbourhoods, mostly north of the Thames, are very dark at night – like the Grand Canal in Venice, which has similar problems. Who lives there ? It’s hard to tell, as the taxman can confirm. Ministers are trying to get on top of property tax avoidance angles and outrageous planning applications for underground palaces – backed by intimidating walls of money. Is this what we want?
In this context Labour’s plans to levy a mansion tax on £2 m-plus homes looks like good politics to most people, for whom such prices are unimaginable because similar homes in Birmingham, Edinburgh or Leeds might cost a quarter of that – much less in some cases. But it divides Labour, even an old leftie like Hampstead’s Glenda Jackson knows its likely impact in real life. As a well-heeled friend of mine put it “the mansion tax may drive most remaining British owners out of central London”. Is this what we want?
When rich US colleges hit the sheer intellectual force and muscle of ambitious immigrant groups – Catholics, later Jews, now Indians and Chinese – they historically reacted with a mixture of snobbish exclusivity and quotas. Britain certainly hasn’t done the latter, though it remains good at the former.
Housing, schools, hospitals, state and private – they face growing competition for limited resources from many directions (demographics is another). In gorgeous St Ives in Cornwall, where my family hails from, the town council is hoping to restrict second-home ownership, which already claims a quarter of the town’s houses as it tries to build homes for locals. Good luck, council.
All this is globalisation impacting on people’s lives in ways that are negative. We all know about it. What do we do about it? First, we don’t make things worse. Here’s hoping Labour strategists bear it in mind.
