DAILY MAIL COMMENT: All pupils would suffer under Keir Starmer

DAILY MAIL COMMENT: All pupils would suffer under socialist Keir Starmer

With a general election on the horizon, Sir Keir Starmer is desperate to reassure voters that Labour is in moderate hands.

But his vindictive, divisive plan to slap 20 per cent VAT on private school fees reveals exactly where his political heart lies.

Removing independent schools’ charitable status would be the ugly politics of class envy.

His mask has slipped – again. Labour’s leader insists he has distanced himself from the worst kinds of hard-Left populism.

With a general election on the horizon, Sir Keir Starmer is desperate to reassure voters that Labour is in moderate hands. But his vindictive, divisive plan to slap 20 per cent VAT on private school fees reveals exactly where his political heart lies

Yet attacking Britain’s private schools was a key plank of Jeremy Corbyn’s election manifesto in 2019 (when Sir Keir, let’s not forget, fought tooth and nail to make him prime minister).

Rather than sound fiscal thinking, axing tax relief for fee-paying institutions looks like an act of spite.

It would push fees further beyond the reach of ordinary parents, turning private education into the exclusive preserve of the super-rich.

That would force many middle-class parents, who make enormous sacrifices to educate their children privately, back into the state system – at huge cost to the taxpayer.

And that would invariably pile yet more pressure on state schools – undermining the education of pupils.

Yet attacking Britain’s private schools was a key plank of Jeremy Corbyn’s election manifesto in 2019 (when Sir Keir, let’s not forget, fought tooth and nail to make him prime minister)

It also risks harming co-operation between state and independent schools, which make their expertise and facilities available to poorer children.

Not for the first time, a Labour leader who was educated privately wants to wreck some of the finest schools in the land while pulling up the ladder of opportunity behind him. The way to solve our education crisis is to improve bad schools – not cripple the good ones.

It may not fit Sir Keir’s warped educational philosophy, but people should be free to strive, save hard and spend their money how they want – not how a socialist state sees fit.

Xi’s Covid reckoning

The political philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party is that ordinary people cannot have power.

So it is both shocking and inspiring to see an uprising against Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid lockdown restrictions.

Tensions have been simmering for some time over the president’s handling of coronavirus outbreaks – especially with the rest of the world now opened up.

But the deaths of ten people trapped in a block of flats that caught fire have sparked an outpouring of rage across the nation.

The political philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party is that ordinary people cannot have power. So it is both shocking and inspiring to see an uprising against Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid lockdown restrictions

Not since the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, when at least 10,000 peaceful demonstrators were massacred by the army, has China seen anything like it.

The world awaits with bated breath to see if the brutal regime will crush it with repressive violence.

The lockdown of cities in China – some lasting for many months – has global ramifications too. It has hit trade, which has contributed to spiralling inflation – hitting all of us.

Experts increasingly believe that Covid, which has killed six million and destroyed economies, escaped from a Wuhan lab – a terrible scientific blunder then covered up by the malign Communist regime.

What a wonderful irony it would be if Xi, the country’s autocratic dictator, is toppled by a rebellion over his draconian Covid policies.

There’s rarely a daft, virtue-signalling orthodoxy that luvvies won’t support. That’s why most oh-so-liberal thespians have stayed silent while JK Rowling has been bombarded with abuse from trans activists for standing up for women’s rights. So Helena Bonham Carter should take a curtain call for defending her. If Oscars were awarded for common sense, she would win one.

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