How the left-wing political consensus is killing off ambition, aspiration – and Scotland's private schools

Spotting the unmistakeable figure of ex-MP Sheila Gilmore amongst them I didn’t need to guess the party, and a very well-spoken lady was just leaving our front door, having learnt from my son I was an ex-Conservative councillor. Undeterred, she urged me to vote Labour “to keep out the SNP”, to which I replied I’d be voting for my former colleague Joanna Mowat who has a good chance too. “In any case, I’ll never vote Labour after what you’ve done to private schools,” I added.

I know private education isn’t an election issue, and VAT on fees was imposed by the sour UK Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, not the Scottish Government, but the impact of the decision was exposed this week by a new study for the Scottish Council for Independent Schools (SCIS).

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The VAT receipts last year exceeded the cost to Scottish taxpayers of more pupils in state schools by £10 million, but this will be a £16m loss next year and eventually become an annual deficit of around £200m. Biggar Economics, which conducted the survey, estimates 900 jobs have been lost, and with the shrinkage continuing for the next five or six years, resulting in further closures or mergers, it’s just the start.

No doubt Labour loyalists will blame the impact of the Gulf War or some other nonsense, but private schools knew from their marketing and open day returns that the numbers entering primary one and secondary one would be significantly down, long before Donald Trump chalked a rude note on the side of a Tomahawk missile.

With caricatures of Lord Snooty toffs, the offspring of oligarchs and obscure Asian royalty at Eton and Harrow ingrained in her Oxford-educated head, Phillipson simply refused to accept that hundreds of parents at private day schools really did make sacrifices to exercise choice for their kids.

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It was nowhere more pronounced than in Scottish cities where private schooling is far from unusual, and where the sons of taxi drivers (me) could mix quite easily with the backbone of the middle classes and, in the case of my school, with future Scottish Labour and SNP leaders. No longer; at over £40,000 from taxed earnings to meet the cheapest fees for two kids at a private secondary, it’s now off limits.

There was never going to be an immediate exodus, but Phillipson’s VAT choke across her educational Strait of Hormuz has denied parents access to the gulf of ambition. She must be chuffed to the ends of her immaculate glossy bob.

But the sanctimony of it all should be seen in the light of the suffocating miasma of immorality in which the Labour government is drowning, with the seemingly endless Mandelson saga merely the latest example of sleaze and appalling judgment when it was all supposed to be so much better under unspectacular but steady Sir Keir Starmer.

After this week’s quiet evisceration by the sacked and smarting Sir Olly Robbins and his humiliation at Prime Minister’s Questions, even Labour ministers think two-tier Keir will be gone by summer, but if anyone thinks stamp-duty-dodging Angela Rayner is the solution then they’ve forgotten she’s still part of the problem. Ed Miliband? Nigel Farage would get out the tinsel and Santa hat.

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The upshot is that from being cock of the north two years ago, the Hutchesons’ Grammar School-educated Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar is now, as they say, a feather duster, but out of the electoral confusion in the next three weeks, some sort of left-wing alliance is likely to emerge to keep Reform out in the cold. Far from being the breath of fresh air they claim to be, Malcolm Offord’s party will be the halitosis of Scottish politics – no one wants to get close.

The SNP manifesto, virtually certain to be the basis of its next programme for government, is littered with state-driven solutions for every ill which Labour, Lib Dems and Greens will find easy to back. The answer to the housing shortage is not to slash the planning and cost burdens on housebuilders, and stop interfering with the markets, but the previously announced “More Homes Scotland” national housing agency.

To grow the economy, the SNP will set up a “High Growth Unit” which will do for the economy what Scottish Enterprise has done for entrepreneurialism, ie, nothing. Ditto, a new “Major Projects Office” to encourage big investment. To speed up planning decisions, the SNP plans to streamline compulsory purchase orders. There is a hidden threat to nationalise private bus companies through franchising and “the best configuration of nationally publicly owned transport companies”.

Worst of all is the cynical Swinney plan to impose price limits on supermarkets in which civil servants decide how much staple food items should cost, despite clear evidence that prices are already low by comparison to most European countries. The subliminal narrative of profiteering risks legitimising shoplifting.

Whether SNP or Labour, the government always knows best and the systematic dismantling of private education – to which the SNP contributed by removing charitable rates relief – symbolises the state’s determination to control and set standards, even if they fall below what could otherwise be achieved, like basic numeracy and literacy. In another wonderful illustration of Laffer Curve ignorance, the certifiable Greens want an additional private school tax to finish them off.

Bit by bit, ambition and aspiration is being killed in Scotland and it seems that’s just the way the dominant political classes like it. Unless you aspire to be as blinkered as them.