Another day closer to the general election and I’m at my daughter’s prep school in Oxfordshire. As has come to be the norm, I’m having a ‘VAT chat’ with a fellow mother.
Of course, we’ve known about Labour’s plan for months. It will lead to a likely 20 per cent rise in private-school fees. Recently, however, these VAT chats have intensified and become louder.
‘To think that other parents would vote Labour given what’s coming enrages me,’ a friend says
I begin with my usual opening gambit. ‘Isn’t it awful?’ I say, trying to convey my real sense of desperation that I will have to take my daughter out of the school that she loves, that our way of life is for the chopping block. My VAT chat buddy agrees vigorously, telling me that she doesn’t know what she will do either. We shake our heads before ending, as we always do, with the observation that the state sector will in no way be able to absorb the droves of children (estimated at 17.1 per cent) moving from the private sector into state schools. It is a soothing, if totally ineffectual, conversation.
Not all VAT chats are alike. Sometimes, I judge my interlocutor poorly. One mother is different: she is not, I sense, that bothered about the rise. It will not affect her children in the same way. She smiles and we trot out the same platitudes, but her heart isn’t in it. I smell no desperation and instead I feel rather embarrassed for bringing up the subject. I notice her loading her offspring into a brand-new Land Rover Defender at pick-up and am reminded that we are not in the same boat.
This is a strange reality. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t dream of starting an idle conversation at the school gates about politics, the cost of living, or indeed tax. I would certainly never make explicit judgments about people’s wealth to their faces. But we live in strange times. It has become abundantly clear that private school privilege is by no means an even playing field. As a fellow mother once said to me: ‘Either you’re loaded, or your parents pay, or you just can’t afford it.’ I know which camp we fall into.
I’m starting to suspect we aren’t all Tories, either. Surely not, I hear you murmur. Because wouldn’t that be crackers? To vote Labour even though you would be ludicrously out of pocket as a result?
I poll some mothers for answers. A friend tells me that her school WhatsApp group leads her to believe that there are, among the 7 per cent of the population who send their children to private schools, some who are voting Labour on ideological grounds. ‘I hide my Tory stripes,’ she says, fuming. ‘To think that other parents would vote Labour given what’s coming enrages me.’
Clearly, though, there are lots of parents who can afford a Labour government. The Conservative MP Greg Hands recently triggered a backlash when he asked a WhatsApp group for parents of students at St Paul’s school what they thought of Labour’s plans. The Tory minister was told in no uncertain terms that he should ‘stop assuming everyone’s a Tory’ and that some members felt it was ‘hard to justify’ private schools being exempt from VAT.
It occurs to me that I only conduct my VAT chats with other mothers. I don’t find myself sidling up to fathers and asking them about the bomb about to blow up their family finances. The VAT chat is a distinctly feminine – and specifically maternal – conceit. Mothers smile cannily, but we give nothing away. It is a game we are very good at. It is a toss of the hair, a flick of the bracelet, a fumble with the designer bag.
Some VAT chats are, apparently, quite upbeat, more strident. Just not the ones I have. One friend points out that the fees have already risen by 16 per cent in the past two years and ‘the exodus hasn’t happened yet’. Another mother tells me that she felt rather affronted when her VAT chat went off piste and she was lectured by a fellow parent on the merits of the local grammar school.
I wonder if there is a sense of foregone conclusion about next month’s election result. Even my daughter’s school seems resigned to what is about to happen. I’ve seen the emails: ‘Should the Labour party win the next general election,’ they write with bowed head, ‘parents have enquired about the possibility of paying fees in advance.’ Some schools are even offering options whereby the entire cost of the school fees can be paid in one lump sum, presumably to avoid any VAT. Who are these people, who can afford to pay so far ahead? Fellow parents, that’s who. Just not us.
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