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Labour Plans for Private Schools are Anti-HumanPosted on: September 17th 2019
By: Harley Dalton, Area Manager, Greater Manchester.
The Labour Party's reported plans on private schools are perhaps the perfect demonstration of the malevolent envy and misanthropy that drives the philosophy of HM Opposition under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. According to leaked documents, Corbyn's Labour are planning to propose scrapping both discounted business rates and VAT exemption on private schools, which will almost certainly be justified as an attempt to rebalance the education system (all together now!) for the many, not the few.
From a practical perspective, such a move is self-evidently counter-intuitive if one wishes to reduce inequality in the education system. One doesn't need to be an economist to know that substantially increasing tax on a particular product, which this double-whammy tax raid would do, will lead to a corresponding rise in the price; consequently, making an upper-class education unaffordable to aspiring middle-class families will lead to more educational gentrification, not less.
Financially, it's also one of the more obviously unfair examples of targeted taxation, driven by little more than an envious desire to squeeze the more affluent in our society. While Labour portray private school VAT and business rate exemptions as giveaways to systemically entrenched wealth-havers, the truth is that the families who send their children to such institutions already pay disproportionate levels of tax, levied through higher rates on personal income and assets and from absolute revenue on heightened consumption. The state education budget is bolstered tremendously by the existing contribution of the middle and upper classes, making Labour's plans exactly equivalent to double taxation for the right to educate their own children according to their own preferences.
Fundamentally, however, Labour's plans don't really have anything to do with money or tax revenue, per se. Nor can they claim such moves are about improving the education system, because the existence of private schools has no negative impact whatsoever on the quality of state education. Rather, these proposals only serve to satisfy the invidious misanthropy that sits at the very core of Jeremy Corbyn's worldview and philosophy. The terrifying naked image of that philosophy is the de facto worship of mediocrity and stagnation.
In the first instance, Corbyn's evident hatred for the rich is nothing new, but their opposition to private schooling takes on a freshly malign significance here. Any normal parent should wish for their children to have better lives than they did, and it is this natural impulse that adherents of left-wing collectivist thought are attacking. One of the most powerful motivations human beings have for working hard, saving and investing is to provide better opportunities and overall quality of life for their children, but Labour are opposed to the kinds of substantive improvements that make aiding your own children meaningful, permitting only shallow, superficial material gains instead (unless, of course, it's their own children).
The reason for this is rooted in their obvious and contemptible misanthropy. It is a retaliation against human beings for the fact of living according to their nature. In contradiction to the Marxist doctrines of equal outcomes, the allocation of resources in nature operates according to perfectly logical, functional consequence: to each according to his ability. In human terms, ‘ability' is typically a human's capacity to use their brain properly – to thirst for knowledge, to think rationally and to act according to their own sensible judgement. This is the quality of being an individual, and any attempt to limit the extent to which one can practice it is an outright assault on humanity and its means of survival.
By selecting on the basis of ability, private schools acknowledge the primacy of thinking; conversely, by rejecting this allegedly 'elitist' principle, Corbyn and his Labour Party are engaging in what Ayn Rand called 'hatred of the good for being good.' Such a worldview is incompatible with moral human values and practical human progress. It is the worship of mediocrity and the defeated anonymity of truncated similitude, ultimately to result, without exaggeration, in stagnation and death. If this is the platform upon which the Labour Party wishes to stand, they declare themselves to be an existential threat to the country and every person living within it, rich and poor alike.
The views expressed represent those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of UK Liberty Party. UK Liberty Party sometimes publishes articles we may disagree with because we think the article provides information, or a contrasting point of view, that may be of value to our readers. |
