I’ve always been a Labour voter, but it’s a disappointingly poor and spiteful policy designed to play to public sentiment, even if that ends up badly thought through and counterproductive. In this sense it’s just like the Tory policies like the 2-child benefit cap and the bedroom tax - counterproductive, punitive, doesn’t really raise or save any money, but instead is a bit of theatrics to play off the worst instincts of the voter base (eg. wanting to punish other sections of society rather than design real policies that make sense and work fairly).
It’s bloody obvious that it won’t hurt the comfortably wealthy or the really rich, but instead the children (not even the parents, actually), of middle-income families. It’ll put extra pressure on surrounding state schools, make small independent schools not viable (most especially those catering largely to SEN kids), and not actually raise much money. Far from “closing a tax break” (a very misleading phrase), it takes advantage of the fact that we’re now not in the EU to bring in a new tax on educational services. It involves all sorts of other implications for other forms of educational services, and paves the way for taxing those, too (why not start taxing tutoring, summer schools, music lessons, university fees, all sorts?)
What would be truly equitable and progressive is taxing the genuinely rich, corporate profits, asset-hoarding, landlords, and rentierism of all kinds, in order to improve state education. Not explicitly targeting children because you’re envious of their parents, which actually ends up falling on middle income people while the really well off are merrily unaffected.
We’re about to start paying for DD to attend a private school. We’re very definitely middle income - in fact we’ve managed for the last ten years on around £50k a year household income in the south east - not easy with recent levels of inflation. Our family income will go up next year with a new job, but we’ll be paying the exact amount of the increase back out in school fees. We can’t afford to buy a house; we still won’t be able to when our income goes up anyway (2-bed flats here, for whole counties around, are well over 500k). DD has been awarded a sizeable bursary and two academic and music scholarships to cover part of the fees. We’ve prioritised her education over things like holidays or luxuries; but we are genuinely pretty poorly off compared to lots and lots of other quite average people who own one or more properties, lead much more expensive lifestyles, drive much more expensive cars, go on holidays, and so on.
It’s going to be kids like DD who will be affected by Labour’s policy, not the children of footballers or aristos or property dealers or the comfortably off; or indeed the kids and grandkids of people who’ve made tons of unearned cash in the property bubble. Those won’t be the kids who need to move schools. So all this serves is to focus a bit of spite on those who are a little bit better off, but it won’t touch the actual rich at all: Eton and Winchester will blithely carry on. It’s a mean-spirited, counterproductive and petty policy that is, I think, emblematic of the current Labour party’s disappointing lack of vision and genuine commitment to addressing the structural inequality of our economy.
We have an economy massively distorted by a housing bubble that disincentivises productive investment; incredibly low productivity; poor wages; poor growth; a situation that encourages malinvestment, speculation and rent-seeking of all sorts. The housing bubble and Brexit have been the biggest blights on our economy that anyone could have devised. And the answer is to tax the education of a small number of kids? That’s not redistribution; that’s weak and short-sighted tinkering around the edges while leaving the real issues completely untouched. It’s pretending that all our economic ills are the fault of the slightly posher Joneses down the road; just like the Tories liked to pretend that all our money was going on all those extra bedrooms in the council houses of people only just a bit poorer than you. And, as we well know, both of those things are nonsense. I’d thought better of Labour, to be honest.