I thought the same thing unfortunately. Such an obviously stupid and damaging idea, surely they wouldn’t go ahead with it. Obviously it will hurt children and families who have rights too, and shut down schools that local communities rely on.
I thought that it would be OK because of the zillions of other manifesto ‘commitments’ that actually go nowhere for ages. I thought of the manifesto commitments that are only put in to the manifesto as a sop and then only dragged out of the government as actions, after years and years of campaigning because they’re patently such a terrible idea in practice.
Like having an EU referendum was only put in the Tory Manifesto to calm down the ‘save the pound’ hotheads before it finally was actioned by Cameron reluctantly and self servingly to try to calm down the internal party strife that he couldn’t handle effectively. So that springs to mind as a catastrophic failure of political leadership. A better Tory PM would have managed that anti-EU issue internally and taken it out of the manifesto for public safety.
A better Labour PM than Starmer would equally have kicked this VAT idea and the other perfect storm of taxes that are creating an economic cliff edge for private schools, out into the very very faraway political long grass where it deserves to quietly fade out. He could have focused on improving state school funding to raise standards consistently across schools and also supported children with SEND adequately in state schools. It’s so depressing.