That an eight-year-old can be refused healthcare on the NHS because of the school he attends is deeply troubling. It shows that the service once described by Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor Nigel Lawson as ‘the closest thing the English people have to a religion,’ has become a battleground for class war where children seeking treatment are seen as the enemy of the proletariat.
That includes my children. I am lucky enough to be able to pay for them to attend private schools. I pay the fees on top of my taxes, of course. Now it seems the NHS regards my kids as non-citizens to be shunned.
Quite apart from the moral outrage that the decision of the NHS not to treat a child because they are privately educated engenders, it goes against everything the NHS stands for. Its own constitution is clear. Article 1 says: ‘The NHS provides a comprehensive service, available to all.’ Articles 2 and 4 are equally explicit: ‘Access to NHS services is based on clinical need, not an individual’s ability to pay.’ And: ‘The patient will be at the heart of everything the NHS does.’ Those promises turn out to be worthless.
This decision is not about rationing, an unfortunate but necessary part of the modern NHS. Rationing decisions are based, at least in theory, on medical need. This is about something darker and more dangerous: the idea that if you come from a certain class – if you can afford to go to a private school and are therefore deserving only to be treated with contempt – then you should be denied access to the NHS.
The politics of class war has, appallingly, started to become intrinsically linked with the NHS. The British Medical Association, the doctors’ union, is now more militant and radical even than the transport unions, using strike action as a tool to bludgeon yet more money out of the state, railing about gender politics and Gaza as it goes.
The same prejudices are apparent in the Left-leaning civil service – how else to explain why so little effort is made in the Department of Health to recoup medical fees from European citizens who have used the NHS, as this paper reports? Reclaiming these monies must be a queasy, Brexity and mildly racist thing for our Remainer Blob to endure, but there seems to be no moral compunction when it comes to denying healthcare to private school children.
Sir Keir Starmer leads a government that has implemented some of the most divisive policies of recent decades, targeting groups that Marx would have regarded as the bourgeoisie
The government published an estimate that 3,000 or so pupils would be forced to leave the private sector in the 2024/25 academic year. That has turned out to be wrong by about 8,000
But the example has been set by the Labour Government, which has set out to attack those it sees as being on the wrong side of the class divide.
Sir Keir Starmer styles himself as Mr Moderate, a technocrat who is only interested in what works. But that image is one of the great con tricks of modern politics. He leads a government that has implemented some of the most aggressively divisive policies of recent decades, targeting groups within society that Marx would have regarded as the bourgeoisie, from supposedly rich farmers to non-dom businessmen and women.
But the pole star of Labour’s programme of class bigotry is its imposition of VAT on school fees. The Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, pretends it is about raising money to improve state schools. This is sophistry.
The Government published an estimate that only 3,000 or so pupils would be forced to leave the private sector in the 2024/25 academic year. That has turned out to be wrong by about 8,000.
Next year’s figures will be much higher, as this year many parents scrambled to keep their children in schools until the end of the academic year rather than yanking them out in the middle.
From the Government’s perspective, this is presumably good news, as the aim all along has been to do as much damage as possible to private schools without going down the legally challengeable route of abolishing them.
The idea that the VAT raised would help fund state schools is risible. Many of those at private schools have special educational needs and disabilities, and transferring them to state schools adds a huge cost burden.
But when your mindset is one of class war, and you regard private schools as exemplifying privilege, then the facts are irrelevant. It doesn’t matter that the image of private school pupils as toffs is a dated caricature. Many parents deny themselves things most of us take as basic, such as holidays and new cars, to be able to somehow get the fees together.
I know that, because that’s what my parents did. It’s the same with farmers, who Labour believes are all multi-millionaire landowners and therefore class enemies, when in reality most struggle to make ends meet.
And now apparently children seeking medical care are part of this cohort of people the party regards as ‘fair game’.
The driving force behind Aneurin Bevan’s creation of the NHS was that it would bring everyone together. After the Second World War, providing healthcare for all was seen as key to creating a unified and contented nation – putting an end to the class divides around health. Even a passionate socialist such as Bevan would surely turn in his grave at how the NHS has today rejected that wonderful ideal.
