We are becoming a People’s Republic by stealth. The warnings are increasingly urgent, but is anyone listening?
Last weekend The Mail on Sunday reported a deeply disturbing fact. An NHS bureaucrat had refused therapy to a young boy, saying, ‘We are unable to see this child as we do not provide a service to school-age children who attend an independent school. We are only commissioned to provide a service to the mainstream schools.’
The refusal came after the eight-year-old’s mother was asked to fill in a form which inquired innocently: ‘Where does your child go to school?’ She was in little doubt she had come up against hard dogma, remarking, ‘It feels like an ideological battle is going on.’
This is not a unique case. The mother of an autistic girl in Somerset recently complained that her daughter had been denied access to NHS mental health services, and was told, icily, ‘If you can afford the school fees, you should pay privately. If you had kept your child at the local authority primary school, she would have been supported.’
Last month it emerged that young cancer patients from private schools had to pay £115 an hour for tutoring at an Edinburgh hospital, while it is provided free to state school pupils by the Labour-run city council.
Private school parents were once again sniffily told they had ‘effectively opted out of state funded education and supports’.
Note that wriggly little word ‘effectively’. It actually means they did not opt out. If you choose independent schooling for your child, nobody makes you sign a form saying you’ve ‘opted out’ of anything. If they did, people might respond by asking for a large tax cut.
Parents who pay school fees are often very far from rich. They give up a lot to afford those fees. In fact, they have to pay twice for their children’s education – once through taxes for places they do not take up at state schools, and once through fees.
A mother had been told: ‘If you can afford the school fees, you should pay privately. If you had kept your child at the local authority primary school, she would have been supported,’ writes Peter Hitchens
This is surely ‘discrimination’ against such parents and – even more clearly – against their children. And isn’t ‘discrimination’ a thing we are constantly told we must not do? Er, not quite.
Look at the ‘NHS Constitution for England’, a grand document which thunders, ‘You have the right not to be unlawfully discriminated against in the provision of NHS services including on grounds of gender, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion, belief, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity or marital or civil partnership status’.
But it seems there is no protection for those who use private schools. In fact, it looks as if they can be discriminated against.
The ‘constitution’ states explicitly that the NHS ‘has a wider social duty to promote equality through the services it provides’. And it is that wording, I bet, which is being used by public sector commissars to turn a cold, rejecting eye on children who have opted out of state schools.
The ‘equality’ they believe in is equality of outcome – which can actually deter the more civilised policy of equality of opportunity.
All of this is rooted in Labour’s vast Equality Act of 2010, which the Tories barely fought and did nothing, in their years in office, to dismantle. It undermined all previous conservative and Christian ideas about how a society should be run. Since 2010, for example, Christianity in this country has been just another religion, ‘equal’ to all the others, hence those nurses getting in trouble for wearing crosses.
This is surely ‘discrimination’ against parents and – even more clearly – against their children, Peter Hitchens says
The courts, full of Starmer-type radicals, had already stripped most of the key Christian features out of the criminal and civil law.
Marriage is weaker than ever, and confers fewer and fewer privileges. Parents, especially fathers, are increasingly powerless. The idea that adults are responsible for their own actions and can be punished for crimes has been drowned in a swamp of ‘rehabilitation’ and excuse-making sociology.
Every nostrum of ultra-feminism and sexual revolution has escaped from the campuses where we once laughed at it and has become both law and BBC policy. Those Transgender flags you see flying everywhere this month are a symbol of its triumph.
Everybody in politics and the public sector knows it is suicidal folly to speak openly against any of these things. The new totalitarianism – so far – imposes itself by threatening to make dissenters unemployed, not throwing them in prison. But don’t rely on that for long, as we shall see.
Education has always been the key to this silent, deadly class war. Labour longed for years to destroy the private schools. This was not, as claimed, a war on privilege. Many of those schools, especially the best day schools, opened their gates to thousands of bright, working-class children on merit alone, after the Second World War. But Labour slammed those gates, abolishing – in 1976 – the direct grant system which had given so many poor children tremendous chances in life.
It had already – between 1965 and 1970 – smashed up most of the state grammar schools, about a thousand of them in England and Wales and hundreds more of their equivalents in Scotland, bulldozed. They did this because they offered old-fashioned authority, rigour and tradition to the brightest from every class.
Their ‘comprehensive’ replacements were not set up to provide better education. They never have. They were built to make society more equal, and to teach a less formal, less Christian, more anti-marriage and less patriotic view of the world. That is what they do. The anti-private school commissars of the NHS loathe any challenge to the comprehensive monopoly.
Now, after decades of seething at this survival of the private schools – a non-egalitarian force in our midst – Labour is on the march with bayonets fixed.
It cannot actually ban independent schools as long as this country remains more or less free. But it can close them to all but the super-rich.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has opened a War of Spite on private schools, most especially on those parents who struggle to pay for them.
The imposition of VAT on such schools will probably cost the Treasury more than it raises, by driving private pupils into comprehensives and increasing the costs of state schools. Who’s next after private education? Probably what remains of the conservative media and even some politicians.
Another nasty straw in the wind suggests that the state is growing ever-closer to policing conservative thought as if it was a threat.
It emerged last week that an online training course for the Prevent ‘de-radicalisation’ scheme now lists ‘cultural nationalism’ as a belief that could lead to an individual being ‘referred’.
So be careful what you say about that on social media. The Thought Police are still growing in power and numbers, and their strength increases day by day.
Did you think such changes would come only after the Red Militias had stormed the barricades and occupied The Ritz?
That is all old hat since the days of Blair. In these times, the revolutions are led by lawyers and enforced by blank-eyed bureaucrats.
But the end is the same – a society so transformed that your children and grandchildren will have no idea what you are talking about when you reminisce about how this was once a free country.
Just hope they don’t denounce you to the Secret Police.
Search for Alas Vine & Hitchens on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts now. New episode released every Wednesday.
