Independent Schools: VAT Exemption
Lord Roberts of Belgravia Excerpts(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Roberts of Belgravia (Con)
My Lords, unlike my noble friend Lord Taylor, I had a terrible time at my public school and was expelled—or, more accurately, I was asked to leave and not come back—so I cannot be accused of being parti pris in this in saying that I support public schools.
There is one iron law in politics and history—namely, the law of unintended consequences. As Winston Churchill said in his eulogy for Neville Chamberlain,
“we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations”.
As the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, and several other speakers in the debate have pointed out, the present proposal is suffused with the dangers of unintended consequences. The Government want public schools to become less elitist and exclusive, but as it will be the less financially secure schools that will have to shrink, and maybe in some cases close, that will leave the rest of the independent sector more elitist and exclusive.
The Government say that they are prioritising economic growth, but they will effectively let parents keep about £400,000 of post-tax income per child, if they take their children away. Studies show that many parents will reduce their work hours, retire earlier than planned or leave the workforce entirely, with serious effects on the economy and the public finances. The Government say that they welcome the huge amount of philanthropic work that public schools do in their local communities, but that will understandably be among the first things to go when schools have to draw in their horns financially to keep school fees down.
The Government want more working-class children to go to Oxbridge, but if middle-class parents have to withdraw their children from public schools and send them into the state system while tutoring them privately, the likelihood is that Oxbridge will become more middle class rather than less. The Government are committed to fighting bullying in state schools, but this measure is likely to unleash more bullying, based on class prejudice against middle-class children who join state schools half way through the school year.
The Government say they want lower class sizes, but this measure will probably raise class sizes in state schools, especially if the new teachers cannot be hired on the expected VAT, which will not be forthcoming if parents withdraw their children from public schools in significant numbers. The Government say that they want to encourage educational charities, yet they are setting a hugely dangerous precedent in taxing them, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that they are doing this for a tribal shibboleth, more for ideological than for practical reasons.
This measure unfairly penalises those incredibly useful people in our society—parents who pay for education twice, once through their taxes for other people’s children, and once in school fees for their own. Instead of spending their money on luxuries, they invest it in their children’s education. This is therefore essentially a tax on those parental sacrifices, and one that comes fraught with myriad unintended consequences.
Schools: Safeguarding
Lord Roberts of Belgravia Excerpts(1 year ago)
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Lord Roberts of Belgravia (Con)
My Lords, I join everybody else in thanking my noble friend Lady Jenkin for securing time for this important and interesting debate.
As a historian, I will give your Lordships a brief oversight into the history of transgenderism, as I think it will help throw some light on the current debate. For the previous 30 centuries or so before the 1960s, while there is plenty of evidence of hermaphroditism and cross-dressing, there have been remarkably few people who genuinely believe that they have become a member of the other sex from the one in which they were born. We have the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus from the early third century AD, who the historian Dio Cassius says asked his doctors to change his sex, but there is no indication that they did this for him. He had five marriages and four wives—he married one wife twice. There is no real indication that he changed his sex, although the North Hertfordshire Museum has him down with female personal pronouns.
Then, there was the very colourful Chevalier d’Éon in the late 18th century, who in 1777, at the age of 49, declared that he was a woman. That was accepted by Louis XVI and the British courts, although it was comprehensively disproven at the time of his post-mortem. In the 19th century, the female Albert Cashier fought in the American Civil War as a man. In 1952, the first actual sex change took place in America, for Christine Jorgensen. Here in Britain, it was in 1960 with April Ashley and in 1964 with the historian Jan Morris, whom I knew tangentially. The very fact that we know these people’s names and that they are well known to history is indicative of how rare this phenomenon was.
Then came the 1960s, when post-modernist thought posited that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and that if you feel something, or you think you feel something, that is your truth, which has equal validity to objective truth. The objective truth is that whatever the sexuality you choose—you have the right to choose whichever one you want—you genuinely cannot change your biological sex.
The term “transgender” did not come into existence until the 1990s, but in Britain today, normal Britons who speak about this to their GPs are six times more likely to say that they are transgender than they were 10 years ago. This has all the hallmarks of a classic example of social contagion, in which the internet, smartphones and social media, the fashion and advertising industries, various pressure groups, TV programmes and some doctors, who undertake mutilating surgery on perfectly healthy bodies, have come together to create what is, essentially, a new ideology—one not anchored in the human experience of the past 3,000 years of recorded history.
The result has been a breakdown in social structures, where men are to be found in women’s prisons, women’s lavatories, women’s changing rooms, as we heard earlier in the debate, and women’s sports—places where they do not belong and have no right to be. As with everything to do with transgenderism, common sense seems to fly out of the window.
It is our duty to help teachers safeguard children as much as possible from being unduly exposed to this historically new phenomenon, which we must of course tolerate because we are civilised people, but which ought to be extremely rare, as it has been for three millennia before our present age.