Taxing private school fees could backfire on Starmer – and it’s a gift for Tory toffs

The danger for the Labour leader is that it looks like a tax on aspiration, warns John Rentoul. Which is not a mistake that Tony Blair would have made...

Keir Starmer is taking a risk with this hint of ‘class war’ politics (PA Wire)

The next election will be a test of Blairism. Tony Blair would never have put VAT on school fees, and he would never have said, as Keir Starmer did last month: “My political project is to return Labour to the service of working people and working-class communities.”

Blair always tried to make Labour’s appeal universal, even if it ended up in such weird formulations as “the Labour government today is not the political arm of anyone other than the British people”, as he put it in his 1996 party conference speech.

The only time he showed the slightest trace of class politics was when he said on a BBC Question Time special in the 2001 election campaign that “since you’re a property developer maybe you can afford it” when someone in the audience who described himself as a property developer accused him of intending to put up taxes.