The chairwoman of the British Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference has stated that Labour’s plans to close private schools would be damaging to education in the UK. Robin Tilbrook, Chairman of the English Democrats, explains why he thinks the idea does not make any sense.

Sputnik: What is your take on Labour’s policy towards private schools?

Robin Tilbrook: It is mostly lefty nonsense and it’s also quite strange since most of them went to private school, including Jeremy Corbyn. It’s also been talked about as if it was a UK wide proposal, whereas in fact the British government only has any jurisdiction over education in England, so it would be an English only policy.

Firstly, about seven per cent of students in the UK go to private schools, and there isn’t the spare capacity in the state schools to take that seven per cent, so it couldn’t be one of those policies that could be implemented quickly, they could gradually make things more difficult for private schools, but then if they do that they’d be squeezing the middle-class parents that struggle to send their children to private schools, but they won’t be squeezing the very rich out of the private schools.

The state schools would have to have more capacity, so if it’s not coupled with a lot of extra money; it simply wouldn’t work as a policy. I thought there were a number of big gaps in what they were saying, and they haven’t really thought it through. A good example was that Labour said there should be a seven per cent quota cap on the numbers that can go to University, but again they didn’t mention of course that it would only apply in England because in Scotland the Scottish government decides on university admission issues.

The fact is that it’s not seven per cent of the school population that are in the sixth form, in other words possibly preparing to go to university, it’s something like fourteen or fifteen per cent, so in effect what they were saying is that a lesser proportion of private school educated students could go to university than state school ones.

That hasn’t been thought through clearly, otherwise they wouldn’t have come up with the wrong quota level, and also what I think we are talking about here is having representation not because people actually necessarily want to go to university, but simply out of social engineering.

What a system ought to be is fair, but you can’t impose a sort of uniformity and call it fairness. Obviously many of Mr Corbyn’s admired communist orientated figures have tried to impose that, and it’s generally resulted in all sorts of problems as we know.

Sputnik: Would Corbyn’s ideas be disastrous for the economy should he become Prime Minister?

Robin Tilbrook: The economy is based on people making voluntary decisions about things, and so business people making decisions about investment are highly unlikely to do so if their assets are going to get expropriated.

This is the sort of subtext of what they were saying about private schools, that they were going to expropriate the assets, but if there’s any threat of expropriation; nobody’s going to invest in the economy, in fact they will be disinvesting as fast as they can go in order to try and make sure they get their money out before there is any attempt to expropriate them. It would be a disaster; there’s no doubt about it.

Sputnik: Why do younger people tend to be more left-wing?

Robin Tilbrook: There’s quite a lot of propaganda that people are fed at school these days and as a result the youth tends to be much more towards the left than they used to be, but I suppose as they get more experience of what’s actually going on in the world, they may change their minds. I feel that Labour hasn’t really thought through what they are talking about. Mr Corbyn is quite a good example of somebody who’s used ideology as a patchwork to cover up the fact that he hasn’t really considered things in a rational and sensible way, and that’s what we are faced with. The electoral system faces us with a real risk that we might wind up with a Jeremy Corbyn government.

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