Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has dished it out but can’t take it – so Labour has dispatched its attack dog.
Hands up in you’re a class warrior: Labour Party chair Anna Turley (Image: Getty)
She’s moaned a lot, goodness knows she’s moaned a lot, especially on social media, posting a slew of responses to being labelled a “spiteful class warrior”.
And when home truths hit home and it all got too much she unleashed a woman you’ve never heard of – but as equally vengeful – as her attack dog. And she continues to bark.
A lifelong pen-pusher, first as a civil servant, advisor, and then shadow minister in Jeremy Corbyn’s doomed administration, Turley sits on the Labour Party’s ruling National Executive Committee and is the fourth female party chair under Keir Starmer’s leadership after Angela Rayner, Anneliese Dodds and Ellie Reeves.
And her snarling as she attempts to defend a policy that is pure and simple ideological vandalism says it all.
But she’s just as hypocritical as the rest of them.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson (Image: Getty)
Phillipson, who carries a huge chip on her shoulder, evidenced by her appalling comment that she cares only about the “schools attended by the majority of kids in this country”, was born in Washington, Tyne and Wear, and attended the University of Oxford.
Turley was privately educated at Ashford School, albeit thanks to a scholarship, and also studied at Oxford. And she too has held a lingering grudge, resentment, and feeling of being wronged.
She was born in Dartford, the home of estuary English, which might explain her defence of boo-hoo Phillipson.
Her bizarre argument is that privilege is bought, forgetting that many parents of children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities think the state system under Labour has abandoned them.
And she has nothing but venomous bile for those who scrimp and save in order to give their offspring a foot up the ladder.
In a series of posts on X this week she said: “Note to all the pearl-clutching Tories out in force. You don’t HAVE to send your kids to private school. We have universal education provision in this country.
“If you *choose* to do so, the rest of us shouldn’t pay for you to have a tax break for the privilege.”
And she added: “I saw privilege that people paid for and didn’t earn. And instead I want an education system that gives everyone the opportunities I and others had.”
What she has singularly failed to grasp is that it does not follow that by not charging VAT on something everyone else pays.
And she has omitted to admit that those who can afford to send children to private schools (and why wouldn’t they given the crumbling state sector) effectively pay twice by handing over cash to fund other children’s education in a system they don’t use.
There were never tax breaks for private schools…because taxpayers have never funded them.
Parents who opt to pay tens of thousands of pounds every year in the hope their children receive a better education are surely to be applauded rather than shamed by Labour for whom somebody’s fortune is also somebody else’s misfortune.
Turley and her ilk are the very embodiment of the politics of envy, spite, and hate.
Labour’s malevolent, malicious, and vengeful decision to charge 20% VAT on private school fees (under the guise of recruiting more teachers) has seen more than 100 institutions close at a time the number working in the state system has fallen.
It is why Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said: “It turns out appointing a spiteful class warrior as education secretary was a disaster.”
The policy is clearly ideological vandalism, yet has brought nothing but gleeful celebration from a party that has taken a wrecking ball to almost everything in this country, sacrificing defence spending to reward the idle as welfare payments balloon.
Even Britain’s strictest headteacher has joined the attack on Phillipson.
Katharine Birbalsingh, the highly-respected headmistress and founder of the Michaela Community School in Wembley, North London, agrees the education secretary is a “class warrior” whose policies will have a negative effect.
She said: “Ordinary people – both ethnic minorities and white people – will bear the brunt of what this government is doing and saying. Discord is instigated by those with power and felt by the ordinary man.”