Alan Johnson threatens private schools

The Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, is indulging in some old-fashioned class war. He's standing for the deputy leadership of the Labour party, and what better way to appeal to the core Labour vote than to make a few attacks on private sector education?

He has announced that private schools should do more to 'earn their charitable status'. In particular, he wants them to share their equipment with their state school counterparts. Many of them do so already. He also wants them to share their teachers. Never mind the morale-sapping effect of such a measure on the overworked, harassed teachers in the state sector.

What Mr Johnson did not say, but what was implicit in his mention of 'charitable status', was that, if he had his way, private schools should be stripped of charitable status if they failed to comply with these new conditions .

What benefit does charitable status bring? Tax breaks, for one thing. A charity is not liable to tax in respect of its charitable activities. The charitable status of private schools is commonly estimated to be worth around £100 million per year. It is this benefit that Alan Johnson is threatening to withdraw, by blackmailing such schools into intervening in the public sector, and, in effect, doing the Government's work for them.

(As an aside, the Independent Schools Council has published figures showing that bursaries and scholarships awarded by independent schools in 2007 exceeded £300m, far greater than the amount of tax breaks afforded to the schools.)

The Conservatives also have ideas of their own along the same lines. The key difference is that they are not attempting to threaten anybody. Rather they are hoping to lure private schools into helping out a bit more in the state sector. They want to relax the stringent conditions applying to organisations that want to run city academies. They hope that this will make such a project more attractive to the private education sector, resulting in some private schools helping to run these academies.

A much better idea than the blackmailing threats of an ignorant class warrior representing a Government lacking in ideas.