Being an absolute lover of politics, I often fill my term-time Saturday evenings with attendance at the University of Oxford’s Labour Club’s social ‘Beer and Bickering’. This is a social event which features three motions on various pressing political topics, decreasing in seriousness throughout the night. One fantastic feature of this event is that continually reminds me why I’m a liberal – and why liberalism matters.
Part of the reason I attend is that I love being one of the few people who breaks up the total consensus of opinion on most topics. Motions have included ‘this house would introduce a maximum wage’ – which demonstrated an incredible misunderstanding of who actually makes up the bulk of the British state’s tax revenue – and the one which inspired this article, ‘this house would ban private healthcare.’
The debate went about exactly how you’d expect a bunch of left wing 19-year-olds to discuss private healthcare. The general sentiment was that it was a total moral outrage that certain people could pay to access care. I note that this was often separate from practical arguments about capacity, with the overriding consensus being that even if it had no impact on the ability of the ordinary working person to access healthcare, it was still wrong that someone should be able to pay for a different service.
The room was not, I fear, turned by my rousing case for individual choice and liberty. It was turned, however, by a member of their committee reminding those present that under the current system access to certain aspects of trans healthcare are only available privately, and not on the NHS. How can we ban private healthcare, the argument went, if it would cause suffering to these individuals who the government won’t provide for?
This, dear readers, is why I’m a liberal. Big state proponents think government can fix all your problems – except when it doesn’t. The trans healthcare issue perfectly summarises why private services are a moral good, why my ability to deviate from a top-down sanctioned norm should be a right. It also demonstrates the wonderful irony of authoritarian-leaning leftism, which asks me to believe that the state can solve almost everything and that the state is often morally wrong, both at once.
Government is good, until it isn’t. I don’t believe that government can solve all mine, or indeed your problems, because I don’t believe that the state knows best – or indeed always has our best interests at heart. I believe in people, I believe in community, and I believe firmly in individual liberty.
This is a benefit to private services that government-lovers neglect. My right to send my children to private school means I can expose them to ideas that the state authority of the day doesn’t share, my right to private healthcare means I can access treatment the state doesn’t want to give me. Abolish private services in the name of economic equality, and you also come after my right to think freely, to look after my body freely and to be free from your self-serving idea of what is morally right.
I fear investing too much power in any one body, and the consequences of that are borne out on the smallest scale here in Oxford; but the fear is an important one even on the national and international level.
My message to you is this: make the case for liberalism. I fear that amongst my generation, and in this country more broadly, ‘freedom’ is a word that carries little weight. In a country with no real constitutional protection, the most important check on the government is the will of the people. We have a moral responsibility, to those great people who thought out the values that we love, and more importantly to those who have fought for them – to continue to say that they matter.
To be a Liberal must not simply be about the NHS and Social Care – as important as they are. It must be about freedom, about checks and balances, about the individual. These values are a burden I feel we are immensely privileged to bear, and it our duty to fight for them.
* Zagham Farhan is the Returning Officer, and a former President, of the Oxford Students Liberal Association.
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17 Comments
Fine arguments, but none of us are so naive as to believe that most people choose to pay the considerable cost of a private education, rather than accept the ‘free’ state provision, out of a desire ‘to expose them to ideas that the state authority of the day doesn’t share’. They choose a private education because they know that their children will be educated in smaller classes, with far fewer if any seriously disruptive/violent pupils, and in a school where parental aspirations will impact on most pupils so the overall culture is one of pupils generally being willing to work to achieve qualifications.
As a liberal, I believe people should be entitled to spend their money on things they value, including buying advantage for their children via a private education – but I don’t believe they should be helped in this choice by not having to pay VAT on school fees.
….. “I can access treatment the state doesn’t want to give me”…….
Mr Farhan really is flyoing a kite there. The state (another word for society – meaning all of us) may well – indeed I’m sure it does – “want to give” Mr Farhan treatment……… but because some people are reluctant to pay the additional taxation (e.g. VAT on private education) the political system finds it very difficult to find resources to do so.
What I would like to enquire about in the extent of Mr Farhan’s ‘liberalism’ is whether he would support military conscription of young persons such as himself in the UK in the event that war in the Ukraine spread to the rest of Europe.
>The room was not, I fear, turned by my rousing case for individual choice and liberty.
😂. But well done for trying!
Zagham Farhan….The debate went about exactly how you’d expect a bunch of left wing 19-year-olds…
As opposed to ‘liberal’ or ‘right wing’ 19 year olds?…My goodness: if, at 19, you aren’t expected to espouse simplistic answers to complex problems you must inhabit a strange world.
@David Raw: the state is NOT “all of us”. This is the convenient claim of all sorts of authoritarian states.
“The state (another word for society – meaning all of us)”
I can’t agree with this, and I simply don’t see how any liberal can believe it. The state is not remotely “another word for “society”” and should never be confused with it. To believe “the state is another word for society” is surely to believe that the entire function of society (and the individuals who collectively make up society) is to be a part of and subservient to the state. This would (for example justify conscription in time of war.
There will always be a significant proportion of the people who are unhappy with the way a state is functioning and indeed who are actively trying to change the government (ie the leadership of the state) and the state’s structure – including Liberal Democrats. Are those people to be excluded from “society” because they do not support the leadership of the state?
The problem with VAT on school fees is that someone who chooses to have their children educated privately is saving the state money because it means the state no longer has to educate their children. That does seem to merit some offset on the fees they pay. Maybe the solution is to charge VAT but also give those children vouchers equivalent to what it would have cost to educate them in state schools. Though personally I’m inclined to think that education in general (including adult education) is the kind of thing we want to encourage people to spend money on for the wider good of society, so I’d question why we charge any VAT on it in the first place.
@ Mike Peters
While I am sure you are right to say that most people chose private education for the reasons you give, there are people – including me – who share Mill’s suspicion of state control of education and factor that into the process of deciding how to educate our children. I would ban private schools from being profit making entities: their business is education.
I do think VAT on school fees is unfair. Most private school parents pay high amounts of tax (in absolute terms) and at high rates, and rightly so: they are wealthy. Accordingly they contribute significantly to the education of all – a public good. In addition by paying for private education those parents relieve the state from educating their children so the state’s limited resources can be concentrated on fewer children – another public good. It seems wrong to me that wealthy people who chose to spend their money on education of their children should pay additional tax while equally wealthy people who spend their money on (say) buying art or polluting holidays instead do not.
Raise general taxation to raise money for education by all means, or divert money from elsewhere to schools, but actively penalising of choice in a way that damages provision of a public good seems perverse to me.
Perhaps those who are ‘suspicious of state control of education’, i.e. the National Curriculum’, might review the key stages 1, 2, etc. and point out which ‘bits’ they find suspicious?
@Tristan: Ban schools from making a profit? Why? If a company can make a profit by providing some good or unique education or opportunities to people, why shouldn’t it?
Let’s say I’m planning to set up some business in the hope of making a profit by providing something that customers want. You seem to be saying that’s OK if I want to do something like – say – offer polluting holidays, which is not good for society, but not OK if I want to do something that is actually good for society (such as open a school) . That seems to me perverse and totally counter to your own reasoning about tax.
Also, if you ban profit-making, you reduce competition and – you know where that leads…
Simon R 11th Apr ’25 – 11:10a……Also, if you ban profit-making, you reduce competition and – you know where that leads…
Quotes from the Thatcher ‘blue book’ of 1979…and you know where that led…
“Perhaps those who are ‘suspicious of state control of education’, i.e. the National Curriculum’, might review the key stages 1, 2, etc. and point out which ‘bits’ they find suspicious?”
I’m not familiar with the detail of the National Curriculum, but in today’s political climate I’d worry about the genetics of gender/sex, Britain’s imperial past, atmospheric science and the holocaust. Imagine what might happen if Farage were in a position to dictate the contents of the curriculum,
We are seeing in real time what Trump is doing to US universities, especially Columbia.
@Tristan Ward
From the arguments you make, I assume you would support a parental right to opt out from currently mandatory parts of the curriculum of state schools? Why should a right to avoid say, relationship education with which they disagree, only exist for those who can afford to pay to educate their children privately?
@ Chris Moore. I’m afraid your comment is pure Thatcherism, viz, “there is no such thing as society”. Do you remember that ?
@expats: Margaret Thatcher’s ‘blue book’? What was that? The reference rings a bell somewhere in my mind but I don’t recall anything specific, and a quick Google doesn’t yield anything.
@Simon R 12th Apr ’25 – 10:57am..
Simon, I don’t think there ever was a ‘Thatcher blue book’…I’m afraid I was using the term in an ironic comparison to ‘Mao’s red book’, a set of dogmas which, no matter the consequences, had to be followed..
@expats; Ah, fair enough. I do remember something coming out from the Government in though, maybe in the early 80s, and IIRC Labour then responded with a booklet called ‘Bad for Britain’. Obviously not called the Blue Book though.
Back to the debate, I don’t think the comparison with Mao’s red book is valid. My reference to what happens if you remove competition isn’t some kind of abstract dogma: It’s about what invariably happens in practice (and overwhelmingly backed by mainstream economic theory) – as numerous Governments around the World have discovered to their cost when they try to interfere in markets in such a way as to remove competition: Lack of competition usually leads to higher prices, poorer services, etc. (And before anyone shouts, ‘privatised railways’ or ‘privatised water’ etc., those were examples of privatisation in the absence of much real competition).