Neil Hamilton, leader of UKIP Wales, is rather sceptical about the initiative. He also thinks that the party's move on elite schools is a way to distract public attention from Labour's inability to find common ground on Brexit.
SPUTNIK: What is your reaction to the Labour’s proposed abolishment of Private Schools?
Hamilton: Labour just can't shake off the straight jacket of the class warfare can it? Which is what this is fundamentally all about. What they should really be asking themselves is, why do so many people want to educate their children outside the state sector? You know, I was educated at the grammar school. I had a very good education. But I'm afraid there are swathes of the country where you can no longer say that and lots of people of modest means make vast financial sacrifices to send their children to a school of their own choosing in the private sector. That's the real outrage, I think, is that so many people feel the need to do that.
SPUTNIK: Why are labour focusing so much on this policy when they can't even get their act together on a cohesive Brexit policy?
Hamilton: Well, that's the answer I think. It's a distraction from the main issues of the day. 99% of people in this country believe the provision of education is not a big issue. Private sector schools also are some massive earners a foreign exchange, because half of China seems to be educated in English public schools today. But the Labour Party are not interested in any of that. They want to distract attention from their inability to come to an agreed line on Brexit, whether they're for it or against it, whether they're for or against the second referendum. Do they accept the result of the referendum, the biggest democratic voting figures in British history in 2016?
So under Corbyn and Momentum, of course, Labour's lurched very far to the left. And they're even talking about grabbing people's houses if they are unoccupied for six months. So the sanctity of private property is no longer to be respected by Labour either. And also, they're going to whack up the income taxes and other taxes, which will just lead to a massive exodus of professional and other high earning people. So all in all, it's lose-lose for ordinary working people in Britain.
SPUTNIK: Now, you mentioned their taxes, I am assuming the ideas would be to raise income tax to pay for this educational system how do you think the voters would react to something like that?
Hamilton: Well, voters react with their feet, I mean, 27% of all income tax revenue today is paid by 1% of income taxpayers. The higher earners are massively contributing to the tax take of the Treasury. We've seen this many times before. And I'm old enough to remember the 1970s when there was a big brain drain to other parts of the world because British taxes were so absurd.
In those days, the top-rated income tax was 98%. I don't think even Labor proposes to go back to those rates. But we've seen over many, many years, there's a lot of evidence to show that as tax rates go up, then the exodus of high earners goes up with it. And it's not rocket science to understand the connection between the two. Labour would much rather have equality in misery than the inequality of prosperity. That's really what socialism is all about. Ultimately, it's equality. And they don't care what the income level of the average is, so long as there's nobody above it.
That, of course, is the way things operate in countries like North Korea, except that the ruling class, of course, manages to live a totally different lifestyle from that of ordinary people. And that was the same in the Soviet Union and all the other Eastern European communist dictatorships which Jeremy Corbyn admired so much.
