Politically Correct Charity

The Charities Bill now going through Parliament introduces a public benefit requirement for charities. It has encouraged a Mr Tony Mitchell in a letter to the Telegraph (No Tax Concessions For Sham Benefits) to call on the Charities Commission to withdraw charitable status from independent schools, because he believes: "they reinforce division and inequality."

Education has always been considered of good in itself, irrespective of who benefits: that is why it has been a charitable purpose, the main legal effect of which has been to allow the endowment of schools.

What Mr Mitchell wishes is to abandon education as a charitable purpose in favour of his idea of egalitarianism. His test that education offers a public benefit only if it is available to all irrespective of income or ability places a narrow and personal meaning on "public benefit" which blindly ignores any value education may have in itself.

I have no doubt that Cambridge students are privileged, even poor ones, benefitting as they do from institutions founded on the generosity of past benefactors, and selected from among many who want to go and could benefit. The fact that those who do benefit are in some ways privileged does not mean Cambridge is not worthwhile, nor that we would be better off without it and similar universities. What we value about Cambridge is the education and learning it provides founded on meritocratic elitism and intellectual excellence. I do not imagine anyone believes the educational value of a degree depends on whether a student is subsidised by the state or not.

Similarly, schools educate individual children, and they benefit as individuals. The school a child attends may affect the quality of the education they receive, but in terms of educational benefit, it makes no difference who pays for it.

It is only because Mr Mitchell wishes schools to serve a purpose other than education that he claims there is no public benefit to schools which charge or select. If you share his brand of egalitarianism you may perhaps agree with him, but to the extent they would penalise private and selective schools, his ideas are destructive of education.

The worst of it is that Mr Mitchell's view may be shared by the new Charity Commission, which is left the discretion by the Charities Bill to decide what is meant by the "public benefit" test it says charities must pass. Another example of government trying to make a matter of administrative and political diktat what should be a matter of law.