Dear Editor,
It is an interesting development in a construct in which citizens have historically paid income tax, which accumulates in the government’s treasury, and then is prudently disbursed to fund various services not only to those taxpayers, but to non-taxpayers as well.
It may even be conceivable that the latter outnumber the former, but are not discriminated against.
They access the services provided equally, among which health and education are pre-eminent.
So far as these two services are concerned, however, there has been growing evidence over several years that the quality of the deliverables continues to deteriorate substantially. So that there is an acknowledged recognition of a disaggregation between say, ‘public health’ and ‘private health’, a public education structure and private education sector.
In each case, regardless of earning capacity – which incidentally for many is of a fluctuating, even unassured content – these customers are forced to resort to other providers in search of value not only for themselves, but perhaps, more desperately, for their children. Parents committed, at whatever cost, to providing the basis for their progeny ‘to get a better start in life’ – an ambition expressed and established by their own forbears – are suddenly, in 2017, that is – faced with the punitive choice of paying a further tax for opting out of a deficient ‘national’ education system, recognisable even to the very framers, who arguably, might be better positioned to afford the same punishable ‘private’ education services.
The trouble is that the taxi driver, the self-employed tradesman, must ask why must I not struggle to make my child as competitive as the children of the taxmasters? Why should I not strive to provide mine the chance to be professionals, who in turn may grow to become providers of the very health and teaching services?
It is not as if there were an assurance that the added revenue would be used to fund improvements in the public system, and so relieve us of the financial overburden we now carry. It is not as if the increased budget provision for education, so much boasted about, will be dedicated to improving the degrading employment conditions in which the deliverers of the primary and secondary schools programmes have too long suffered; contributing to the unacceptable deterioration in the quality of products of that public agency whose manning levels keep increasing in explicit disproportion to the value continually reflected in exam results.
Two images appear to emerge: one, the valley of despair for public teachers; and two, the vat of desperation for private students.
Yours faithfully,
EB John
