Britain’s richest 10% don’t think they’re wealthy – and that’s disastrous in the fight against inequality | Anoosh Chakelian

Labour's plan to charge private schools VAT has caused predictable uproar and revealed skewed perceptions of wealth

What does it mean to be wealthy"? It is perhaps this question more than any other that haunts British society. The public's definition can be glimpsed in the reaction to Labour's mansion tax idea for properties worth more than 2m in 2015, or its proposal for a 45p tax rate on earnings over 80,000 in 2019: a revolution of polite but pushy well-to-do Britons (and a Conservative election victory) never seemed to take long to follow.

Like expensive Swiss clockwork, it's happening again. At the time of writing, more than 70,000 parents of private school pupils have signed a petition to stop Keir Starmer's plan to charge private schools VAT. Tony Perry, an NHS data analyst on a 60k salary and leader of the Education Not Taxation: Parents Against School Fee VAT campaign - who sends his 10-year-old son to a 21,000-a-year school in Berkshire - describes himself as a non-wealthy parent". Go through the comments on the petition and many others chime in to protest just how wealthy they aren't.

Anoosh Chakelian is Britain editor of the New Statesman