Back at school for an evening, a Conservative of the old sort hears the next generation of socialists and has to award them the cup
This House Would Abolish Billionaires: I Judged a Sixth-Form Debate and Lost It to a Girl of Seventeen
I was asked back to school on Thursday. Not my own; I keep away from my own, as a decent headmistress should, so that my successor may ruin it in peace. This was the big comprehensive on the other side of town, which holds a debating competition each autumn for its sixth form and wanted, as the head of English put it on the telephone, a judge with standards. I said I had those. I did not say that I had also a diary to fill, a false name to fill it under and a settled view of the politics of the young.
The motion was: this house would abolish billionaires. I am a Conservative of forty-seven years’ standing and I expected an evening of adolescent socialism to mark with a red pen. I took three.
The Hall
It was held in the school hall. Two tables at the front with a jug of water each. A lectern. About a hundred and fifty pupils, a scattering of parents and a row of staff along the back wall with their arms folded, in the attitude of people who have been at work since eight.
The rules were the usual ones. Two teams of three. Seven minutes each. Points of information to be offered by standing and accepted or declined. A timekeeper with a bell. I was to mark on argument, evidence, delivery and rebuttal, and to give the cup to the better team regardless of which side I agreed with.
The Proposition
The first speaker for the motion was a tall boy in a blazer too short in the sleeve. He began by saying that nobody earns a billion pounds. I wrote: here we go.
He had the standard case, and I will give it its due, since I had to mark it. A person paid fifty thousand a year, he said, would need to work for twenty thousand years to make a billion, without spending a penny. So a fortune of that size is not wages. It is ownership: of shares, land, a company that thousands of others built. He said that such wealth buys newspapers and politicians and bends the rules in its own favour, and that a democracy could not survive it.
It was fluently done. It was also, I noted in the margin, three assertions in a trench coat. Who says a fortune cannot be earned by building something millions choose to buy? What is the mechanism of abolition? At what figure, exactly, does a man become a menace: nine hundred and ninety-nine million? I wrote: no definition. No method. Six out of ten.
His second speaker, a boy with a great deal of hair, proposed a wealth tax of a hundred per cent above a billion and read out what it would raise. I taught mathematics. I know a figure that has been found on the internet at eleven the previous night. I wrote: source? And: you have assumed they stay.
The Opposition
I settled back. This was my side. The first speaker against the motion was a confident young man with a signet ring who was plainly going to read law. He said that billionaires create jobs. He said that if you tax them they will leave. He said it was the politics of envy. He said that phrase four times.
And I found, to my considerable annoyance, that I was marking him down.
It was lazy. That is the only word. He had the answers I would have given and he had not done the work. Which jobs? How many leave, in countries that have tried it, and what did it cost? Some have tried and repealed such taxes because they raised little; there is evidence on that, a good deal of it, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others have published it. He cited none. He simply said envy and smirked. I wrote: assertion. No evidence. Complacent. Five out of ten, and I resented every mark I withheld.
The Girl
The third speaker for the proposition was a small, plain, serious girl of seventeen with a folder. I learned afterward that her mother works nights at the distribution centre on the ring road and that she is the first of her family to stay at school past sixteen. She did not raise her voice once.
She began by conceding. She said her own side had made it too easy. Abolish was a silly word; nobody was proposing to shoot anyone. She would defend something narrower: that above a very high threshold, wealth should be taxed each year at a low rate, a penny or two in the pound, as a house is taxed.
Then she took the opposition’s points in order, with the folder. They will leave: she gave two countries where a version had been tried, said plainly that in one it had failed and been scrapped, explained why, and what a better design would need. I had expected her to hide that. She put it on the table herself. They create jobs: she agreed, and asked whether a two per cent levy on the excess would stop a single factory being built, and gave a figure for the returns such fortunes typically earn in a year. Envy: she said she did not envy them, she had never met one. She only observed that her mother paid a larger share of her income in tax than a man who owned the warehouse she worked in, and she would like somebody on the other side to explain why that was good for the country.
The boy with the signet ring rose on a point of information. She accepted it. He said the top one per cent already pay a large share of all income tax. She said yes, that is true, and it is because they have a very large share of all the income; and that in any case she was talking about wealth, not income, which was the distinction his side had spent twenty minutes avoiding. He sat down.
I had stopped writing. I had to make myself start again. I gave her nine.
The Verdict
I do not agree with her. I wish to be plain. I think an annual tax on wealth would be the devil to assess, would be dodged by precisely the people it was aimed at and would fall in the end on those merely comfortable, as these things do. I think the motion as worded was childish. I could have taken her on, and I should have enjoyed it.
But I was not there to agree. I was there to judge, and the standard was the one I had held for thirty-eight years. Who defined their terms? Who had evidence? Who dealt honestly with the weak point in their own case? Who answered the other side instead of repeating themselves?
On every count it was the proposition, and on every count it was because of her. The cup went to the team arguing for a motion I think absurd, and I handed it over myself, and shook her hand, and told her she had done something I had not seen in a public argument for a long time: she had told the truth against her own interest and won anyway.
The boy with the signet ring looked as though he had been robbed. I took him aside afterward. I said: you had the better brief and you lost, because you thought being right excused you from the work. That is my party’s besetting sin. Do not let it be yours. He will not thank me for ten years.
What I Take From It
I went expecting to mock young socialists who had not paid attention in school. I found one who had paid more attention than anybody in the building, me included. I still think her side wrong. I can no longer think it stupid, and that is an inconvenience I shall have to carry.
My editor at The London Prat will be pleased. The house essay on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not says the target is the lazy argument, wherever it sits. Tonight it sat on my side, with a signet ring.
The piece: a debate, it reports, has been won by the side that conceded its own weakest point. Officials said the tactic was unfamiliar and would be investigated. The losing side, which had repeated one word four times, said it had been confident of victory. A judge of advanced years was seen to award marks against her own convictions and is being monitored.
It will appear on the British satirical news page. I have asked the head of English for the girl’s folder, with her permission. I should like to mark it properly. More of my marking is over here.
