In the Queen's Speech two weeks ago, the government announced it will bring back the Charities Bill which ran out of time in the previous parliament. The effect of the bill - if it becomes law, as it probably will - will be to force many independent schools to do more charity work to avoid losing charitable status and therefore suffering more tax. This will make life harder for them. It will, at a minimum, result in higher fees for the parents.

Chris Woodhead is one of those who think the attack is not too serious. He has said that giving up charitable status would add four per cent to fees and this should not present too big a problem.

Four per cent would certainly do some damage to those who are struggling to afford private education and for whom this would be the last straw. But there is a worse threat. Private schools with charitable status may not be allowed to give it up. A school that did not want to do the charitable activity required, might not be permitted to 'go commercial'. Its assets were created by charitable donations and the law might insist that they remain for charitable use. The assets could be assigned, perhaps, to some other charity. So the pressure on such schools to do charitable work could be as powerful as the threat of being closed.

What is wrong with that? Isn't charitable activity a good thing? Yes, most of us agree with that. But this is not charity. Charity, by its nature, is voluntary. This will be done under duress. It is more like extortion.

It is unjust treatment of the parents of children at private schools. They are already paying for their children's education twice. They are paying through their taxes, then paying the school fees. Making private schools do charitable work would mean they would pay three times. This is would be penal and create an even bigger discouragement to private education than the existing laws. (Quite deliberately as far as Old Labour M.P.s are concerned.)

What about one of the fast-growing, relatively low-cost, faith-based schools? Their customers are often not rich at all - I have met one who was a single mother living on a council estate who has been giving up 40 per cent of her income to save her children from a comprehensive school where they were being turned into delinquents. She took them out and put them in an evangelist school instead. If such schools for the poor were taxed, this would be obscene. But if such schools were not taxed, private schools would suffer tax depending on whether the customers were rich or poor. This would expose the fact that this is really an attack on the wealthy - an exercise in class hatred.

Old Labour hates private schooling, its growth and the growth of home-schooling because these things imply that state schooling is not good enough. The easy way to dispose of that uncomfortable suggestion is to make life as hard as possible for private schools and, if possible, destroy them.

It is sometimes argued that private schools should not get a charity 'tax break'. That is a sick joke. The parents pay twice, as already mentioned. But more fundamentally, education should not be aggressively taxed anyway. You don't need to think education is necessarily a charity to believe it is a 'good thing'. Instead of increasing further the burdens on private education, parents should be allowed to take the cost of the state education of their children and spend it on private schooling instead. That would give poorer parents - above all - a real choice. They are the ones whose children are most frequently condemned to 'bog-standard' comprehensives. They - and hundreds of thousands of others - would benefit by a reduction in the burdens on private schooling, rather than an increase.

(This is the unedited version of an article which appeared in the Times Educational Supplement last week.)