I’m old enough to remember when a test of one’s middle-class, left-wing credentials meant refusing to cross a picket line.

As a progressive professional in the 1990s, your credibility might also hang on whether you had collected for the miners, attended the anti-Poll Tax march, or boycotted food imported from South Africa.

Today, the only true remaining measure of whether you have sold out your socialist principles appears to be whether you are prepared to send your children to a private school.

Given the parlous state of the National Health Service, even paying for private healthcare is no longer deemed ideologically verboten in the red wall enclaves of Hyndland and Bruntsfield. Better not to be dead than red, is the new cri de guerre across the barricades of Scotland’s suburban revolutionaries.

Of course, there is more than one way to skin a cat and eschewing the benefits of private education doesn’t mean one can’t still flex one’s financial muscle to ensure that Jaspar and Jocasta are able to study Economics and Finance at the university of their choice.

Given the homogenous nature of the education system north of the Border, paying a premium for a home in certain catchments is enough to guarantee your child a place at one of the country’s top performing state schools.

Read more by Carlos Alba

And, following Labour’s decision to remove VAT-exempt status from independent institutions – increasing the cost of fees by up to 20% and putting some schools out of business – those premiums have never been higher.

Property prices in East Renfrewshire, East Dunbartonshire and in some parts of

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