Balls is firing blanks in the class war over our schools

The story has been the same for 40 years. In the name of socialist principle, they knock out the competition to their alma maters.

Ed Balls, an old boy of Nottingham High School, is the latest example of a hypocritical tradition. He is pursuing good state schools for breaking his admissions code and in the process helping Nottingham High and every other private school.

I doubt if he sees it like that. But then Tony Crosland never saw that he was ensuring boys from his old school of Highgate would no longer have to face well-educated oiks when he decided in the Sixties "to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland".

The result of egalitarianism for the many and elite education for the few is, inevitably, private schools getting a grossly disproportionate share of places at the best universities.

Poor John Denham, a rare example of a comprehensive boy near the top of the Department for Education, is trying to redress the imbalance but will only make matters worse. The universities minister raised the prospect of social class for colleges when he said he suspected "snobbery and social bias on the part of admissions staff" were denying places to children from modest backgrounds.

Er, has he ever met a British academic? They aren't port-swilling aristocrats who break open another box of Havanas and cackle about doing down the proles.

They are overwhelmingly Leftish. When they aren't dealing with the bureaucracy that Denham's department imposes on them, they worry themselves sick about bias in admissions policy.

But whatever strategies they follow they can't provide a remedy for the effects of bad secondary schools because it's too late to pick up the pieces at 18. If Denham tries to cover up for the failures of comprehensives by insisting on quotas, all he will do is further alienate middleclass parents from Labour and lower university standards.

Lord Adonis, the Blairite education minister, had the better idea of helping gifted state-school children compete with Balls and his kind by offering residential and online courses.

The result was telling. The teaching unions attacked the scheme, and 900 of the 3,100 secondary schools in England and Wales refused to take part. Doubtless their heads thought they were being anti-elitist. It didn't occur to them, any more than it occurred to Tony Crosland and Ed Balls, that all they were doing was giving the children of the wealthy an easier ride.

Until the Labour Party and wider liberal society realise that they must bring on talent, England will continue to be a perverse country in which the language of egalitarianism is used to justify the maintenance of class barriers.