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The report by the former health secretary, Alan Milburn, into social mobility which is published today contains a bold bid for mass appeal: its claim that the middle classes are being excluded from the professions.
The report also recommends that the state should be a surrogate pushy parent, by raising the aspirations of children whose families would not normally entertain ambitions for them to be doctors and lawyers.
It is true that 45 per cent of senior civil servants and 75 per cent of judges are privately educated.
And the report is right to point out that informal admissions procedures in the professions, like internships and work placements, can be a back-door means for the children of well-off individuals with contacts to secure sought-after jobs.
Unfortunately, Mr Milburn's prescriptions for reform focus, to a dispiriting degree, on the institutions that are gatekeepers to the professions: chiefly the universities, which are advised to take the social backgrounds of candidates into account.
The professions themselves are advised to be more transparent about their make-up in terms of social background and race.
But the overwhelming reason why people from less well-off backgrounds fail to enter the professions is that their education falls short of the standards of private schools, or indeed of the best state schools.
The golden age for social mobility was the era of the grammar schools: before their abolition, more students from state school entered Oxford and Cambridge than from private schools.
The proportion of senior professionals from ordinary backgrounds would be still smaller if former grammar-school pupils were excluded.
A government that really did value social mobility would consider some means of reinstating this ladder to enable bright children to make an escape from a low-aspiration environment.
But no major party favours selective education so state schools must be obliged to raise their game. Mr Milburn, like the Tories, favours the expansion of city academies.
Beyond that, why are so many state-school pupils directed towards soft subjects, leaving foreign languages, single science subjects and classics to independent schools?
The truth is, raising academic standards is still the most useful thing the state can do to diminish the class divide.
Son's in harm's way
There is at least no class divide when it comes to the injuries sustained by troops in Afghanistan: roadside bombs do not distinguish between officers and men.
We learn today that the son of the third most senior officer in the Army, Lieutenant General Sir Nick Parker has suffered multiple injuries and lost a leg.
It is worth questioning whether politicians would see the conflict differently if their own children were in uniform. In his inflammatory film, Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore pursued Congressmen to establish whether their sons were serving in Iraq; most appeared to think he was mad.
There are obviously few MPs with military backgrounds in the Commons now - Eric Joyce is an exception as an ex-soldier among Labour MPs, yet in 1945, no fewer than 60 Labour MPs were ex-officers with more from other ranks.
There are no figures for the numbers of MPs with children serving in Afghanistan, yet it is worth asking whether it would change their perspective if they were.
The conflict is worth fighting, as the Secretary General of Nato, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, reminds us today, but the argument about equipment might be conducted rather differently if it were the sons of Cabinet ministers in harm's way, not other people's.
The working web
The Mayor, Boris Johnson, launches a website to match some of London's pool of graduates with suitable vacancies, as well as giving information about job fairs and CV advice.
It is worth a try. Young people have been hardest hit by the recession; they need all the help they can get.
Reader views (1)
The Evening Standard comment doesn't take into account the snobbery that exists between private schools, so many more former pupils in top positions are more likely to have come from the so called 'major' grammar or public schools.
- Mark, Venice, Italy, 21/07/2009 23:04
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