Of all the great achievements of the post-war Labour government, the one, more than any other, which would have cemented its reputation as the greatest reforming government of all time would have been the abolition of privilege in education. If the rich and powerful knew that their sons and daughters depended on the state, they would pretty soon ensure that the same standards they themselves had enjoyed were established under the new dispensation. This would have been a major step in the direction of a more classless society.

That Labour failed to abolish private education following WWII – which many had begged it to do – is not a criticism of that heroic government. It was, quite simply, a bridge too far. All its other reforming zeal left it with insufficient headwind to tackle this greatest of all bastions of privilege. Had it done so, it should have included faith schools since education should only concern itself with empirical facts.

Britain will have to wait for its next cataclysmic event to enable it to deal with this most entrenched of all its inequalities. Only when the governing classes are themselves traumatised, along with the rest of us, will they yield this most precious of all their privileges. Then, and only then, will we be close to enjoying equal opportunities.

Meantime we must pray that the traumatic event required does not extend to another world war, such as before the great Labour government reforms, or a financial crash of the sort that 2008 threatened, which might very well have been 1929 all over again but for the great engine of Far East growth. But, just the same, it will have to be something quite dramatic.

While we wait, the political classes should make good on their constantly trumpeted willingness to send their own offspring to the country’s state schools. It is rank hypocrisy for the politicos of both the Right and Left to extol the virtues of state schooling, while at the same time lambasting the private sector in the process, and then go on to send their own children to fee-paying schools. Great numbers have done this, including one of Labour’s shrillest advocates for social justice, Diane Abbott. The fact she represents one of London’s most deprived boroughs, Hackney, didn’t stop her sending her son to a private school.

There is, too, something deeply troubling about the numbers who make it to the top, be it in politics, the military, the judiciary, the Civil Service, finance and business, who were once part of the Oxbridge set up. That needs also to be urgently examined. Elitism seems to be at the very heart of Britain’s privileged classes, almost as though it is in their DNA. It’s the ‘Old Boys’ network writ large. A closed shop par excellence.