Those obsessed with the idea that the middle class damages the poor hurl their energy into knocking down the good. The incredible thing about the history of grammar schools is not that some people advocated comprehensives: there is no necessary reason why a comprehensive should not work. It is that they insisted existing grammar schools should be destroyed. Likewise, it is right to worry that children from poor backgrounds find it so hard to get in to good universities, but it is monstrous that some of those worriers wage a constant culture war against our best universities because their high standards lead them to admit more pupils from good schools than bad ones. If half the students at Oxford come from the independent sector, might that not have a teensy-weensy bit to do with the low standards of too many in the state system?