Shadow Equalities Minister, Gloria de Piero, suggested a form of social engineering which would judge people by their parents' background

Consider this scenario. It’s the near future, and you’re in a job interview. You start nervously, but the long hours of preparation have paid off.

As the interviewer starts to nod and smile, a great weight lifts from your shoulders. Surely, you think, the job is yours.

And then the interviewer glances down at a piece of paper, and his expression changes. ‘Oh,’ he says flatly. ‘It says here that your parents were solicitors.’ And in that moment, the job is gone.

If you think this sounds like the stuff of fantasy, have a look at the speech the Shadow Equalities Minister, Gloria De Piero, gave to the Labour Party Conference on Sunday.

If Ed Miliband becomes Prime Minister, she declared, public-sector employers will be forced to ‘monitor the social background’ of their staff in order to end the dominance of the middle classes.

Of course Miss De Piero was right to suggest that far too few working-class Britons are climbing the ladder to the top jobs in Whitehall.

As she pointed out, it is a national embarrassment that only 25 of the 654 graduates recently selected for the civil service’s fast stream came from working-class backgrounds.

No one doubts that Britain has a serious problem with social mobility. Her proposed solution, however, strikes me as not merely absurd, but positively dangerous.

It is essentially a form of social engineering, which would judge young men and women not by educational achievement, their hard work and potential, but by their parents’ background.

The potential absurdities of such a process are easy to imagine. First, employers would have to ‘monitor’ their staff’s social class — though how they would go about it remains distinctly unclear.

How would they define their employees’ class? By birth and breeding? TV viewing habits? By their accent and dress sense? Their parents’ postcodes? On these matters, not surprisingly, Miss De Piero was less than specific.

In any case, before long the Government would almost certainly demand employers publish the figures in class-based league tables. And soon enough, employers with too many middle-class workers would find themselves squirming on the Whitehall carpet.

Slowly but surely, Britain would end up with a two-tier public-sector workforce: on the one hand, those who got their jobs on merit; on the other, those selected to appease Whitehall’s demands for the right class balance

Ministers would announce ‘special measures’ to ensure the right kind of diversity. Interview panels would be told quietly to discourage applicants from the leafy suburbs, irrespective of talent and qualifications.

And slowly but surely, Britain would end up with a two-tier public-sector workforce: on the one hand, those who got their jobs on merit; on the other, those selected to appease Whitehall’s demands for the right class balance.

Not only is it economic lunacy, it is immoral, too. And it is hard to imagine anything more corrosive, anything more damaging to morale in the workplace. Just imagine the gossip, the whispering, the climate of suspicion.

Did Smith get his job because his dad was a docker? Did Jones land her promotion because she went to a failing school? And if redundancies were to be made, would doctors’ children be first in the firing line?

How many of us, after all, want to be defined merely by class? And how many of us would like our prospective employers to take our parents’ background into consideration?

If Ed Miliband becomes Prime Minister, Miss De Piero declared, public-sector employers will be forced to ‘monitor the social background’ of their staff in order to end the dominance of the middle classes

The irony of all this is that many of Labour’s Shadow Ministers would find it hard to get ahead under the new system.

As the child of a working-class household in Bradford, Miss De Piero would be all right. But the man who followed her onto the podium on Sunday, the Hon Tristram Hunt, the privately educated son of a Labour peer, would face an uphill struggle.

As the son of a Hampstead academic, Ed Miliband would surely tick the wrong box. So would Ed Balls, the private school, Oxford and Harvard-educated son of a zoology professor. Even some of Labour’s most iconic figures might struggle in Miss De Piero’s brave new world.

Clement Attlee, the boarding school-educated son of a Surrey solicitor, who served as Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951, would not do at all. As products of private schools and Oxford, both Michael Foot and Tony Benn would be out, too.

And as for Sir Stafford Cripps — the Winchester-educated son of a Tory baron who served as Attlee’s Chancellor during the 1940s — he would be wasting his time even sending in an application form.

At bottom, this is yet another example of one of the Labour Party’s most depressing tics — their lunatic insistence that it is up to universities and employers to fix social problems that should have been addressed earlier in life.

Listening to Miss De Piero on Sunday, I was reminded of Gordon Brown’s disgraceful attack on Oxford University 14 years ago, when he claimed — entirely falsely — that the university had discriminated against a bright comprehensive school student called Laura Spence.

To anyone who has ever worked in the university sector, as I have, the idea that admissions tutors discriminate against working-class students is not just offensive, it is downright laughable.

Similarly, the idea that public-sector employers actively discourage talented working-class applicants, presumably by wearing top hats and asking questions in Latin, strikes me as utterly ludicrous.

The truth is that too many working-class youngsters have been betrayed by a school system dominated by league tables, low standards and rampant box-ticking.

The way to give them a leg up is to give them a good education — not to let them sink and then expect employers to sort out the mess afterwards.

But I doubt that Miss De Piero really thought about what employers want. What she wanted was to give her Left-wing activists some red meat. A bit of old-fashioned class war always gets the comrades on their feet.

The record of history, however, suggests that hammering the middle classes is no way for Labour to win elections. Indeed, Miss De Piero should be warned that the harder she hits, the easier she will make it for the Tory ‘toffs’ she hates so much.

The biggest election winners in Labour’s history, including Clement Attlee in 1945, all made a point of reaching out to middle-class voters, selling them a vision of a united Britain based on fairness and opportunity

The biggest election winners in Labour’s history — Clement Attlee in 1945, Harold Wilson in 1964 and 1966, and Tony Blair in 1997, 2001 and 2005 — all made a point of reaching out to middle-class voters, selling them a vision of a united Britain based on fairness and opportunity.

Of course Mr Blair (Fettes private school and Oxford) now cuts a miserably tarnished, shop-soiled figure. But I could not help wondering what he would have made of Miss De Piero’s speech.

Just before the 1997 election, Mr Blair described the kind of voter he wanted to reach, calling him ‘Mondeo Man’. This, he said, was a former Labour voter, ambitious and aspirational, who had bought his own house and started his own business.

Prejudices

‘His instincts,’ Mr Blair said, ‘were to get on in life. And he thought our instincts were to stop him. But that was never our history or our purpose.’

Would Mondeo Man pass muster with Gloria De Piero? Would his children get jobs under her new dispensation?

I doubt it, somehow. Too often under Ed Miliband, the Labour Party has retreated to its comfort zone, pandering to the prejudices of its more Left-wing supporters and refusing to confront the hard choices in an age of austerity, globalisation and international turmoil.