This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

I still struggle to persuade many Tory loyalists that their party has now actually become a rather Left-wing version of New Labour. If only they’d listen, it might help them come round to recognising one of the most important facts about modern Britain.

Here’s some evidence. The Cabinet Office Minister, Matthew Hancock, has announced plans to grill job applicants to find out if they have been to independent schools.

He explains this inquisition by saying: ‘Social justice is at the heart of everything this one nation Government is trying to achieve.

'Our goal is simple: to make sure everyone has the opportunity to succeed and make the most of their talents, whatever the circumstances of their birth.’

Social justice? This is, of course, top-grade tripe. What Mr Hancock wants is to destroy quality, in the name of equality.

There is a simple and proven way to make the best use of the nation’s talents: restore the 1,000 fine state grammar schools in England and Wales madly destroyed in an idiotic frenzy between 1965 and 1990, and their equivalents in Scotland.

Then build more of them. And reopen the best independent schools to the children of poor homes by reintroducing the direct grant system, which gave a free, first-class education to thousands of talented children from state primaries, the late Alan Rickman being a good example.

Every time I hear politicians drivelling that the independent schools should do more to help the state sector, I long to shout in their ears: ‘But they did! And it worked! And you abolished it in 1975, and are so pig-ignorant you don’t even know about it!’

Even now those supposed towers of snobbish privilege which are the independent schools do what they can (often through the generosity of parents already paying stiff fees) to take in as many boys and girls from less well-off homes as they possibly can, free of charge.

Meanwhile, huge numbers of children at these alleged Snob Academies come from families where the fees are a giant strain on the family budget, willingly accepted. Many have tried the supposedly improved state education system and found it gravely wanting. They just think education is more important than holidays or new cars or restaurant meals.

They tend not to be rich enough to live in the catchment areas of the exclusive fake comprehensives where wealthy Leftists send their young, pretending to be apostles of equality when to all intents and purposes they have paid for their children to be privileged.

Mr Hancock’s scheme would waft these pampered Leftists into the best jobs, as they are already wafted into the top universities, which are ceaselessly pestered to make them discriminate against independent schools. And it would slam the door of opportunity in the faces of many who would make the most of it. Crazily, it would do this in the name of progress.

How insane this all is. None of these people knows what he is doing. The Left has not only taken over all the parties, but now proceeds to spit on the very people – the poor – it claims to be helping.

I will quote here what that great teacher, headmaster and university Vice Chancellor, Lord James of Rusholme, told the House of Lords in 1976 as he protested against the destruction of all these schools: ‘If I were a High Tory instead of a Fabian Socialist – a Tory of a type that now scarcely exists even in cartoons, one who really believes in privilege and keeping the lower orders down – one of the first things I should do would be to get rid of grammar schools and, above all, I should applaud what we are doing this afternoon, getting rid of the direct grant schools.’

I would like to point this out to Mr Matthew Parris, former Tory MP, BBC favourite and frequent apologist for David Cameron, who wrote last week: ‘The present public mood of sneering at public school toffs is healthy.

'The brand must be trashed. People must be made to feel sheepish about going to Eton or Harrow. It was welcome news yesterday that the Cabinet Office Minister, Matt Hancock, is drawing up a list of questions that employers may ask job applicants about their socio-economic background.’

He added that he meant this to sound aggressive. Well, I mean my response to sound rude. Mr Parris and Mr Hancock have adopted opinions which are stupid, ill-informed and utterly wrong.

Finally...the great housewife myth is turning to dust

The nastiest and most dishonest slogan of the ultra-feminists was that women who stayed at home to raise their children were ‘chained to the kitchen sink’.

This unpleasant expression scared many women away from doing the most important and responsible (and rewarding) task which most of us will ever have – raising the next generation to be worthy inheritors of a great free country, hand-reared individuals rather than battery children, the conformist products of TV and mass culture.

And it gulled them into undergoing a real enslavement: wage-slavery. How many really wanted to do this, and how many were cajoled and propagandised into it?

Well, last week Professor Maggie Andrews, of the University of Worcester, told the Hay Festival that the old assumption was that feminism was about escaping the domestic, getting out of the home, getting a job and being financially independent.

But ‘people are more sceptical about that now - they see a much more complex picture. They see the domestic space as one area of women’s power.

Certain elements of the domestic have become much sexier, much more popular, an escape from the horrors of society’.

Well, that’s one way of putting it. I just think many women have discovered that wage-slavery was a false liberation, and that, if there are any chains in their lives, they are the chains of money that keep them from their children.

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A sorry war with nothing but baddies

News from the supposed liberal democratic paradise of Ukraine, so much nicer than Mr Putin’s nasty Russia.

According to the United Nations, Ukrainian forces are rounding up and torturing suspected rebel sympathisers.

One victim had his hand smashed with a hammer and was waterboarded while being kicked and punched in the genitals.

The UN had to abandon an anti-torture inspection after being denied access to five secret detention centres. The Russian rebels are just as bad, but you knew that. So sorry, but there are no good guys in this conflict.

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If the true culprits of the Birmingham pub bombings were arrested, tried and convicted, how long would it be before they were released in the cause of the ‘peace process’? My guess is two years maximum – less than you can get for some driving offences.

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