It is so sad, so disappointing. I had hoped that with Ed Miliband as leader, the Labour party would put its weight firmly behind the state education system, and seek to repair the social damage caused by surviving discriminatory practices in the private sector. We all know they are there, and many of us wish they would go. Time was when Labour advocated removing the anomalous and archaic tax status of private schools, more suited to the days of Trollope’s Barchester than to the 21st century, but we hear nothing of that now. The political and legal establishments, which populate these schools with their own offspring, are dead set against it. And the rest of us seem to have fallen meekly in line behind them. Witness the all-too-modest proposals of Tristram Hunt.

The Miliband brothers were educated in north London at Haverstock comprehensive, a school that became a success through a concerted effort by parents, neighbourhood, teaching staff and, if I remember rightly, the campaigning support of Ben Whitaker, Labour MP for Hampstead in the 1960s. Surely, I thought, Haverstock Ed of all people would know that one of the threats to the improvement and continuing excellence of state schooling lies in competition from unfairly privileged independent schools, which lure pupils with offers of ever better swimming pools and cricket pitches.

There seems to be no upper limit to what wealthy parents are prepared to spend for those extra advantages and the unspoken and unmentionable sense of superiority that comes with them. Andrew Halls, head of the independent King’s College School in south-west London, complained this week of the “distasteful competition” for “ludicrously extravagant facilities”, which he described as an “arms race”. Educational expenditure, like the price of property, is out of hand. And those who cannot or will not pay are not competing on a level cricket pitch.

Society is growing more unequal and more divided, and in theory most of us deplore this. So why can’t we tackle one of the most blatant causes of inequality, an inequality that begins in our primary years? You can Sure Start as many disadvantaged children as you like, but the entrenched privileges of children in prep schools and independent secondaries will continue to poison the fountain of knowledge.

We hear a lot about “draining the swamp” that breeds terrorism, and that’s not my kind of language, but it does suggest to me that the swamp we really need to drain is the swamp of entitlement. That is where the language of class warfare breeds. Jokes and sneers about white vans, plebs, bigots, Mr Plod, the Bullingdon Club and bacon sandwiches, and the press’s exploitative delight in associated faux pas, are the scum that rises to the top of a society that seems unable to rid itself of a culture of class deference. Personally, I find calling someone Mr Plod just as offensive as calling someone a pleb. It’s interesting, of course, to discuss, as we all did, whether “pleb” is more likely to be an upper-class or a proletarian insult. (I tend to think the latter, but so what?) And either way, what a trivial subject to cost people their jobs, and on which to spend millions of pounds in legal fees and miles and miles in column inches. We must be mad.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Haverstock school, where the Miliband brothers studied, pictured in the 1970s

Who knows exactly how much money the abolition of that poisonous charitable status would bring to the exchequer. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter whether it would be more or less than the bedroom tax, or the abolition of tax breaks on buy-to-let (which seem, ingeniously, to have replaced what used to be the incentive known as second mortgage tax relief). Others better equipped than me can do those sums. It is the principle that counts. Some issues are not quantifiable in monetary terms, and true equality of educational opportunity is one of them. We all pay the price of those expensive educations, even those who seem to benefit from them. We pay for them in our white vans and our Daimlers, in our subservience and our anger, in our hatreds and resentments.

The template of the public school should be scrapped, not slavishly imitated by the state sector. The short trousers of the forlorn little rich boys evoked by Ian Jack in his excellent article in the Guardian last week may have been phased out, but other oddities survive, and some are being newly introduced.

I was surprised to read that the headmaster of Mossbourne Academy, an oversubscribed inner-city comprehensive, “has ambitions for Mossbourne to become the first state school to win at the Henley regatta”, as “we’re obviously looking at what the elite private schools are doing and doing our best to replicate that. We want our students to have the same opportunities”. Henley versus Hackney.

It is no doubt my limitation that the very word “Henley” seems redolent of a bygone Edwardian era, and good luck to the rowing boys and rowing girls of Hackney. But it’s a mad world; the world of Harry Potter, of school dorms and tuck boxes, of feasts and bullies, of banqueting halls and wizards, of fags and monitors and house colours and arcane slang.

Please, Ed, think again. I feel bereft without anyone for whom I can vote. I wanted to vote for you, and for the future. But I really can’t vote to twin myself with Harry Potter.