The "old school tie" mentality is alive and well in the United Kingdom. The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, an Edinburgh University graduate, spoke to the delegates of the Trades Union Congress last Thursday and drew the battle lines between the Labour government's commitment to provide "opportunity for all" and the perception of the Conservatives as defenders of elitism.
Let the country be clear, the Chancellor told the TUC: "It is about time we had an end to that old Britain when what matters to some people is the privileges you were born with rather than the potential you actually have."
Such pronouncements resonate well in the Labour heartlands, where traditional Labour voters work hard to pay off the mortgage and send their children to a good local school. It was an aspirational message and maybe it was designed to "fight populist fire with populist fire", as Mr Brown's critics said, in the wake of Conservative successes on law and order and pensioners.
But it has certainly shaken up the debate over privilege versus potential and the Chancellor has taken a lot of flak for it.
What prompted Mr Brown's scornful attack on elitism was the case of a 17-year-old state school student, Laura Spence. This bright student, who gained 10 Astarred GCSEs at her Tyneside school and is expected to get 5 A grades at A level, attended an interview at Oxford's Magdalen College last year to study medicine at the Oxford Medical School.
There were five places available for 22 applicants. Seventeen students were rejected, including Laura. The five who were selected included two from state schools and three from ethnic minorities. Three of the successful candidates were women.
Laura's headmaster at Monkseaton Community High School, Dr Paul Kelley, subsequently complained about discrimination against state school students. But according to the President of Magdalen College, Mr Anthony Smith, there was no official complaint last December when most headmasters write to say their students should have been selected.
"It just seems very odd that this has been blown up in the press just one week before this student was due to sit her A levels," Mr Smith said this week. In fact local newspapers had picked up the story before the national press. It has also emerged that had representations been made on Laura's behalf, Magdalen College would have encouraged her to apply for a less competitive course, such as biochemistry. Laura has since been offered a £65,000 scholarship to study biochemistry at Harvard.
Gordon Brown then seized on the issue. He weighed in with comments at the TUC denouncing Oxford's decision as "an absolute scandal", interpreting the admissions system as evidence of the "old school tie" and the "old school network" operating at its worst to keep out state school students. The row was further inflamed when details of the confidential interview notes written by Magdalen College were leaked to the BBC. The memo said that Laura, as with other state school students, was "low in confidence and difficult to draw out of herself despite being able to think on her feet". It went on to say, however, that she would make "an excellent doctor".
But the cat was out of the bag. The Independent Schools Council, which represents nearly 500,000 pupils from independent schools, Oxford's vice-chancellor, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats all joined in condemning Mr Brown's "opportunistic" intervention. When the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr John Prescott, broadened the campaign against elitism and privilege in a speech on Tuesday, signalling extra funding for universities consistently attracting students from state schools, the Conservatives charged Labour with engaging in "tired old class war rhetoric".
The criticism - that Mr Brown made his comments without the full knowledge of the facts of Laura's case - does stick. But it does not disguise the fact that state school students in the UK are under-represented in higher education, or that a fee-paying school pupil is 10 times more likely than a state school student to gain three As at A level.
This year Oxford made 53 per cent of offers to state school students in an attempt to balance the state school/fee-paying school intake. But the proportion of students accepted by Oxford from state schools, relative to the number of such applicants, is drastically lower than the success rate in the fee-paying school sector. Almost half of Oxford students come from fee-paying schools, though only 8 per cent of students in the UK are privately educated.
Removing class and money as tickets to educational success strikes a chord with New and Old Labour voters. But Labour has made it more difficult for state school students to attend university by introducing fees and abolishing maintenance grants. And when middle-class Labour voters remove their children from less successful local schools because of poor funding and unmotivated teachers, the responsibility for the poor performance of some state school students must be addressed by the party in power.