New Labour: an elite defined by hate

The New Snobs of Labour have gathered this week in Manchester for their party get-together. Snobbish? You bet. Our country is now governed by an elite that denies being elite. Our ruling class flaunts its state education, yet attended the best comprehensives in the land.

Of course, David Cameron's cocooned background (Eton and Oxford) isn't ideal preparation to lead the country, but David Miliband didn't exactly grow up on a council estate, either. Nor did I. However, like all those from the genuine middle, I grew up around those who did. We went to school with them. We still see them. We couldn't avoid seeing them even if we wanted to.

But for the new ruling class, which we might call the New Labour core vote, those from council estates are, knife crime aftermaths aside, invisible.

When the Glasgow East by-election forced the Gallowgate underclass (life expectancy lower than North Korea in some parts) into Westminster's in-tray, the Government suddenly had to empathise with a depravity they only sporadically admit exists. Likewise, those who govern us have sheared off any connection with the old upper class. Ours is now an elite that knows nothing about either 'chavs' or 'toffs', nothing except that they loathe them.

This hatred stems from when Thatcher banished both the aristocracy and the old working class by declaring only money, and only new money at that, to be 'merit'. New Labour has all too gleefully continued her work.

There have been similar changes in America, where there used to be the tennis-playing, golfing, polo-playing and yachting class of Vanderbilts, Roosevelts, Rockefellers, Astors, Du Ponts, Carnegies and Joneses, the original 'Joneses' with whom others strived to 'keep up'. That class still exists. But even the last, and the least probable, of its notable