Tory Minister Matt Hancock admits his "one nation" party is all about "social justice" - i.e. it hates the "selfish" middle classes

Lick! Lick! Slurp! Slurp!

Cabinet office minister Matt Hancock has told British companies that they should ask job applicants whether they went to private school. This, he says, will stop discrimination against the poor. No it won't, you silly man: it will merely encourage businesses to suck up to government by discriminating against the those young middle class people whose parents have made themselves poor by shelling out a fortune on a decent education for their offspring. It won't, of course, make a dent in the work prospects of the little darlings lucky enough to belong to Britain's trustafarian upper-middle and upper-class oligarchy. They are members of a cadre which has a way of arranging these things behind the scenes, either through their network of powerful contacts - or by employing junior in one of their own companies.

The other questions Matt is encouraging major companies to pose during interviews concern the postcode the applicant lived in at the age of 14, whether they received free school meals, and their parents' professions. I'm surprised he didn't also suggest they find out whether the applicants' parents had any books in the house, read to them at bedtime, took a daily paper other than The Sun or the Daily Star, ever visited an art gallery, listened to classical music or tuned into Radio 4 - all of which would presumably lead to a jobseeker being rejected for having benefited unfairly from an irredeemably bourgeois upbringing.

According to Hancock, "We are tackling the last workplace taboo. We British don't always like discussing things like our parents' background, particularly at work. But you can't manage what you can't measure."

If the British prefer being reticent about their origins, then why try to change that? I also noticed a reluctance among work colleagues to share information about their sex lives or their salaries (not that I ever asked): should we be trying to force them to publicise those aspects of their lives as well? Why? These are national characteristics - the sorts of things that make the British British - so why shouldn't they be allowed to maintain their habit of reticence on certain subjects without being hectored by some poxy politician and his band of busybody experts? I'm amazed that I have to explain all this to a high-ranking Tory: I expect this sort of idiocy from Lib-Dems and Labourites, not Conservatives. Why the hell did Hancock become a Conservative in the first place if he wants to socially engineer the Britishness out of the electorate?

As for Hancock's assertion that "you can't manage what you can't measure," here's a tip - don't try to manage or measure it, numbnuts! Let companies hire the best person for the job, i.e. leave it to the market. You're probably a bit young to remember, but there was a funny, bossy woman who used to talk about that sort of stuff way back in the 1980s. Won three elections (without the need for coalition partners). Saved the country from socialism. She was the leader of your party before it once more fell under the sway of patronising social democrats who think that the middle classes should be stopped from helping their children to get on and that the British are too stupid and unenlightened to muddle along by themselves without every aspect of their lives being supervised and directed by compassionate, superior people like you.

I wondered whether Hancock's mania for "social justice" (i.e. unjustly penalising the hard-working, gratification-deferring bourgeoisie) resulted from his own struggle to claw his way up life's greasy pole following a tough plebeian upbringing. Had his state school colleagues bullied him for doing too well in class? Had his drunken, unemployed father beaten him black and blue for switching channels from ITV to BBC2? Had prospective employers laughed in his face for not knowing the difference between "infer" and "imply"? Well, not really - after gaining a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Exeter College, Oxford, and an MPhil in Economics from Christ's College, Cambridge, he worked for his family's software company before finding employment as an economist at the Bank of England, subsequently becoming an economic adviser to Shadow Chancellor George Osborne. And all that despite attending a private school in the notoriously disadvantaged hellhole that is Chester. Not exactly Sons and Lovers, is it!

Michael Gove is one Tory who evidently understood that there's only one effective way to re-establish the sort of social mobility that Britons enjoyed - and Britain benefited from - before left-wing "experts" decided to demonstrate their infinite compassion by hurrying the process along (thereby, inevitably, bringing it to a grinding halt). Gove knew that the way to revive social mobility isn't to bully businesses, or to introduce quotas, or to punish private schools for doing such an embarrassingly good job, but to improve state education. (There are plenty of really good state schools: but there are also plenty of shitty ones.) This, Gove set about doing with great energy and success in the face of relentless opposition from the education Blob, which seems utterly determined to maintain the supposedly horrendous status quo it's always whining on about. But the Education Secretary's spineless boss noticed that one of his cabinet ministers seemed to be pursuing policies of which his party's traditional supporters might actually approve (yikes!), and so Gove was humiliatingly demoted and replaced with some wet goggle-eyed female appeasement monkey. And now we have yet another faux-Conservative minister burbling about "social justice" (apparently it's what the Conservative Party is all about - who knew?) and blaming business for not helping the disadvantaged (why should they?) and attacking the middle classes for being selfish (i.e. making sacrifices for their families, the swine!) - while, as usual, leaving the oligarchy to carry on as before.

Pass the sick-bag, Alice!