Middle England reveals a terrible insecurity

Beyond their arrogant certainty in their own superiority, they are fearful their children are doomed to failure

Poor "Middle England" is under attack again, its children vilified for being "too clever" and "too privileged". Top universities are under pressure to admit more people from state schools. Tom Utley, of The Daily Telegraph, has complained that his son has been denied a place at the Cambridge college attended by Mr Utley himself, and by Mr Utley's own father, because of this policy. The boy is now going to have to make a fist of it at a university known as Edinburgh.

Melanie Phillips, in the Daily Mail, has been busy fighting the corner of such poor chaps as Anirudh Singh, who was turned down by Bristol, which is currently being fingered as the main culprit in this war against Middle England. Mr Singh must now slink off, licking his wounds, to his place at a university known as Cambridge.

Simon Heffer has joined the fight as well, lauding the boycott of Bristol that has been called for by the two teaching unions that represent private schools. "For too long Middle England has served as the whipping boy of the authoritarian Left..." he declares, in an apparent, but puzzling, reference to the government of Tony Blair. "The Bristol scandal marks an end to this masochistic stoicism," he continues. "The middle classes now know their enemy all too well; and, like the enemy, they realise they must be prepared to organise, to fight and to be absolutely bloody-minded if they are to get anywhere."

What are we to deduce from all this worry about not getting anywhere? That Cambridge and Edinburgh are "nowhere"? There's some faulty logic at work here – so faulty, in fact, that if one was to judge all Middle England by its self-proclaimed media champions, one would have to assume that it was a body of people without any logic whatsoever, all of whom send their children to private schools.

But Middle England cannot be as these champions depict it, because actually only 7 per cent of the population have their children educated privately, and, unless we assume that the upper classes have recently drifted away from what they so curiously title "public schools", and the working classes have not been taking up a single scholarship lately, not all that 7 per cent are strictly Middle England's children.

Further, 40 per cent of the people at nasty, discriminatory Bristol University come from the 7 per cent at private schools, while Edinburgh, or "Nowhere" as I like to call it, takes 37 per cent of its undergraduates from among the 7 per cent. Which means you have to laugh when Melanie Phillips declares: "Just imagine the outcry if universities were giving priority to the offspring of the rich." They always have done, you daft brush of a girl. This is the outcry against that old practice, and it's taken about a millennium to be heard.

Let it not be denied that the Government's admission – that universities must take into account that a child who gets four Bs at a sink school may well be brighter than a child who gets four As at a top school – is a confession of failure. Yes, it's rotten that so many state schools offer education so inferior. But at least this way a child's life chances are not decreased because they were clever people at awful schools, while other clever people went to good ones.

The Middle England critics like to call this messing around with admission criteria "social engineering". But the truth is that it is they who have forever been indulging in social engineering, by purchasing their children's futures. Now they are incandescent with rage that the task of gaining unassailable advantage for their offspring is no longer going to be quite so foolproof as it has always been.

And they know it, or they would not be so scared. Both Mr Utley and Mr Heffer declare themselves certain that this boycott against Bristol University will work. "Denied countless high-calibre students who will then go off to adorn rival establishments, Bristol can only decline," says Mr Heffer.

But if this is the case, what are they so steamed up about? Maybe they know that, actually, things are not so clear-cut. Research at Warwick University found that students from private schools were 8 per cent less likely to get a first than their colleagues from state school. The presumed reason is that young people from state schools are more used to the sink-or-swim-style approach at university. No doubt our friends on the right would declare that this is actually because their own children are being discriminated against at this level, too.

Yet behind this arrogant certainty in their own superiority, these commentators seem full of fear: full, oddly, of a dreadful lack of confidence in their children, worried that because this slight dent in the advantages that have been secured for them, they are doomed to failure. "Are we doing our children a favour by sending them to the best schools," Mr Utley agonises, "or would they stand a better chance in life if we sent them to lousy ones." Ms Phillips is even more apocalyptic. "It will no longer be enough to attend a comprehensive," she speculates hysterically. "It will have to be a bad one."

All this manipulation, all designed to get one's own children to the front of the queue. It speaks of the most terrible insecurity, the most awful lack of confidence in their children's ability to grow and thrive and be happy. Ms Phillips goes so far as to declare that "Ministers assume that the reason such [disadvantaged] students don't go to university is discrimination. It doesn't occur to these insulated snobs that many young people may prefer to get a job instead". Which, if true, means that these changes will make no difference to the status quo whatsoever, and no people at private schools will actually have to make way for the "disadvantaged" at all.

These odd flights of fancy, whereby the champions of Middle England contradict themselves again and again are conspicuous throughout their arguments. They really see themselves as the disadvantaged, and the actual disadvantaged as the people who are having everything. The result is that their own arguments end up speaking out for exactly what it is they are criticising.

Mr Utley suggests that in general, "the middle classes are the most economically productive and the most law-abiding. The more of us, the merrier for the Treasury and for the wellbeing of rich and poor alike". He's right, of course, which is why it makes good sense to heave bright working-class people up the ladder, instead of continually shoving them off it because others got there first and have already reaped the benefits.

Mr Heffer goes even further: "As Lady Thatcher so perceptively saw, the great motor of prosperity is the relentless aspiration by individuals to ensure that their children have better lives than they did – which, of course, benefits society as a whole." Quite, Mr Heffer, which is why it is worthwhile to encourage the children of families where no one has attended university into the great seats of learning, rather than having the same families warming seats for the next generation.

In fact, the blind rage and lack of logic with which these people defend the idea that their privilege should not be questioned, and that their age-old form of social engineering should not be challenged, constitutes proof that the educated élite needs some new and hungry blood. The bright and well-connected have nothing to fear. The fact that they are so fearful suggests only that they're not as bright as they like to think they are.

d.orr@independent.co.uk