Things have come to a pretty pass when Harriet Harman, so afraid of the poor that she needs to wear a stab vest when walking around her own constituency, is seen as a class warrior.

Harman was pointing out to the TUC the obvious fact that while race and gender disparities are seen as serious problems, the focus of real public and voluntary efforts, the degree to which class determines life outcomes is significant and growing. Social mobility is getting worse. Too often, family and geography are destiny. And while Tory toffs like Teresa May might claim that focusing equality efforts on class and background is 'outdated and distracts from the real issues'. But even that well known Marxist broadsheet, the Daily Telegraph, is happy to say that "working-class children in Britain are less likely to climb the social ladder than in any other developed nation".

Maybe because we dress more alike and speak more alike than ever before, people like Teresa May can kid themselves that class distinction is dead. But family equals destiny far more in our supposedly gleichgestalten new milennium than it did in the supposedly class-ridden 1950s. White working-class boys are the poorest performers in English schools and are in danger of being completely left behind in an economy where skills and knowledge are vital.

Tories like May just don't get it because, try as they might, they have no real experience of poverty or exclusion and more or less believe that poverty and poor education are a product of feckless loungers and too much socialism. They also think that working-class means the well-heeled self-employed building contractor who puts in their extension, because he swears a lot and reads The Sun.

At the end of the day, that's why economically dry as I may be, I could never vote Tory. The Tories are in favour of entrenched privellege, despite all the image makeovers; and although in theory they are in favour as anyone else of kids from poor backgrounds (like me 20 years ago) having equality of opportunity, in practice they shy away from anything that might make that equality of opportunity real.

And if there's a distinctively Tory way of overcoming the impact of social background on outcome, I'm all ears. But first, you're going to have to convince me that Tories even believe this is a problem; people like Teresa May don't seem to get it at all.