Labour’s new education policy aims to give all children a better start. It will be a long road to undo the damage this government has done
Class? Labour was once too wary of the mine-strewn territory to use the word. Tony Blair talked of meritocracy – “we are meritocrats”, he declared in his first keynote speech of the 2001 general election campaign. He called for “equality of opportunity”. While his 18 taskforces on the causes of “social exclusion” yielded many successes – a 50% decrease in the number of poor children and a sharp fall in teen pregnancy and youth unemployment – he generally avoided any talk of inequality itself, or class.
Keir Starmer strode into that minefield on Thursday outlining the fifth of his “missions”, and the one that may prove the most politically defining: he calls it “my personal cause”. He would “shatter the class ceiling”. He spoke of the “snobbery” of the academic versus vocational gap and of the mental barriers telling working class children “this isn’t for you”. Politicians avoid the word, yet there it still is, large as life.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
