THE standard case against redistributionist or egalitarian politics today is that the Britain of 2008 is more or less a meritocracy. Never mind if you’re old man’s a dustman and he wears a dustman’s hat; he probably made a killing after exercising the right to buy his council flat and lives in prosperous retirement in Essex.

OK, so the public schoolies still maintain something of an edge. But never mind, son. Concentrate on your studies, put the graft in, and one day you too will be on a middle management wedge with a Ford Focus thrown in. If you’re good enough, you’ll get there.

But hard evidence that this is the case is inconclusive, to say the least. As recently as December last year, one report found that ‘social mobility in the UK remains at the low level set in 1970 when the country was bottom of an international league table. Only the United States amongst Western democracies is on a par with the UK.’

The odd thing is, New Labour has – within certain limits far below what many on the left consider adequate – enacted policies designed to tackle precisely this issue. More money is being spent on schools in real terms under the Tories, more young people are going to university, and even parents I know on the far left whose kids have been through the SureStart programme seem agreed that the scheme is good in as far as it goes.

Hence the apparent confusion surrounding another report, this time from the prime minister’s strategy unit. Unsurprisingly, given its provenance, it seems to suggest that things are looking up. But the reception it has received varies dramatically from newspaper to newspaper.

The Daily Mail inevitably seizes the opportunity for some autopilot Labour bashing. The story leads page 10 and the spin is that prospects for poor children are now no better than 30 years ago.

Equally predictably, David Aaronovitch in The Times – a journalist habitually ready to put the best possible gloss on whatever the government does, even if that entails cheerleading for war – engages in a spot of New Labour boosterism. ‘Be patient’, he recommends. Read between the lines and you will see that ‘Britain is gradually getting fairer’, he insists.

Somewhere between the two takes is Nicholas Timmins in the Financial Times, a man with decades of experience writing about social policy and not openly politically aligned. His verdict is that that any claims of improvement are at best ‘premature’ and that more evidence is needed.

They can’t all be right. For those of us who are not social policy specialists and who have no time to study the documents – and that includes me – I suppose you pays your money and you takes your choice. But on grounds of what I do know, and because the judgement of journalists with expertise is usually preferable to punditry, my hunch would be back Nick Timmins’ verdict.

At the emotional level, this whole question is hugely important to me. One of the things that still motivates me to engage in politics is social class and class inequality; as far as I am concerned, this is something up close and personal.

I embody some of the changes that came about as the result of the social democratic consensus before Thatcherism wrecked it. As the son of a railway worker and a nurse, I was the first person in my family ever to get into higher education, let alone qualify for a postgraduate degree from a leading university and thereafter land a solidly middle-class job.

The idea that these opportunities have been stripped away from the generation that followed mine is still capable of making me angry. For instance, I still think that New Labour’s (now partially reversed) decision to abolish student grants was the single most retrogressive step taken by any postwar British government.

After more than a decade in office, I would really have liked to read a study that proved that New Labour had made measurable headway in taking on the engrained privileges that still seem to come automatically with a public school education.

But the obvious conclusion here is that attempts to tackle the negative social impact of the class structure without attacking the class structure itself are condemned in advance to inefficacity.