I'VE always argued that the trouble with Pol Pot is that he was just too damn soft on the urban petit bourgeoisie, and I was pleased to learn this morning that Simon Heffer shares that assessment.

The Daily Telegraph pundit’s big problem with the genocidaire prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea is not so much his penchant for trivial workaday misdemeanours like the annihilation of a quarter of all living Cambodians, but rather that he tried to ‘impose fairness’.

Just like Harriet Harman and her ‘mad Equality Bill’, in fact. Unfortunately, Simon doesn’t quite clinch the parallel by nailing Hattie on her policy on forced agrarian collectivisation. But let’s not quibble; all but fools will instantly identify the immediately obvious basic underlying continuity of the two politicians’ inherently socialist thought processes.

All this and more can be found in the somewhat febrile if highly entertaining examination of Labour’s latest campaign slogan – ‘A future fair for all’ – to which Heffer devotes his column today.

The basic pessimism of the rightwing mindset is on full display. ‘We are not equal. We cannot be made equal,’ Heffer intones. Life is not fair, nothing that governments can do can change or even substantially ameliorate that, so the plebs should live with it.

[L]et us go back to that slogan, and its watchword: fairness. It is a word that radiates cynicism. It imputes the lowest of motives to its target audience: which is that they will want to be governed not by a party that gives them a fair crack of the whip, but by one that gives them a fairer crack than they truly deserve. They will get this fairer crack at the expense of others who, in a mirror-image of their own experience, must make do with less, often much less, than they deserve. What is fair about that?

The assumption here is that the default setting in a class-divided society is the kind of limited fair crackdom that the hard right advocates. In Hefferworld, we all have an opportunity to excel, and to go as far as our talents will carry us.

And this, very patently, is not the case. The mere existence of inherited wealth – whether one approves of it or not – nullifies any such pretence. Money buys privilege in a myriad of ways, from private education to better access to top universities, social connections, and even the ability to work for nothing as an intern in a fashion PR house.

Any talent that can properly be described as inherent must, by definition, be distributed across rich and poor alike in a bell curve manner. If everyone could go as far as their talents could carry them, that would be reflected in the social composition of the political elite and the legal profession and national newspaper columnists and FTSE 100 chief executives. It most obviously is not.

This works profoundly to society’s disbenefit, by allowing the mediocre to edge out those more able but still skint. Moreover, such a patent disconnect between effort and reward contributes to the alienation widely felt among the poorer sections of society.

In plain English, that is 'not fair', and this is the problem that social democracy rightly exists to rectify. The remedy inevitably involves wealth redistribution, and I suspect this is the nub of the question for Heffer.

But to put it in a way that he might be able to understand, must it not be right to remove the distortions to the unregulated free market in talent, thereby maximising overall social utility?

The only people who should logically object to fairness are those that gain from the unfairness that has always characterised Britain.