Under Labour, students now applying for civil service internships will be judged on what jobs their parents did when they were 14.
“Some children’s parents were more equal than others.” Labour’s message to the next generation: If your parents did too well, don’t bother applying.
Imagine a young woman, 20 years old, sharp as a tack, blazing through her university finals with a mind like a steel trap and a heart full of civic duty.
She dreams of shaping Britain’s future through public service. Her fatal flaw? Her mother was a dentist. Her father… a computer programmer. And so, she is cast out of Labour’s new Civil Service internship programme, not because of anything she did, but because of who her parents were when she was 14.
We have now entered the Age of Ancestral Guilt.
The Civil Service, once a temple of neutral excellence, is now to be reimagined by Labour as an ideological sorting house, not for ability, not for ambition, not for contribution, but for… class origin.
Their new rulebook reads less like a government policy and more like a particularly obtuse chapter from Orwell’s Animal Farm, only now it’s “Some children’s parents were more equal than others.”
This isn’t equality. This is exclusion dressed up in overalls.
Pat McFadden, Labour’s Cabinet Office minister, cheerily announced that students will be judged for eligibility based on what jobs their parents did a decade ago. Not what they’ve done, not what they can do, but the careers of mum and dad during their child’s awkward year nine. Receptionists? Welcome! Plumbers? Please, this way. Accountants? Sorry, try the private sector.
It’s as if Labour wandered into the MI6 recruitment office and declared, “Right, lads, no more spies unless your old man drove a van.”
And this is the party that once accused its opponents of being elitist, discriminatory, and out of touch. The irony would be delicious, if it weren’t so deeply absurd.
Class warfare as policy
Let’s be blunt. This is not about opportunity. It’s about optics and tactics. A headline stunt for a party desperately keen to cosplay as “the most working-class Cabinet of all time” while simultaneously playing amateur demographic puppeteers. They’ve moved from social mobility to social taxonomy, complete with civil service caste systems.
What next? C.V.s with mandatory family trees? Interviews that open with, “Tell us about your father’s employment status in 2009”?
What kind of democracy excludes based on heritage?
This isn’t levelling up, it’s chiselling down. It’s not justice, but vengeance masquerading as fairness. If the Tories had ever proposed barring anyone from internships based on too much inherited privilege, the Left would be marching on Whitehall with megaphones and Marxist pamphlets.
Now it’s Labour doing it, and somehow we’re all supposed to nod along politely?
This is the slippery slope where principle ends and identity politics devours its own tail. Replace “socio-economic background” with race, gender, or religion, and this would be a scandal with a half-life of decades. And rightly so.
Because the fundamental truth remains: democracies should judge people on who they are and what they do, not on where they come from.
Merit is not middle-class.
This isn’t an argument against helping people from working-class backgrounds. The real world is brimming with barriers and invisible ceilings. But the solution isn’t to build new ones in reverse. It’s to tear them all down.
It’s to widen the gate, not replace the gatekeeper with a clipboard and a copy of Who’s Who of Parental Professions.
Labour says it wants the Civil Service to “reflect the people we serve.” Fine. Then why not reflect all the people, not just the ones who tick a pre-approved social box?
Instead, they’ve chosen to punish today’s students for the employment status of their families yesterday. The Left has become what it once railed against: the architects of exclusion, the curators of grievance, and the bureaucrats of absurdity.
So let’s call it what it is: class-based discrimination wrapped in sanctimony.
Labour has become the party that preaches equality, while institutionalising division. They are not just hypocrites. They are hypocrites with a clipboard.
And the rest of us? Maybe we’re just hoping our parents were poor enough to matter.
By Claire Bullivant
