'Posh people always win in the end' - yes, one good example is the current government. Osborne can screw the entire country as much as he wants, and still not only have a job, but get well paid as well.

Surely homeless people get the worst of it. They don't have a home, or any fashion style, or even a particular hair style, yet they are still mocked and considered inferior to everyone else. To add insult to injury people say any money given to them will go on alcohol or drugs - those same people tend to be found drunkenly staggering past them on a Friday or Saturday night, perhaps even urinating in a side streets.

It might be bad taking a bashing for being posh, but imagine how inconvenient it is to not only be homeless, but to be bashed for it.

In the late Swinging Sixties and the early Psychedelic Seventies public school chaps and old school boys came up with the wizard solution - Mockney.
In those far-off days, how an upper-class accent made people cringe. The obvious solution was to speak 'Proper'.
At contemporary Oxbridge, the undergrad who speaks with anything close to a 'lower-class' accent had better be ready for a little ribbing or worse.
To listen to a wonderful version of the English upper-class accent is quite easy. Old films with George Sanders, Tom Conway, Basil Rathbone, Louis Hayward, George Macready and Ray Milland( Welsh not English) are readily viewable on the internet. A revelation and not an English actor among them. Oh, yes, we'll include Peter Finch and Richard Burton for old times sake.

Pygmalion

Labour was never the party of anything like the whole of the working classes, nor did those classes ever provide anything like all of its support. Britain has neither a proletariat nor a bourgeoisie in the Marxist or Continental sense, but several working classes and several middle classes.

There was never any incongruity about the presence of middle or upper-class people in the Labour Party, and not least among Labour MPs. Nor about their having come from, and far from cast off, either Liberal or Tory backgrounds. Especially in Labour's early years, those backgrounds routinely included activism, and indeed parliamentary service, on behalf of either of those parties.

Herbert Morrison professed never to have seen any conflict "between Labour and what are known as the middle classes". Aneurin Bevan denounced class war, calling instead for "a platform broad enough for all to stand upon" and for the making of "war upon a system, not upon a class". Both served under Clement Attlee (Haileybury, Oxford, the Bar and the Officer Corps), who was succeeded by Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford).

Harold Wilson was a Fellow of an Oxford college, and the son of a chemist and a schoolteacher. Jim Callaghan was a tax inspector. Michael Foot's public school may have been the Quakers' Leighton Park, but it was still a public school, which duly sent him to Oxford; he and his brothers indicated just how far the sons of a provincial solicitor could climb if they were sent to the "right" schools. Neil Kinnock's father may have been a miner, but he himself was a lecturer. John Smith was a QC. We all know about Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband.

And why not?

Whereas the present Cabinet is drawn from the overclass, which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a result of the same processes as produced the underclass, and which is at least as cut off from life as it is normally lived. But it is much less numerous, it is concentrated almost exclusively in one corner of the country, and it is much more pernicious economically, socially, culturally and politically.

Although related to the old aristocracy, its members have no social conscience, rather regarding their enormous wealth as "merit", and as entitling them to behave in absolutely any way they see fit, not least with regard to drugs. At different times, David Cameron has defined both secondary schooling and "a normal university experience" as necessarily including illegal drug use. What next? And when is someone going to take him on?

Between 1688 at the latest and 1914 at the earliest, the political life of the United Kingdom and of her predecessors was defined by the struggle between the expanding middle and the top. There might have been dire consequences for the emerging working class, but the process eventually delivered it the means of redress. Yet the middle class has now been conned into believing, both that its own interests are identical to those of Cameron or of George Osborne, and that the skilled working class, so comparable in income, concerns, and often even tastes these days, is indistinguishable from the characters on Shameless. The actual median household income is around £23,000: that is the real middle.

Thank God that Cameron has not seen the last of that Bullingdon Club photograph, and therefore cannot carry on selling himself, Blair-like, as just an ordinary, if vaguely upper-middle-class, husband and father in early middle age. No, he is not. That Club is an organisation which exists specifically in order to commit criminal damage and other offences, even including assault, just so that its members can prove their ability to pick up the bill. Imagine if a group of youths the same age, but who got up at six o'clock in the morning to pay for universities, were to organise themselves into a club, complete with a membership list, officers, some sort of uniform, the works, for the express purpose of smashing up pubs. They would rightly be prosecuted as a criminal conspiracy, and could reasonably expect to be imprisoned.

Well, living in rural England, as I have done most of my life and which is a very different matter from merely owning great swathes of it while living in Knightsbridge or Notting Hill, I suspect that the publicans of Oxfordshire are not without connections in the local constabulary and magistracy. How would it look for Cameron, Osborne and the preposterous Boris Johnson if the Bully Boys were to be locked up for just long enough to have themselves sent down? Or how would it look for the University of Oxford if they were not sent down under such circumstances?

Btw, no one knows what a Sennockian is. get over it.

I really liked the article by the way - it captured how I feel about it all. I was also the child of a professional parent in a state school and had some similar experiences - incredible difference in outcomes with friends whose parents were manual workers, etc. I do find it a bit tiring the way everyone gets me wrong - half the time people who don't know me seem to assume I have my own grouse moor - except complaining is such a silly waste of breath, and is so stupid when in fact I am (one is?) the lucky one, as your article shows so well.

Not only is being sneered at for being posh "[not] all that bad", it's also what posho-Oxbridge-twats deserve.

Two things about posh-bashing:

1. It's counter-productive. The natural response it inspires in anyone on the receiving end - as the author is honest enough to say - is "well, f*ck you then." Anyone who goes from a private school to university is familiar with the range of good-banter-to-slight-ribbing-to-near-the-knuckle-to-outright-hostility that occasionally gets thrown around. And, for most of that spectrum, it's all good fun and games. But - and here's the thing - ten years later you always find the people who were dishing out the nastiest bits of it complaining that public schoolboys form cliques with their own kind and never mix with anyone different. But why on earth would they bother if it means facing down outright hostility? What's in it for them?

2. It's completely socially acceptable to say things and make generalisations about posh people that, if said about poor people (ooh, look, even that phrase sounds socially unacceptable!) would be hailed as the vilest bigotry. (this goes double the second politics gets involved. Everyone knows the "tories lower than vermin" quote, imagine if a tory had said that about Labour.)

"Posh people always win in the end. The bashing makes no difference at all."

Not quite; the difference the bashing makes is that they feel justified in winning and little compassion for those who lost.

''Glosswitch is a feminist mother of two who works in publishing.''

What an odd description?