I've always thought most political labels are meaningless. Long before Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, I could never understand why believing in markets as the most efficient means of allocating resources, and thus promoting prosperity, should be regarded as right wing. The same applied to vouchers, which are intended to give the power of the purse string - and thus control - to those without wealth. And after 9/11, I could not understand why the Left should, overwhelmingly, believe that the promotion of democracy and human rights was somehow right-wing, and caving in to Islamofascism as left wing?

Today's piece by Nick Cohen on education exemplifies the nonsense of such labels. There's much that I disagree with him about, but on the two most important and interlinked issues of our time - the battle to defend Western civilisation and to promote freedom and the importance of education - we are as one. Yet somehow he is dismissed by supposedly 'centrist' writers and politicians as a leftie agitator (and I am castigated as being on the right).

I don't see how anyone can seriously disagree with a word of his piece today:

All the efforts by New Labour to redistribute wealth, all the Sure Start schemes and working families' tax credits, have merely slowed the process, while the great expansion of the universities has left the gap between working- and middle-class participation in higher education wider than ever.

Economists produce thousands of papers on the reasons why. The education system has to be high among them, unless you believe education doesn't matter. The liberal-left never has believed that since the Enlightenment, although I do hear rather a lot of liberals dismissing education today.

Their denial is an excuse for a failure of idealism which has left education as the largest cause of hypocrisy and mystification for my class and my generation. In public we deplore elitism. In practice everyone knows that the grammar schools, which at least selected by ability, have been replaced with private and comprehensive schools which select by parental wealth. If you are rich and have a bright child, he will go private and although he will have to pass exams, he won't face competition from children whose parents can't afford the fees. If you are rich and have a dunce, you select by house price and move into the catchment area of a good school or get your nanny to drive your child to a good school in another borough or lie to vicars and send your child to a good church school. Again, you know your child won't face competition from brighter children whose parents can't afford to buy houses in the right area or don't have the knowledge to play the system. The result is that in the inner cities we don't have comprehensives but a universal system of secondary moderns.

The refusal to be honest about money makes serious debate impossible. The children of the rich stay rich. The children of graduates graduate. The children of the working and lower-middle classes sink into financial and cultural impoverishment. Yet most of the time when education is discussed the speakers refuse to admit that, uniquely in Europe, Britain has private schools with higher intellectual standards than their state rivals.

If they did, conventional political certainties would evaporate. Before he left the education department, Charles Clarke (Highgate School and Kings College, Cambridge) wanted to force successful schools to take disruptive pupils, even though the teaching would inevitably suffer. It sounded like a tough socialist measure which promised equality of misery. Yet Clarke couldn't force the private schools to take excluded pupils, so you could look at him another way and say here was a public school boy stopping the best state schools competing with his alma mater. Clarke didn't mean that, anymore than another public school Labour minister, Tony Crosland (Highgate School, and Trinity College, Oxford) meant to give the private schools their greatest boost ever when he began the civil war in state education with the promise to 'destroy every fucking grammar school in England, Wales and Northern Ireland'. None the less, both Crosland and Clarke were the objective friends of the children of the wealthy because they handicapped the competition.

It is precicely because educational opportunities which are currently the preserve of the better off should be based not on wealth but merit that the grammar schools debate is so important. And it is those who believe in selection by ability, rather than the cheque book, who are the real progressives.

(My book on this is available here.)