It is interesting that you see the insignia of Duke or UCLA or Penn State on T-shirts and baseball caps all the time, but you never see Nottingham or Keele or Imperial. Why is this? You might occasionally see teenage French tourists wearing an Oxford University top, just as they might wear one with a Beefeater on it, but for the purposes of this argument, teenage French tourists don't count.

It can't be a failure of supply. It might have been once, 30 years ago, but there's plenty of branded varsity merchandise available now. Not just arcane University Challenge-style stripey scarves, but decent gear a normal person might wear. Except they don't. Not once they've left college anyway, and not many while they're still there. British graduates are more likely to wear the name of an educational establishment located thousands of miles away than the one they attended themselves. Why is that?

Because they, we, would be embarrassed. Because we'd feel like a dork. Because it would look too keen, too stuck-in-the-past, too best-years-of-your-lifer, too much the team player, too institutional. People who've never got over where they went to university are pitied and pitiful, and no one wants to be mistaken for one such.

But there's another reason too, which revolves around class. Differences between British universities - intellectual, historical, geographical, but primarily, social - are, make no mistake, keenly felt by the people who have attended them. But until recently graduates formed a tiny fraction of the population, and belonging to pretty much the same class they knew it was politic not to make a song and dance about their alma mater. Someone would be bound to typecast you on the basis of a sketchy stereotype: too northern; too southern; too posh; not posh enough; too easy to get into; too hard to get into, whatever.

Given that one day in the not too distant future many Britons, if not a plurality, will be middle-class graduates, the shunning of college regalia may be about to end. In the wake of the failure of Labour's “toff strategy” at the Crewe & Nantwich by-election, commentators have been quick to declare the class war dead and buried, but I say: not so fast. The class war isn't over, the battle lines have merely shifted. The divide isn't inter-class any longer, it's gone intra.

Two factors might override traditional British reserve. One is that lots of those who now benefit from higher education do not regard it as their birthright and might therefore be happy and proud to advertise their achievement. The second is that the more entrenched middle class will want to distinguish its pedigree from the newcomers. I wouldn't be surprised to see a profusion of alma mater regalia appearing. It's a business opportunity for someone.

Meanwhile, presumably these existing outlets wouldn't survive unless there was at least some demand: evidently quite a few Brits already do sport college colours, but indoors, in private, like those men who try on their wife's underwear.

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