The recent hoo-hah in Bromley, where the council had to deny that it would consider assisting hard-up private school fee-paying parents, must have caused great relief in Labour circles. A Conservative council proposing to help the rich? Great, bring on the election campaign right now.

It depressed me no end. Class war appears to be alive and kicking in education, just as we are all becoming politically pluralistic and tolerant about everything else. As I have three school-age children and two stepchildren in further and higher education, I have plenty more years of this to come.

As it happens, we don’t send our children to private school. As it happens, we are fully versed in the arguments about elitism, about how it would be so much better if the community had a really representative mix in the local schools. And as it happens, my stepdaughter went to the school once described by Alastair Campbell as a bog-standard comprehensive and is about to go to one of the leading universities in October.

So there is plenty to defend about the state and plenty to find fault with about private education. Phew. Because there is a growing militancy in some quarters that all choice in education should be removed, that all children should go to a school designated by the local authority (even by lottery allocation) and that any deviation by going private or tutoring is deviant in itself.

Those of us who enthusiastically voted for Tony Blair in 1997 and beyond believed that Labour understood aspiration in education above all else. What an irony that education is going to be such a deciding factor in people like me who are definitely considering switching their vote away from Labour.

And what an irony that an Eton-led cabinet seems to understand aspiration so much better than the Labour party. North London liberals like me are expected to toe the line that Tory education policy must be inherently bad. The fact that those making Conservative education policy also appear to have plenty of state education credentials between them is another inconvenient truth.

The party line on politics has infected everything. When I told one of the parents at our school that we were tutoring our 10-year-old so he could sit the 11-plus grammar exams, she became decidedly icy. (I can, apparently, move to the street next to the best school, but home tutoring is too much like private education for some.) So why are we considering grammar school? I went to one of London’s best known comprehensive schools, Camden, in the 1970s and, although I learnt oodles of confidence and made enviable networks that have sustained me in my career ever since, I received a pretty lousy academic education. (I have no basic knowledge of geography, history or science whatsoever and got two average A-levels and failed a third.) Our eldest is academic. He’s a perfectly normal kid who could watch television for hours, and often does, but he can also be stopped in his tracks by an interesting fact and, although aged 10, writes creatively like a 15-year-old.

After the grammar school open day, when we had spent two hours being shown the labs, met the pupils and seen the eye-watering library, he said to me earnestly: “Does it make me a toff, Mum, but I really, really want to go to this school.” Well yes, apparently, it does.

But do I feel confident that the local comprehensive would nurture his interest as he hits the stormy years of adolescence? A mother with three teenage sons and one daughter there told me that although the atmosphere is lovely and all the kids like it, “the truth is the girls get down to work more easily and none of the boys really apply themselves”.

We will apply for both schools, although deep down I think I know that I don’t want to risk a “good enough” comprehensive, even if it means incurring the wrath of my fellow liberals.

Of course state education can be perfectly fine and I have no explanation why one child may thrive better in the same environment than another. Of course we should be providing opportunities for all our children and the ideal is a local community-based school system where the standard is high regardless of whether you live in a council flat or a mansion.

Let’s stop ironing out the imperfections in the system with mob bitchiness, as it brings the bullying right out of the playground and into the home. Bromley parents who are outpriced by the recession and who now have to uproot their kids and find cheaper educational alternatives should get our sympathy, not our contempt. The implication is that they have transgressed in some way by wanting to better their children’s chances in the first place. This is the politics of envy, not of education.

Julia Hobsbawm runs the media firm Editorial Intelligence and is the author of The See-Saw: 100 Ideas for Work-Life Balance

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