John Major has discovered that "in every single sphere of British influence, the upper echelons of power in 2013 are held overwhelmingly by the privately educated or the affluent middle class."

Well, who knew? Clearly not the former Tory prime minister who must have failed to notice the privately educated and affluent middle class ministers clustered around his Cabinet table.

"To me, from my background, I find that truly shocking," he says in a parodic imitation of police commander Louis Renault's faux shock in the film classic Casablanca at discovering that gambling has been taking place in an unlicensed club - shortly before collecting his winnings.

It might seem admirable, if belated, that Major should realise that Britain is a class-divided society in which a tiny wealthy elite dominates everything.

But for this self-proclaimed Brixton boy the blame for rigid social division lies not with the landed aristocracy and industrial capital that united to produce a self-perpetuating ruling class.

The fault lies with the 1997-2010 Labour government and its legacy of a "Victorian divide between stagnation and aspiration."

The Morning Star was never an apologist for new Labour, but it seems a little harsh to blame it for centuries-old entrenched privilege.

It wasn't Labour that ensured that the top ranks of the Cabinet, Civil Service, the military, the established church, the judiciary, the BBC, the Fleet Street journalistic elite, City boardrooms and other major institutions are dominated by the privately educated 7 per cent of the population.

Major points the finger at Labour, but he must know that even now his own Tory Party still takes over half its MPs from private schools.

If there is less likelihood of people from his petty bourgeois background - his father was a small businessman - succeeding to the extent that he did, he should look closer to home.

One of his achievements when chairing the Lambeth council housing committee was the scale of council house construction carried through.

Tories actually competed with Labour in the 1960s over who could build the highest number of homes at affordable rents to reduce homelessness and overcrowding.

When Margaret Thatcher took over in 1979, her governments, dominated by wealthy, public school-educated ministers, stopped financing local authority housing and enforced the sale of existing stocks.

There were fortunes to be made by property speculators as demand for homes soared in the private sector, with its inevitable corollary of rising homelessness.

In sneereing that there was no such thing as society, Thatcher encapsulated the selfish, greedy, dog-eat-dog philosophy that makes sense to those who already hold the best cards while sidelining those of modest means.

Some commentators suggest that Major is playing a devious role in appearing to attack Labour while actually targeting his own side, believing that the public may be put off by a plethora of old Etonians in a Cabinet boasting two-thirds of multimillionaires.

If that's the kind of thing that bothers him, he's clearly in the wrong party. The Tory Party is based on the self-interest of a tiny elite.

Labour is supposed to represent - and draw its MPs from - the other side, but new Labour did far too little to redress society's inbuilt injustices.

If Labour or Major is to support effective action, a wealth tax and fairer income taxation come to mind, to say nothing of abolition of the caste-ridden public school system.