"Harriet Harman's declaration of class warfare will bring national ruin," stormed the Daily Mail, while The Telegraph fumed over "an act of social engineering that even the Soviet Union would have regarded as ambitious".
The object of the papers' scorn was a paragraph in the government's new white paper on social mobility, - included reportedly at Harman's insistence - saying ministers would consider legislating to give public sector agencies a duty to tackle socio-economic disadvantage.
According to research for the Sutton Trust, the number of young people from the poorest fifth of the population acquiring degrees saw little change from 1993 to 2002. In contrast, for young people from the highest 20 per cent of families, the figure has risen from 37 per cent to 44 per cent over the same period.
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