SOCIAL Mobility and Child Poverty Commission chair Alan Milburn says employers should "wake up and smell the coffee" after a report found that elite jobs are more likely to go to members of the elite.

Milburn should take his own advice. So 70 per cent of job offers at 13 top law, accountancy and "financial services" firms went to people who went to fee-paying and selective schools?

What a surprise. Why does the former Labour minister think rich people pay for their children to attend such schools?

They would hardly do so if this investment, totally hundreds of thousands of pounds per child at the most expensive schools, left their offspring with the same lousy job prospects as everybody else.

Top bosses ought to ensure their recruitment practices are "genuinely meroticratic," Milburn believes.

In the case of the City spivs whose reckless gambling and anti-social profiteering now comprises the most glamorous wing of the "financial services" sector, it's hard to see why they should bother.

The pattern both in the City and in big companies more widely is to pay astronomical sums to top management regardless of whether the firm is making or losing money.

Not even the bankers' crash of 2008, which derailed the economy of the whole capitalist world, has had any impact on how much these free loaders are allowed to stuff into their boots.

No doubt the "poshness tests" Milburn describes do exist in many sectors. And it is the task of the left to fight prejudice and discrimination wherever we encounter it.

But we must be clear. There is no such thing as "meritocratic capitalism." Like Ed Miliband's doomed flirtation with "responsible capitalism," it is a contradiction in terms. 

Capitalism is a system where those who own and control the means of production enjoy the wealth created by working people.

Our ruling elite is by its nature a parasite. It lives off our labour and at our expense.

And it is a class, defined by its ownership of the means of production. It will perpetuate itself and defend its privileges.

Even if the odd working-class kid "makes it" into a cushy top job it will not benefit the working class as a whole one scrap.

Our rights - to weekends, to paid holidays and sick leave, to pensions - have been won by working people organising in trade unions.

Our society's greatest achievements, from the National Health Service to comprehensive education available to all, are the result of working-class political power exercised through the party the trade unions founded, Labour, and the wider labour movement.

This is why Milburn is on to a red herring. If he wants better prospects for people from less privileged backgrounds, he should take up the call of this week's trades councils conference for a serious debate on working-class political representation.

That cause took a step forward yesterday when the outstanding socialist and champion of our class Jeremy Corbyn got onto the Labour leadership ballot paper.

Corbyn will ensure that the case for socialism gets a hearing in the leadership debate and will hopefully remind certain MPs that their party was founded to be the voice of the working class and will have no reason to exist if it cannot perform that role. 

But it will not be enough simply to cheer him on. Starting with this Saturday's vital People's Assembly marches against austerity in London, Glasgow and Cardiff, it's time to crank up the volume.

Millions are looking for an alternative. Let's make our voices heard.