Nothing better illustrates how out of touch Britain’s New Elite are with the rest of us than the Gary Lineker furore

interests of big business ahead of the national community.

They are less concerned about the notion of national borders than most of us, which explains their strong desire for a much softer approach towards the small boats.

On many of these issues, the Left-leaning New Elite are often in a galaxy of their own, with views — or ‘values’ — that are simply not shared by much of the rest of the country.

And what really sets them apart from the old Right-leaning elite is their open scepticism about the things that have long held Britain together — our remarkable history, and our very distinctive national culture, traditions and ways of life.

Whereas members of the old elite derived their sense of status by projecting their wealth and inherited family connections, the New Elite derives its self-worth from what it perceives to be moral righteousness over others, whether in the present day or in the past — insisting wrongly, for instance, that Britain is institutionally racist or that the Empire was universally evil.

Unlike a large swathe of Britain, the New Elite disparages its country and feels less attached than others to our shared national identity. Its members are less likely to see Britishness as an important part of who they are, and more likely to see it as a source of shame and embarrassment.

So there is a yawning gap between the values of the New Elite and the majority. But what about the ‘voice’ — namely, do the majority of people any longer feel they have a voice that is heard and respected in our politics and culture?

Gary Lineker, in that tweet supporting the people who arrive here on boats across the Channel, lamented the fact that these ‘poor souls’ have ‘no voice’. But my contention is that it is the majority of Britons who now have no voice.

Over the past half-century, members of the new middle-class graduate elite have not only reshaped Westminster and much of the prevailing culture around their strongly liberal values. They have also, as I say, taken over almost all of the most important and influential institutions, where their voice now booms out to the rest of the country through a megaphone while the voice of others is silenced.

Just look around. The House of Commons, the civil service, the creative industries, the cultural institutions, the BBC and a large swathe of the media, the charities and the NGOs, the public bodies, and the universities, are all now dominated by an elite graduate class who talk a great deal about diversity but are themselves not diverse at all.

They went to the same schools, the same universities, share the same values and a view that the voice of people who come from different backgrounds, who hold different views, should either be silenced or stigmatised as unacceptable, as an underclass of racists, gammons, Karens and bigots.

Today, a large majority of workers and people who do not belong to the graduate class feel that ‘people like me have no say in politics’. And they are right to feel this way.

The blunt reality in Britain today is that if you come from the working class, have not graduated from one of the elite Oxbridge or Russell Group universities, and hold a more traditionalist set of values, then you have been pushed out of the national conversation about who we are as a country.

Look at the Labour Party, for goodness sake, the ‘party of the working class’. Whereas Labour used to ensure there was a wide range of voices in our politics, ever since the era of Neil Kinnock the number of Labour MPs who have previously held a working-class job has completely collapsed, from 64 to just seven today. Like one of those strange creatures on a David Attenborough documentary, the working-class MP has become an endangered species.

Remarkably, Labour MPs are now more likely than Conservative ones to belong to the graduate class and are a staggering 20 times more likely than the average voter to have a degree from either Oxford or Cambridge.

And when it comes to their professional ‘ experience’, the largest single group of MPs in Westminster today are political careerists — people who have only ever worked in politics.

We have entered, in other words, a ‘diploma democracy’, in which the entire political system has been skewed around the graduate minority at the expense of the forgotten non-graduate majority.

Understandably, this has left millions of voters with a palpable sense they have no voice at all. When people look at the adverts on television, the museums, the latest book releases, the BBC home- page, the newspaper columns, they often feel they are living in a foreign country, a world that is simply no longer interested in listening to, or hearing from, people like them.

Just look at the adverts on television at the moment — do they look like a realistic portrayal of Britain to you? Or do they reflect the world of the New Elite?

As polling shows, around half of viewers believe that ethnic minority and LGBT communities are over-represented on television.

And now this profound sense that people’s values and their voice are being written out of the story, is being compounded by something else — how today’s elite now think that only certain groups in Western societies have virtue, while others are morally inferior and to be stripped of social status.

Let’s be clear. Increasingly, the New Elite is reshaping British society around an entirely new hierarchy. At the top, with the most status, esteem and recognition are the elite graduates and racial, sexual, and gender minorities, who score points simply because of their minority identity.

At the bottom are the white working class, straight men, nongraduates, and those who cling to

The drumbeat of rebellion will only grow

People sense their values are being ignored

more traditionalist views, such as supporting Brexit.

One powerful symbol of this is how white working class kids have been treated. While elite universities have fallen over themselves to recruit minority ethnic children, their white counterparts have been left behind.

The New Elite, of course, denies this is happening, but recently the University of Cambridge was revealed to have initially advertised a programme for under-privileged students only to those from minority ethnic backgrounds, while failing to mention their white counterparts.

Another symbol is how the New Elite has shovelled money into expanding the universities while failing, for much of the past 30 years, to invest seriously in further education and technical colleges. Once again, if you belong to the wrong group you are simply not taken seriously, not shown respect.

People are not idiots. Up and down the country, many of them can now keenly sense that their values, their voice and their sense of virtue are being undermined, if not ignored.

This is why, over the past decade, so many have been rebelling.

And unless the New Elite does a better job of listening to the forgotten millions — by ensuring their values are represented in the national conversation, by giving them a voice in the institutions, and by showing them as much respect as they show to the elite and minorities — then the cry of rebellion will be deafening. And the chance of successfully governing this country will disappear altogether.