Perhaps Keith (and others) might like to listen to the excellent Toby Young on the subject of 'meritocracy'.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08lgq9n
Like it or not, intelligence (i.e. IQ) is both largely inherited and also closely correlated with income. It would indeed be rather counter-intuitive if it were otherwise.
Putting it bluntly we are not all 'born equal' and even if poor children were adopted at birth and brought up in a stimulating environment the chances of them getting into Oxbridge is close to zero as they are mostly pre-programmed to be thicker than average.
It is absolutely disgusting that the Labour party is against one of the main reasons for social mobility in the sixties and the seventies. A cursory glance at place of secondary education of Prime Ministers and Ministers of this period will show just how important Grammar Schools were.
It's about time we started looking at schools being places of education rather than a laboratory for some utopian social engineering experiment.