Much of the metropolitan education establishment thinks the selection debate is over. The real debate, they say, is how, and to what extent, you have selection at 11. The Tories favour selection. New Labour, while never formally disavowing the comprehensive principle, has fiercely defended the right of Britain’s 161 grammar schools to select. It set up a ballot system for abolishing grammars which the Bush family must have copied and imported to Florida for the presidential election.

New Labour is also creating specialist schools which may select 10 per cent of their intake by “aptitude”, not ability. Remember, in the 1950s, they tried to kid us that secondary moderns were not for failures - they were just “a different kind of school”? Eleven-year-olds today will no more fall for the lie that aptitude isn’t ability than my contemporaries fell for that lie.

New Labour is also creating city academies, in the full knowledge that these private-sector-run schools will find ways of selecting their intake, just as their predecessors, technology colleges, did. The favourite strategy was to take pupils from all ability bands, but select motivated pupils from each band.

We know - thanks to York University’s Professor David Jesson - that able children in comprehensives perform just as well as similar pupils in grammars, and the presence of selective schools in an area pulls down overall standards.

We also know the crippling sense of failure that afflicts children selected for what they perceive as a second-class education. Anyone who works in a secondary modern (sorry, a high school) will tell you that their first and hardest task is to restore pupils’ self-esteem.

We know too that high schools will be starved of funds, for when the Secretary of State says specialist schools will get more money, she means that their neighbours will get less.

So who on earth wants selection? A few parents want their children segregated from the poor. They feel confident that they are middle-class enough, and well-educated enough, to make sure their own children become successes. Some poorer person’s child will be the failure.

Big companies often want it, because they believe it will help them to pick out the brightest. The advantages to a computer firm of having an IT specialist school that selects those with an aptitude for IT, is obvious.

But what will happen to the rejected children? In the days of the 11-plus, the economy demanded a minority of educated people to do the brain work, and a mass of manual workers. The 11-plus was a simple way of dividing these groups at an early age, and of passing on our class system to the next generation. But at least there were jobs, of a sort, for those from secondary moderns. There aren’t any more. Children from non-selective schools - secondary moderns in all but name - will not even have menial jobs to go to.

Who will they be, these unemployed and unemployable people? They will be the sons and daughters of today’s poor, of course. When you select, you reject the poor. In comprehensives, nearly one in five children is poor enough to get free school meals. In grammar schools, it’s just over one in 50.

Even without selection, schools for the poor produce lower results. At schools where more than half the children qualify for free meals, fewer than one in four of the pupils gets five or more good GCSEs. As the percentage of free school meals goes down, the percentage getting five good GCSEs climbs.

So, just as we did under the 11-plus, Britain will spend the greatest part of its education budget educating children from comfortably-off families, who are thought to need more than those from poor families.

And this rigid, cruel, class-ridden, one-size-fits-all system is being sold to us on the basis of creating diversity. The Ministry of Truth is alive and well.

Francis Beckett is a freelance journalist and commentator.