Polly Toynbee laments how her privileged background left her without redemption…

“…to live a well-heeled life on the left is to live with inevitable hypocrisy and painful self-awareness, with good intentions always destined to fall short of ideals, social concern never enough, struggling to be good but inevitably never good enough. I hunted hard for any redeeming twig of a working-class branch of my family tree, without success. Confessing a background of privilege comes hard to the likes of us, who can claim no “merit”, no handy pulling-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps rugged path to our good professional jobs as writers, academics and teachers, set on our lucky way at a young age.”