A "cosy club" of people educated at private schools and Oxbridge still dominates British politics, the judiciary and media and locks out talented people from more modest backgrounds, according to government advisers.
In a hard-hitting report, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission called for class to be given as much priority as gender and ethnicity in a "national mission" to break open an elite "formed on the playing fields of independent schools" and "finished in Oxbridge's dreaming spires".
Its research into the background of more than 4000 people who run Britain found that small elites are dramatically over-represented. Seventy-one per cent of senior judges, 62 per cent of senior armed forces officers, 55 per cent of Whitehall permanent secretaries, 50 per cent of House of Lords members and 36 per cent of the Cabinet were privately educated.
Labour accused Prime Minister David Cameron's Government of standing up for "a privileged few".
However, 22 per cent of Ed Miliband's Shadow Cabinet also went to private schools, three times as many as in the population as a whole.
