HARRIET Harman, former pupil of premier academy St Paul’s School and niece of the Countess of Longford, is introducing a new Equality Bill – and nobody laughs.

Under her proposals, public bodies will have to show they are promoting equality. It sounds like something out of a social satire by George Orwell. For it is impossible to promote equality, since inequalities are so numerous and deeply embedded.

I have always thought Thomas Jefferson’s words which open the US Declaration of Independence to be a particularly ripe piece of hokum: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal…”. Nowadays, we must change “men” to “people”.

All the same, people are not created equal.

Some are tall, others are short. Very early on in our lives, we reveal different capacities and talents: one is a whizz at arithmetic while another can only count on his fingers. Social background seems not to be the determining factor. The bloke who is bad at maths might be from a rich family, while there are plenty of good mathematicians from poor homes.

The promotion of equality is socialist dogma, social engineering, the sort of thing lampooned by TS Eliot when he wrote of “Men dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good”. All efforts to promote equality bring more inequality because such programmes always include creating institutions which are themselves incoherent.

For example, comprehensive schools don’t work because it is insane to try to teach together children whose abilities are so different.

Moreover, comprehensives do more damage to children from poor backgrounds than to those from the middle classes – because middle class kids with strong parental support will tend to survive and prosper in a comprehensive whereas bright children from poor homes are held back by the playground culture of “it’s not cool to be clever”.

We have all known this for ages, but the likes of Ms Harman and the posh left-wing ideologues who run the Labour Party are not allowed by their class prejudices to admit it.

Congratulations, then, to US First Lady Michelle Obama when recently she told a group of girls: “It’s cool to be smart.” Now, Tshirts bearing this slogan are all the rage.

Mrs Obama recalled her own childhood experiences of intimidation by her black fellow pupils because she wanted to learn and get on. She said: “They taunted me for talking like a white girl.” Such peer group bullying of aspirational working class children is endemic in the comprehensive system.

We cannot promote equality, but we can and should promote equality of opportunity.

In education, this means providing discipline and order in schools and creating many types of classes to nurture the very different talents and aptitudes of our children.

One proven method of achieving this is through the grammar schools, which is why the Left despises them.

The left-wing dogmas which provoke class war by social engineering and the politics of envy have been long discredited – not by rival social theories, but over many decades by practical experience. Forty years of comprehensive education. And the result? Even on the Government’s own admission, 43 per cent of our children now leave school, after 11 years of compulsory education, unable to read, write and count adequately.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.