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At midnight tonight, Parliament will be dissolved. After nearly three years, the job that more than four fifths of its members promised and were elected to do — honouring the result of the

2016 referendum — has still not been accomplished. Whether or not you are glad that Britain still belongs to the EU, this is hardly an impressive achievement. The Brexit Parliament did not

deliver Brexit. It will not be missed. Whoever wins the general election, the next Parliament will look rather different: certainly much younger, somewhat less masculine and more ethnically

diverse. But will it be any less dominated by the upper middle class that has always run the country? Yesterday’s election for the Speaker was revealing in one particular respect: all the

candidates were privately educated. It didn’t matter which party they came from. In fact the Labour ones were at least as privileged as the Tories. Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the new Speaker, is not

only a Labour MP, but the son of another one, now in the Lords. Appropriately enough, he was educated at Lords College in Bolton. The runner-up, Chris Bryant, is also a Labour MP. He went

to Cheltenham College. Both men went on to Oxford. Harriet Harman, the daughter of a Harley Street doctor, went to St Paul’s, the most elitist girls’ school in the land. And so it goes on.

None of this justifies Labour’s punitive policies towards fee-paying schools, which are based on pure class hatred. In the case of many MPs on the Left, as we have seen, there is the

familiar phenomenon of pulling up the ladder behind oneself in the name of “fairness”. But the answer cannot be to destroy the schools that educate the ruling class. That would merely

perpetuate the problem of class politics. Instead, the new intake of MPs should devote some thought to how we can elevate the rest of the country to the level of the best. Pure meritocracy

is impossible, even if it were desirable — and there are good reasons to think that it isn’t. In a brilliant essay for TheArticle last weekend, Jay Elwes discusses The Meritocracy Trap by

Daniel Markovits, a Yale law professor. The bottom line is that meritocracy, taken to the extremes that Markovits sees in the US, is toxic both for the elites and for the rest. And as Elwes

points out, “the politicians of the Left who want to dismantle the elite fail to grasp that they are implicated in its rise”. Britain may not mirror America in every respect, but the

Anglophone countries are in many ways more similar to each other than we are to Continental Europe — or indeed anywhere else. That is one underlying reason why a majority of Britons voted

for Brexit, although the elites did not. We yearn to temper our meritocratic instincts with other criteria, but we end up with the same result. As soon as a new group achieves success, it

uses its wealth to buy its way into the top tier. None of this would matter if the country as a whole were happy with the way in which we have been governed. But there is plenty of evidence

that the public is deeply distrustful of the establishment. Indeed, many of us suspect our masters of being callous, complacent and corrupt. It is no use trying to remove this stigma with

empty words and gesture politics. The nation has grown cynical about a self-satisfied and entitled oligarchy that ignores the needs and even the democratic mandates of the majority. However

populist our politicians may have become, they have never been less popular. The new Parliament has an opportunity to do something about this ugly perception. MPs across the spectrum should

roll up their sleeves and do something for those who aspire to better themselves. What we need is not the levelling down of vindictive egalitarianism, but the levelling up of an honest

attempt to create equality of opportunity. The country has already paid a price for regaining its national sovereignty. Now our leaders must show that they know how to make proper use of

that independence. The party that promises to build a fair and decent society in which individuals can flourish in freedom will triumph over those who offer nothing but class warfare and the

politics of envy.