What Toynbee doesn't get

For those who haven’t leafed through a copy, or read the extracts in the Guardian this week, Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s new book is effectively an extended diatribe against the Unjust Rewards of those who, say, work in the City, or who went to Oxbridge universities. It’s a one-note attack – with scant room for subtleties – and Giles Coren mercilessly lampoons it in today’s Times. Here’s my favourite passage in the Coren piece, in which he takes on the book’s description of Oxford:

“Not only did the word ‘spires’ appear twice in the same short extract, but the lawns, bless them, were ‘manicured’. Except they’re not, Polly. They’re just mown. Same as everywhere else. You don’t have to be rich, or posh, or evil to mow the bloody lawn. They mow the lawn on council estates too. It’s you, Polly, and you, Dave, who are trying to present Britain as a cartoonish, divided society to suit your own arrogant, dim-witted, outdated Weltanschauung.”