THE Tories are fighting over token “one nation” policies. Even purely symbolic gestures on “social mobility” soon bump into the real values of the Tory Party — which are: helping the super-rich avoid tax, squeezing the poor and supporting the right to buy privilege for the sons and daughters of the wealthy.

At the end of May, Cabinet Office Minister Matt Hancock announced some voluntary measures the government wants big firms to use when hiring staff.

It proposed that companies look at, among other things, how many former public schoolboys and girls they hired.

Hancock said: “Social justice is at the heart of everything this one nation government is trying to achieve.”

Which would be a surprise to, say, those driven to foodbanks by arbitrary loss of benefits.

But Hancock wants to keep the Cameroonian light at least glowing by showing the Tories vaguely care about social mobility.

The proposal is completely voluntary, and only suggests firms should keep stats on educational background of recruitment, like they keep stats on race or sex of who gets hired. It’s a vague effort to not look like the totally nasty party.

But unfortunately, it is. Hancock’s mild measure led Tory Lord William Waldegrave, a former minister and Conservative grandee to threaten to storm out of the party.

Even asking how many public schoolboys get jobs is too much for Waldegrave — mostly because he left government to take up a number of jobs, including “provost” (boss) of Eton.

It’s hard to imagine Hancock (himself an ex-£4k-a-term public schoolboy) is really out to seriously curb career privileges of public schoolboys.

But Eton boss Waldegrave opposes anything that might even slightly change the Tories’ “old boy network” access to jobs.

Waldegrave threatened to tear up his party card if Hancock didn’t drop his minor reform.

Waldegrave denounced it as “social engineering.” Which is especially pathetic as public schools, with their weird rituals and costumes, are themselves so very clearly “social engineering,” expressly designed to engineer a place in the elite for kids whose parents are willing to pay the price.

So even the vaguest attempts to not be the nasty party come up against the entrenched nastiness of the party. In fact, Waldegrave personifies much that is wrong with the Conservatives.

As an aide to Thatcher, Waldegrave helped pioneer the poll tax, possibly the most regressive legislation of the post-war period.

Waldegrave also advised Thatcher to try a “Scottish experiment” with the poll tax and “use the Scots as a trail-blazer for the real thing.”

His old job — using the Scots as lab rats for his attacks on the poor.

His new jobs — ensuring privilege for Eton boys at £36k a year. They are sort of his yin and yang of unfairness.

But that isn’t all: Waldegrave is also chairman of Coutts, a bank whose ultra-rich clients include the Queen.

Waldegrave joined the Coutts board in December 2012. In December 2015 Coutts was fined $78 million by the US Department of Justice for helping clients avoid tax by using hidden offshore structures.

The tax avoidance happened while Waldegrave was on the Coutts board. US authorities give an example of how “between July 2011 and April 2014, Coutts assisted a US client in transferring $33m from an undeclared account held in the name of a Belize corporation to 11 other accounts at Coutts held in the names of nominee entities” — so hiding money from the US taxman.

Waldegrave, who defends the rights of public schoolboys to top jobs, also imposed the poll tax on the poor and runs a bank that helped the rich illegally escape taxes.

When the Tories make vague nods about fairness for all, they soon run into the reality that they are an intrinsically unfair instrument for the rich.

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ONE of Britain’s biggest “multi-academy trusts” (MATs) massages its own figures in a way that would, I hope, get any student of maths told off by teacher.

The Kemnal Academies Trust, which runs 41 schools, is one of the five biggest MATs.

Nicky Morgan backed off forcing all state schools to become academies run by these private trusts, but the Education Secretary is still trying to twist her academy schools “U-turn” into a “Z-turn” and continue forcing many more schools into the hands of MATs.

Morgan says handing schools to MATs will “increase numbers of outstanding and inspirational schools.”

But the annual report of the Kemnal Academies Trust — known as TKAT — shows how evidence for “improvement” is weak.

TKAT’s annual report, published in February, says 60 per cent of its schools are marked “good or outstanding” by Ofsted.

It’s a creative approach to numbers. Schools can get four marks from Ofsted: 1-Outstanding; 2-Good; 3-Requires improvement; and 4-Inadequate.

I read all the reports for TKAT schools on Ofsted’s website. Only one of the 36 available reports — Chichester High School for Girls — was actually marked “outstanding.” Twenty were graded “good.”

The claim about most of its schools being “good or outstanding” relies on using just one “outstanding” school to try to buff up the reputation of the 20 “good” schools. That’s pretty shifty maths.

Fourteen TKAT schools were actually graded “requires improvement” and one was marked “inadequate.”

So almost as many were “inadequate or requiring improvement” as “good or outstanding.”

TKAT certainly isn’t able to guarantee improvement. Its annual report admits: “Disappointingly for three academies we have seen a decline in their Ofsted grade since conversion to academy status.”

TKAT’s latest accounts show other features common among big MATs. It is a very large private organisation wholly dependent on £128m a year of public money.

It pays generous top salaries: chief executive Karen Roberts gets “£150-£155,000” a year, an increase of somewhere between 11 per cent and 19 per cent on last year.

TKAT also has a politically connected director: private equity millionaire Ian Armitage, who has given £25,000 a year to the Tories since 2014, became a TKAT director in 2015.