The rich people telling A-level students "don& #39;t worry about your grades, just stand on your own two feet" would starve to death if they were left alone in a house with a well-stocked kitchen.

This is what they mean by "standing on your own two feet"

It was the constant theme of Tory MPs in the 1980s and 1990s: people had to "live in the real world" and "pull themselves up by their bootstraps".
Yet half of them had never been outside a quadrangle:
Eton>Oxbridge>the Bar>Parliament

As a rule, the bigger the golden pedestal on which rich people were born, the more they instruct poorer people to be self-reliant. https://www.monbiot.com/2011/11/07/the-self-attribution-fallacy/">https://www.monbiot.com/2011/11/0...

And let& #39;s not forget this little episode. From a man who lives on his wife& #39;s estate, that takes £150,000 in state benefits (farm subsidies) https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/01/iain-duncan-smith-live-benefits">https://www.theguardian.com/politics/...