British politics have seen many intriguing subplots in recent years, none more striking than the terrifying mediocrity of our establishment. Consider the facts: most commentators have been fantastically wrong about every major political event; we could end up with three prime ministers in the space of three years; and nobody thought it might be a good idea to put a plan in place in the event of Britain voting to leave the EU. And these are just the first things that spring to mind.

Sure, Britain isn’t uniquely awful in this regard – Emmanuel Macron, France’s robot prince, is also plummeting in the polls, for example – but it is worth asking why our nation has been cursed with such incompetent rulers, and what the hell can be done about it.

My suspicion is that a major part of the problem is that so many members of our ruling elite have been picked from a tiny class of privileged individuals who are estranged from the rest of the population. As Laura Pidcock, one of the few working-class MPs, recently said of Westminster: “There are people here who are multimillionaires … There are people who have spent their whole lives being primed for this. I mean people who are just born into a system of ruling over others.”

Pidcock’s observations are borne out by statistics: despite just 7% of the population attending private school, they make up nearly one-third of MPs. This is supposed to be seen as a good thing, because it’s down from nearly half in 1979. In the judiciary, the situation is even worse, with around three-quarters of top judges having gone to private school. In journalism, things are going backwards, with more journalists now coming from private schools than in 1987 (51% compared to 49%). This is what sociologists call “elite self-reproduction” – the practice of privileged individuals ensuring that privilege is passed on to their children using social infrastructure.

So here’s a solution: instead of collectively rolling our eyes every time a new report on these statistics comes out, let’s introduce quotas. If 7% of the population goes to private school, then it seems only fair that 7% of Britain’s elite jobs should go to privately educated individuals. This would include chief executives, barristers, journalists, judges, medical professionals and MPs. The rest of these jobs should be divided between comprehensive and grammar school alumni in a ratio that reflects the numbers educated in each. Grants to the odd lucky individual don’t seem to be helping to address this national shame, nor do lashings and lashings of middle-class guilt. It’s time for radical action.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that private schools are expensive because the education is so spectacular that we can’t afford not to give the best jobs to their alumni. But if that’s what you think, I’d suggest you don’t understand what private schools are for. In 2013, the writer Adam Ramsay – an alumnus of Scotland’s “poshest” boarding school – wrote about his experiences. The piece is a glimpse into an unfamiliar world and worth reading in its entirety, but here’s the part that stands out: “It is not because you want your child to get top grades that you send them to live for five years at a British public school. There are much easier and cheaper ways to achieve that … There is a bizarre belief held by many that success in Britain correlates to intelligence and hard work. This is a very middle-class concept. What the upper class understands is that success stems from two things: confidence – or, at least, the appearance of confidence – and community. And they are the purpose of public school.”

In a blog for the London School of Economics, academics Abigail McKnight and Richard V Reeves make related points, albeit less polemically. They use a term called “the glass floor”, which describes how children from affluent backgrounds are protected from sliding down the class system. They argue that “children from better-off families are effectively able to hoard the best opportunities in the labour market”, in part because they have “more social and emotional skills” and “a greater chance of attending a grammar or private fee-paying school”.

At its worst, this system is nothing more than a racket to keep the wealthy at the top, and recent political goings on in Britain are an indication of how damaging it has been to the country’s social fabric. In fact, a 2015 study by Cambridge University found that state school pupils perform better at university than their privately educated counterparts. If there’s no evidence to show privately educated students are more academically gifted, we need to ask why so much state school talent is absent from the most important roles that shape our society.

Instead of favouring candidates for top jobs from just 7% of people, quotas would widen the applicant pool to include everyone, and that would mean those who take up these jobs would not just be reflective of the nation as a whole but of a higher calibre too. Given that 93% is such a massive proportion of the population, it’s unlikely we’ll be in the situation where there’s a shortage of judges or journalists. In fact quotas of a sort are already used by the Labour party in the form of all-women shortlists, and research suggests women selected in this way tend to be more experienced than Conservative MPs, male or female. Now there are record numbers of female MPs, who comprise 45% of the overall parliamentary Labour party.

Quotas might seem like a desperate measure, but these are desperate times. We can’t afford to be ruled by a class of people who allow us to be taken out of the EU without making a plan because they regard it as “the hard shit”. We can’t have any more general elections where the people who are paid for their insight have to admit they didn’t know what they were talking about. It’s time to do something drastic to address this situation. And if you’re worried about hundreds of state-educated people suddenly taking up elite roles, just ask yourself: can they really do a worse job than the people in charge now?

• Ellie Mae O’Hagan is a freelance journalist