The United Kingdom is a few months away from crashing out of the European Union, the main opposition party is engaged in political fratricide and the country faces the highest risk of recession since 2007. Yet 160,000 Conservative party members will land us, almost certainly, with yet another Etonian prime minister, the 20th in our history. Whether the UK ends up being led by Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt, one thing is certain: the winner will be the private school sector.

For all the populist triumphs, the elite are blossoming in this anti-elitist era. Only 7% of the general population have a private education lavished upon them. Yet last month a survey by the Sutton Trust revealed that people in the upper echelons of power were five times more likely to have been privately educated than the general population. It is not just the professions. Even the England cricket team is shown increasingly to be the preserve of those who went to private schools.

Play Video 7:03 Should we abolish private schools? – video

Access to such an education is available to wealthy households, and only those with incomes above £120,000 send children in appreciable numbers to private schools. This walling-off of one section of society from another is damaging. The disparity in funding also creates unequal opportunities. In Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem, by Francis Green and David Kynaston, the authors calculate that private schools spend about three times as much per pupil as the state does. When Mr Johnson makes a commitment to ensure fair funding across schools in England, he doesn’t mean levelling the state sector upwards to private school standards so that ordinary students can fairly compete with their richer peers in exams, for access to high-status universities and ultimately similarly attain fortunes in their work lives that reflect their abilities, not their parents’ income.

There’s no sign that Mr Johnson seeks to replicate the uplift in revenue seen in the private sector for state schools. Over the past 10 years in the state sector there have been 8% cuts in per-pupil school spending, while private school fees have risen by 49% to an average of £14,289 per student in 2018, about half the median annual income in the UK for full-time workers. With all this cash sloshing around there ought to be little surprise when private schools hold austerity days and serve standard school fare in their canteens, forgoing without irony a slow-baked Moroccan lamb with broad beans, prunes and preserved lemon lunch. Or why in the 236 private schools in London, 59 have theatres – replete with cutting-edge technology and modern design – compared with the West End’s 42 certainly more famous and probably more shabby venues. In Labour there are signs that the issue is being revived with an attempt to harden up the unambitious current policy of putting VAT on private school fees. It’s a far cry from when Neil Kinnock, as Labour’s education spokesman, committed the party in 1980 to eliminate private schools within a decade.

Michael Gove, who served as education secretary under David Cameron, has suggested a desire to abolish private schools “by stealth”. There is good reason to ask why we permit a section of rich people to secede, in educational terms, from the rest of the nation. What is being purchased is social privilege. It cannot be right that the freedom to spend one’s money to buy a head start in life at the expense of everyone else prevails when the widespread antisocial effects of such practices are so obvious. The temper of the times is to resolve economic and social injustice. Private schools cannot be exempted from that.

• This article was amended on 22 July 2019. An earlier version incorrectly said the Sutton Trust report “revealed that the upper echelons of power were five times more likely to be populated by the privately educated than by those who went to state schools”.