A CLANGING dissonance can be heard whenever the high priests of the right and their acolytes gather to discuss ideas about competition and opportunity. These are two of the economic pillars upon which all prosperity is built. To strangle competition or to thwart it with state interference like high taxes and workplace legislation risks stunting growth and driving away wealth-creators and investment. The opportunity to make money and create affluence is always reduced when you are required to pay heed to the concerns of the little people.

It’s galling to be made to pay a state-imposed minimum wage; invest in health and safety and donate your profits to maintain the transport, health and education systems with which happily you no longer need trouble yourself. Let the markets be free from all artificial intervention so that they can set their own prices. Only in this way can the best come to the fore and the dross fall quickly away. And once that order has safely been established then perhaps we can afford to be compassionate and to give freely of a portion of our riches in tax-efficient endowments.

The distorted notes are audible though, when the Tories come to discuss our education and health systems. In these areas, curiously, there can be no room for ideas of fair competition and opportunity. Rather, every sinew must be strained to ensure that there is no fairness and precious little competition. Artificial constraints and protections, so abhorrent to their ideas of allowing the economy to spread its wings, are nonetheless welcomed in their idea of what a successful education system ought to look like. Thus, every artifice is used to diminish the chance of the wrong sort of people controlling the levers of the nation’s destiny and its means of direction. From the outset the dice must be loaded in their favour. For what is the purpose of belonging to the elite if you fling your doors wide to any passing clever-clogs of questionable lineage? Restrictive practices in the workplace reduce the ability to amass fortunes but in our education system they can be applied assiduously to protect them.

Their favoured instrument in maintaining this gerrymandering of influence is the UK’s private schools network. These exist for no other reason than to maintain the hegemony of as few people as possible. It’s amusing to hear Ruth Davidson purport to abhor the divisiveness of Scottish nationalism when she and the party she represents are committed to maintaining a system which sews division into the fabric of our culture and politics. After all, there are bountiful dividends to be gained. These are all evident in the latest report of the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission. Their Elitist Britain report showed that we live in an “increasingly divided” society where the most influential positions are five times more likely to be occupied by someone from a fee-paying school than the general population.

The study found that while only seven per cent of the population attended a private school, almost 40 per cent of them secured the most powerful positions in the country. Two thirds of top judges in England and Wales were privately educated, a figure that is replicated in Scotland. The current UK cabinet possesses, at a rate of two in five, a grossly disproportionate number of ministers who attended these facilities.

In all spheres of British life the writ of our privately-educated elite is utterly dominant: top civil servants; the Lords; the army; powerful public bodies and our most influential journalists. Britain is a country seemingly content to maintain a state of “persistent inequality” with power resting within a “narrow section of the population”. Thus, a perverse strain of cultural consanguinity occurs. Certainly, some very gifted and able people come though these schools but they process a high number of footless dilettantes too. In a wide terrain the influence of such aristocratic losers reduces to nothing but in a confined space where the big decisions regarding war, finance and crime are made they cause irreparable damage to our national interest. This has hurt Britain grievously down through the centuries from the Charge of the Light Brigade; the catastrophic appeasement of Adolf Hitler; the Suez Crisis; the wars waged in the Middle East on lies; the 2008 financial crisis, right down to the present day and the folly of Brexit.

Five years ago, the Government’s adviser on social mobility, Alan Milburn said: "The shocking lack of social mobility is entrenched in British society. There is a glass ceiling in British society – and more and more people are hitting it. Whether it is law or medicine or journalism or politics, the upper echelons of Britain are dominated by a social elite. The data is so stark, the story so consistent, that it has all the hallmarks of social engineering.

“Economic recovery is unlikely to halt the trend of the last decade, where the top part of society prospers and the bottom part stagnates. A recovery that sees national wealth rise might be an economic success but if earnings fall it will be a social failure.” This is where we are right now.

The acquiescence of those who would self-identify as moderates are just as culpable. They seek well-mannered and well-behaved solutions which allow them to appear reasonable but which will never be a threat to their own gilded lifestyles; their non-executiveships; their quangos: them and their think-tank complacency. They are trouser-press philanthropists, the useful idiots of the elites whose hems they are permitted occasionally to touch.

France has also come to acknowledge the social damage wreaked by artificial elitism. This week the country’s most celebrated university for politics and administration announced it’s to abolish its entrance exam as it seeks to dilute the influence of the establishment in France. This follows President Macron’s decision to close the Ecole National d’Administration, the elitist finishing school for the country’s top civil servants.

This week too Scotland also ventured a modest step forward in curbing the unfair advantage of those who already wield most of it. The Barclay Review into non-domestic rates, as expected, recommended removing the eligibility of private schools for charity tax relief. In the short term this will raise the modest sum of around £5million a year for the Scottish Government. In the long-term though, nothing much will change until these schools and their pernicious influence cease to exist.