THERE could hardly be a more poignant vignette of Britain today than the hidden truths revealed by the HSBC Swiss bank.

Five years after this colossal tax evasion and avoidance scam was known to the British authorities, there has been one prosecution.

At the same time, in just one of those five years (2013), no less than 1,046,398 sanctions — deprivation of all income for weeks or months on end — were imposed on unemployed people claiming jobseeker’s allowance, often for trivial or even incorrect reasons.

Also in that year nearly 200,000 people were prosecuted because they didn’t have a TV licence.

The culture of rewards and punishments in Britain today is

based unambiguously on the ideology of class power dominated as never before by a small clique with overwhelming control of wealth and power.

It was coincidental, but deeply meaningful, that at the same time that news of the HSBC Swiss scandal broke, the Tories held their Black and White Ball to raise funds for the party.

More than 500 extraordinarily rich Tory donors took part in a pricey bash at the Grosvenor House hotel in central London, forking out £15,000 a head for dinner, though that’s a tiny addendum to the vast sums that these plutocrats have already, and will continue to, cascade into Tory party coffers before May 7.

The wealth of last year’s guests added up to £22 billion. It was probably more this year, though the Tories imposed a news lockdown to prevent the rest of us finding out.

For the rich scroungers the rewards are phenomenal and the risks negligible.

Even if they’re caught, which must be one chance in hundreds of thousands, there’s no naming or shaming, let alone the indignity of prosecutions.

Even if the worst comes to the worst, HMRC only demands the tax owed plus interest, plus a 10 per cent rap across the knuckles, not a penalty of five times the tax owed or — perish the thought — confiscation.

If the ultra-rich use top lawyers and accountants to resist, as unquestionably they do, the matter is often resolved by a negotiated “agreement,” and no further action is taken.

Even the Financial Times recently argued that “no-one who commits a crime should be able to bargain for a pardon.” It’s a thoroughly bad culture. Suppose a burglar caught red-handed with the swag bargained to give back some or all of it and was then allowed to walk away free. It would create a furore.

Prosecutions are essential to puncture this complacency for the super-rich.

That would cast a chill over other would-be offenders which would be more effective than all the money raised at present.

Add in two other ingredients — an incentive for whistleblowers by allowing them to keep, say, 30 per cent of the money their revelations raise, plus an office of tax responsibility to keep a public and transparent check on government revenues matching the Office for Budget Responsibility checking on government expenditure — and the ideology of class power would take a decisive hit.

Osborne isn't working

GEORGE OSBORNE boasts interminably about success with his “long-term economic plan,” but even the slightest scrutiny of the evidence shows that his claims don’t remotely stand up. Labour should be eating him alive.

After the 6-7 per cent collapse of output brought about by the financial crisis, output per head has grown by less than 2 per cent from 2010-13, whereas in the recovery from two previous recessions during 1981-4 and 1992-5 growth was over 8 per cent.

That difference between those 2 per cent and 8 per cent figures, largely caused by Osborne’s cuts, means that his austerity policies have cost Britain conservatively at least £100 billion in lost production — equal to a loss of £1,500 for each adult and child in the country. That is a monumental failure of policy.

Osborne’s failure over the deficit is equally dire.

He promised in May 2010 that the deficit would be reduced to £37bn by the end of the fiscal year 2014-5 next month.

It is actually about £97bn — more that two-and-a-half times what he predicted.

Yet he has the chutzpah to keep saying he has already cut the deficit by half, from its peak of £150bn in 2010 to £97bn now — a cut of less than 36 per cent.

Even that ignores two crucial factors. One is that most of that deficit reduction has happened despite his policies, not because of them, since the great majority of the reduction was due to the expansionary economic policies put in train by Alisdair Darling in his last two Budgets in 2009-10.

The other factor is that the rate of annual reduction of the deficit has markedly slowed and is now occurring at a glacial pace.

After the financial crash there was a serious shortage of demand, but Osborne’s austerity policies, instead of easing it, severely aggravated it.

Despite the fact that Osborne’s policies were the opposite of what was needed, he has had the luck of the devil through measures being applied from four other sources which have compensated for his own folly.

First, £375bn was inserted into the economy through successive waves of quantitative easing.

Then interest rates were lowered to virtually zero — 0.5 per cent for the last six years, the lowest by far for the whole 320 years of the Bank of England’s existence.

Then because of the gross mis-selling of pensions and other financial products the banks were forced to disgorge £23bn in compensation to their consumers for their misdeeds.

And finally, just in the nick of electoral time, the world price of crude has halved over the last 10 months, bringing inflation down to 0.3 per cent and giving people for the first time in six years a marginal rise in incomes over prices.

Then Osborne has the shameless gall to claim that this was all part of his long-term economic plan.

However, what is part of the direct consequences of his own folly is that the trade deficit on manufactured goods is now running at nearly £120bn a year, productivity which is crucial to any sustainable rise in incomes is firmly stuck on the floor, private business investment is still distinctly sticky, household borrowing is now over £2 trillion and still heading north and unemployment is still nearly two million. All part of your long-term economic plan, George?

Michael Meacher is Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton. For more of his writing visit www.michaelmeacher.info/weblog.