Why, if you can't get a job and are five minutes late for a job interview or work programme do you get "sanctioned" and have all your benefit - for which you've contributed all though your working life via national insurance contributions - taken away for four weeks and left with no money at all, whereas if you cheat the state through elaborately artificial tax avoidance on an industrial scale - notoriously like Barclays Capital or indeed any big bank - you're not bankrupted, not disqualified from continuing in the finance sector you've disgraced, and not sent to prison?

Why, to take a recent case reported in the Manchester Evening News, if you have progressive retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative incurable disorder, and are registered blind are you then told by Atos that you must go back to work or lose benefit, whereas if Serco charges the state - taxpayers - millions of pounds for false electronic tagging of prisoners that never took place you suffer no penalty are told a few months later that you can continue to bid for government work?

Bob Diamond, the disgraced former chief executive of Barclays, presided over the rigging of the Libor inter-bank market, as did at least another dozen big banks, which adversely affected interest rates for £220 trillion in contracts worldwide, was never put on trial and is now reported to be seeking a fortune in new deals in Africa.

Neither Fred Goodwin nor any of the leading executives of all the big banks that crashed the world economy into the longest recession for a century through a mixture of greed, incompetence and negligence has ever been prosecuted or jailed.

Ernst & Young and its former auditor have never been punished after being found guilty by the Financial Reporting Council, the industry's independent regulator, for failing to make known the liquidity and cash flow problems of Farepak, the Christmas hamper savings club that collapsed in 2006, which led to thousands of members of the public suffering losses.

In response to the discovery by grace of Edward Snowden of the limitless electronic surveillance of citizens even the US has set up a review board to examine the National Security Agency's data-mining activities.

The British government has done nothing.

There has been no investigation of who originally authorised this mass surveillance state, no checks have been placed or are currently proposed to restrict GCHQ's limitless intrusion into the privacy of ordinary people and no radical reform as is obviously needed of the laughably inadequate intelligence and security committee appointed by the PM to investigate his own investigatory agencies.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes - especially since the government's denuding of the public sector has left realms of wrongdoing effectively unregulated?

A serious example took place in the last week or two before Christmas, always a good time to bury bad news.

The government has repeatedly exploited its prerogative to prevent the serious misdeeds of several sections of the established powers-that-be being brought to light and appropriate penalties imposed.

The extremely serious issue of whether Britain was involved in rendition - covertly seizing a targeted person anywhere in the world and bundling them off to a prison, usually in the Middle East, where it was known they would be subject to severe interrogation under torture - was swept under the carpet by a government decision taken secretly within the bowels of Whitehall.

Among other cases this involved two opponents of former Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi being intercepted on their flights through the intervention of British agents, detained and flown off to be tortured in Gadaffi's dungeons.

The inquiry by Sir Peter Gibson was suspended because of possible charges against officials and the then foreign secretary.

The government then promised for more than three years that an independent judge-led inquiry would examine the allegations, but has now abruptly announced that the investigation will instead be handed to the intelligence and security committee, which is as good as saying the whole thing will be kicked into the long grass.

Gibson asked 27 searching questions about the whole affair, but now the answers, even if they're investigated at all, will very likely not be made public.

The committee's members are chosen by the PM, not independently by Parliament, and their hearings are almost always held in secret.

Moreover its reports are censored before publication - assuming they're published at all - in full consultation with the spooks on whom it is reporting.

So no chance at ever getting at the truth there.

What is so deplorable is not simply Britain's almost certain involvement together with the US in the scandalously illegal practice of rendition, but that the government can so easily block the truth coming out by the spooks' scheming, the connivance of Whitehall officials and the ministerial stroke of a pen.

Michael Meacher is Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton. Read his blog at www.michaelmeacher.info