This Thursday I have secured a debate on the floor of the house on the sanctioning of benefit recipients.

The details about the sheer injustice of the practice, its inappropriate targeting and its devastating impacts, all of which are horrendous, I shall spell out in full, but I will also be making another comparison.

Why is it that those jobseeker’s allowance recipients who are five minutes late for a job interview get deprived of their benefit (£71 a week) and hence their livelihood for four weeks for the first infringement — as it is called — of the rules, three months for the second, or three years for the third, while bankers or traders who have corruptly stolen hundreds of millions of pounds from the public suffer no punishment at all? There could not be a more extreme example of one law for the rich and another for the poor.

So why does this happen? It’s got nothing to do with morality or justice, just the power structure.

Hedge funds, financiers and private equity firms contributed more than a quarter of all the Tories’ private donations since the general election, so the perpetrators will never be personally punished, while those forced to rely on JSA — which they’ve earned by national income contributions through their working life — are demonised as “shirkers” and severely punished even for the most trivial of reasons.

The big US and European banks have so far been forced to pay out $100 billion in legal settlements since the financial crash, and the US Federal Reserve has recently found that the biggest banks could still face a further $151bn bill for operational risk procedures, repurchasing soured mortgage bonds and their handling of the falling value of the buildings they own.

These astronomic sums show not only the severity of the offences committed and the enormity of their impact on the wider community but also how the targeting of those individuals responsible has been displaced on to the institutions they work in — and hence also of course on to shareholders as well as taxpayers in reduced government receipts.

Yet even these very large fines have little impact on banks readily able to absorb such penalties. The “big six” US banks made profits of $76bn last year.

The fines don’t get to the heart of the problem, which is to change behaviour. That will only happen when liable individuals, from the chief executive down to other board members and top managers, are given lengthy jail sentences if they are found guilty of reckless embezzlement at the public’s expense.

Since one is fed in prison, even that would not compare with being made destitute for three months or three years at a stretch.

Oxfam recently reported that Britain’s richest five families are wealthier than 12.6 Britons who make up a fifth of the entire UK population.

The latest survey from Forbes magazine shows that these five fortunes are heavily based on property rather than entrepreneurial innovation.

The families listed are those of the Duke of Westminster — who owns 190 acres of prime real estate in Belgravia, London — the property magnates David and Simon Reuben, the Hinduja brothers, the Cadogan family, whose wealth has always traditionally come from property, and (the one exception) the Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley.

Their combined wealth works out at £28.2 billion, an average per family of £5.6bn each.

The collective wealth of the poorest 12 million Britons however comes to only £2,230 each.

Thus the wealth of the richest five families is 2.5 million times greater than that of the bottom fifth.

This is grotesque — so what should be done about it?

The first requirement is obviously a wealth tax aimed primarily at the super-rich 1 per cent — a total of 307,000 people.

Dependent on the levy rate applied, it could raise £10bn to £15bn a year and likely considerably more.

It would need to be applied in conjunction with three other measures.

One is a financial transaction tax pitched, initially at least, at some 0.01 per cent of the value of the transaction, to rebalance tax between an undertaxed financial sector and an overtaxed industrial sector.

Second is a real crackdown on tax avoidance, in the case of individuals by requiring all tax havens in Britain’s crown dependencies and overseas territories to identify all British citizens holding accounts there. And in the case of corporations, requiring all multinationals to submit accounts based on country-by-country reporting of their activities. Third is ending the absurd corruption of the tax system whereby a fifth of big businesses now pay no tax at all and more than half pay less than £10m a year.

This may be seen by some as whistling in the wind since after 30 years of neoliberal free-market capitalism the super-rich are often regarded as beyond the reach of the taxman.

But the worm is beginning to turn partly because the increasing excesses of inequality in an era of austerity are seen as intolerable.

More than that, a recent referendum in Switzerland — one of the most conservative countries in the West — only failed by a very narrow margin to cap top executives’ pay at 12 times the lowest earner in a company.

If that option with mandatory effect were now introduced in Britain, it would probably pass.

Labour is already committed to raise the minimum wage and to incentivise companies to go further with the living wage, which would likely raise the wage floor for around three million low-paid workers.

Two other more far-reaching measures are also needed. One is to shift the balance of bargaining power in favour of the workforce to counter the excess of corporate power, and the other is to make clear that full employment will be a central goal of economic policy for the next Labour government.

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