AS of last year's budget, Britain was spending close to £165 billion on what the Government likes to call benefits.

It's a vast amount by anyone's standards, not least for a country struggling to pay off its debts. You wouldn't want to see a penny end up in the wrong hands.

In fact, around half the total goes on the pensions people believe they earned over the course of their working lives. A lot of the rest goes to individuals who also paid their taxes while they were able or allowed to work. Governments might like to make benefits sound like hand-outs, but that's a fiction.

Still, the fact only makes fraud all the more heinous. We know it goes on. How bad is it? Iain Duncan Smith's Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) can tell you. Of £3.4 billion in "benefit overpayments" in 2013/14, crooks and chancers got away with £1.2 billion. To save you the trouble, that's 0.7% of the "welfare bill". To give the problem context, official errors leading to overpayments cost another £700 million.

None of this excuses fraud. In that regard, governments, especially Tory governments, take their responsibilities seriously. Find yourself caught making false benefit claims and you will wind up in court, or be asked to pay a penalty of between £350 and £2,000. You will probably have your benefits stopped or cut while the state gets its money back. The DWP lists no fewer than 21 benefits you might be putting at risk, including such things as the severe disablement allowance.

It needn't end there. Should you have made a false statement to obtain housing benefit, you will have committed an offence punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Should you have simply failed to notify a council of a change of circumstances in order to fiddle the benefit, the law provides for a sentence of up to seven years. But so what? Clearly, you were too stupid to get yourself a private Swiss HSBC account in which to stash your loot.

It is almost that simple. We lost £1.2 billion to benefits cheats? That's deplorable. But the government riding to hounds to hunt down anti-social crooks is less quick to mention that in 2013/14, Britain also lost an estimated £22.3 billion to tax evasion. That's just the official figure. In research for the PCS union, Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK concluded that the real total was £73.4 billion.

Such a number makes for a certain sense of proportion. Clearly, not all the tax losses were due to the kind of offshore evasion that was a house speciality at HSBC in Switzerland. The plumber with his undeclared cash-in-hand does not jet off to the Alps. But the sheer scale of criminal tax-dodging causes questions to come tumbling one upon the other.

In what sort of country do scroungers costing £1.2 billion enter popular mythology while £22.3 billion goes astray? What's the nature of the country that locks up its benefits cheats - 403 in England in 2012 - while only a single prosecution follows the great HSBC leak? What does it say about that country when Stephen Green, the man who chaired the dodgy bank when it was enabling evasion, is ennobled and welcomed into government, no questions asked?

The banks; always the banks. However good, bad, or morally indifferent people are, whether they are on the dodge or singing in the choir, here come the bankers, time and again, to prove there is something morally rotten at the heart of all things British. Just listing the scandals that have piled up since the great crash of 2007/2008 takes more time than is worth the bother. One truth unites all: neither the welfare of citizens, the law, or the good of the economy has detained the banking class. Rigging the game has been their only interest.

Where the banks are concerned, we are close to scandal fatigue. Thanks to them, we have learned all the worthy lessons about greed, inequality, power, morality, the corruption of the political process, and the meaning of class. Fraud just about sums it up. Billions have disappeared hand over fist - bonuses or bail-outs; it's all one - and a generation has been deprived as a consequence. Above all we have been defrauded in transactions that were supposed to depend on trust, by institutions that presented themselves as the most trustworthy of all.

HSBC's Swiss adventures are a small episode in a bigger story. What HMRC knew and when it knew, what it did with the knowledge and what it failed to do, is equally just another billow in the enveloping fog. Elsewhere in that gloom David Cameron is dodging the issue of whether he ever asked Lord Green about HSBC and tax evasion when the banker was being welcomed into government. Out in the darkness, George Osborne is shouting about cracking down on tax evasion while Tory donors salt money away in Swiss accounts.

Lord Fink, the former hedge fund manager and Tory treasurer with a name you couldn't invent, assures us that "everyone does tax avoidance at some level". As his threats to sue Ed Miliband seem to dissipate, his lordship states what seems to him self-evident. It's true enough: who pays more tax than required? But in this Britain, in these times, language itself is disappearing into the cold fog.

Avoidance is legal, we hear repeatedly, and therefore fine, even when conducted through Switzerland. Evasion is meanwhile criminal, even when - as in the HSBC case - criminal charges are beyond the wit of the authorities. But then, between these poles comes something called "aggressive avoidance", a form of behaviour that is legal until Osborne decrees that it's not. A simple distinction between right and wrong has been lost in the thickets of the tax code. So another piece of symbolism joins the list.

In this game, even the double standards have double standards. Benefit scroungers receive condign punishments; bankers and their clients escape jail. Now add the fact that HMRC apparently did not dream of bringing prosecutions in 1100 cases of suspected HSBC-assisted evasion. The tax authority instead boasts of recovering £135 million. While those who have no money are pursued for small change fraudulently obtained, those with plenty hand over a fragment and preserve their liberty.

The argument, old but refurbished for the 21st century, is between individualism and the common good, between what a rich few can get and keep and what a society needs if it is to function. We make laws for that common good. The banking class breaks laws, time and again, for personal enrichment alone. The issue, this time, is not "wealth creation" but the means employed and the chaos they promise.

Labour and Tories alike have been complicit in this for a long time. Before the crash, both agreed that banks should suffer no more than "light-touch" regulation. We know - yet still keep learning - what transpired. It led not to general prosperity, but to a class of robber barons whose conviction was that wealth is something you retain at all costs. Then HSBC came along to show them still better ways to cheat.