I know we're not supposed to encourage the politics of envy these days, but there was something just a little offensive about the Royal Bank of Scotland announcing record profits of £9.2 billion - the highest ever recorded by a Scottish company - on the day we learned that 900,000 Scots are living in poverty, including 240,000 children. HBOS rubbed salt in it by adding another six billion pounds profit.

I know the poor are always with us, but that doesn't make it any more acceptable. And yes, it is relative poverty we are talking about in those Glasgow postal districts, rather than the absolute destitution that you see in India. Being poor in Britain today means being in a family of four living on £186 a week after housing costs. But that doesn't make it any easier to make ends meet in this shopaholic culture.

Of course, the RBS hasn't been exploiting poor Scots in any obvious sense - unless they happen to have a temporary overdraft. Most of its earnings come from banking activities abroad. The Royal is a pillar of Scotland's financial services industry, which is the source of much of Scotland's economic growth, and therefore jobs. You won't hear any mainstream political parties criticising making profits these days.

But the conspicuous juxtaposition of rich banks and poor people should make us morally uneasy nevertheless. It also tells us something about the way that global capitalism is driving a wedge between the haves and the have-nots at home and abroad.

The RBS is a global economic player, with a turnover equivalent to a small country in Africa. Its profits may create prosperity in Scotland, but not much of that trickles down to constituencies such as Glasgow Shettleston.

The international reach of capitalism, coupled with two decades of deregulation and low personal taxation, is threatening the social cohesion of post-industrial economies such as ours. Growing disparities of wealth have been the defining features of both Tory and Labour administrations. And it's getting worse.

There really are two nations. Take East Lothian, where the average wage is around £22,000, which means a lot of people are living on very much less. Last week, the chief executive of this Labour-led council, John Lindsay, walked out the door with a £130,000 redundancy cheque, a pension of £55,000 and a one-off lump sum of £155,000. He probably even thinks he's worth it.

Local government officials across Scotland earn fabulous salaries for performing relatively mundane executive duties. They justify their remuneration on the grounds that in the private sector they would get as much or more. Prodigious private wealth is skewing our values.

A million pounds used to be a lot of money. Not any more. In Edinburgh you'd be lucky to get a decent house for that now in the well-heeled ghettos of South Side or Murrayfield.

The windfall gains being made in the property market rival that of the banks. And often, they are being harvested by the same people. Profits up, assets up; wages down, social housing down. There was a time when Scotland was a relatively egalitarian society in which only the landed aristocracy and a handful of industrialists lived in a different society. Now a large section of the middle classes effectively live on another planet. We're not Jock Tamson's bairns any more.

Of course it would be naive to think that banking superprofits or private property could be seized to fund poverty programmes, in the way called for by the Scottish Socialists at their conference this weekend. The flight of business from a high-tax Scotland would make things worse. We're all economic realists now.

But a little redistribution might not do any harm, now and again. We don't live in an era of particular philanthropy. Rich people don't feel responsibility for the poor in the way the Victorians did - not their problem. They tell themselves that they are wealth creators rather than what they actually are: disproportionate consumers.

The more you spend, the more you help the poor. Except that, increasingly, poverty is a product of employment. There has been a huge increase in the numbers of working poor living on the minimum wage, which has become the norm in many areas of our service economy.

We used to say "hard work is its own reward", and now, for many people, it has to be.

It can't be solved simply by more free school meals or raising the school leaving age, however desirable those policies might be in themselves. Certainly, avoiding education or training is the surest route to poverty. But being born in the wrong place, getting divorced, having depression or having a disability are just as likely to send you to the bottom of the heap.

Labour is promising to eradicate child poverty by 2020 and that is a noble objective. But it will remain a pious hope unless some way is found of getting just a little of the wealth locked up in those huge profits and capital gains and using it for social purposes. The alternative is to live in a society in which social divisions will become permanent and irreversible.