So it’s not only the bankers who through greed and recklessness cock-up the financial markets and wreck the real economy and then expect to be generously treated with colossal bail-outs and even retention of their bonuses. It’s the lawyers too and other professionals. The latest PAC report yesterday have just uncovered that 36 barristers have been forced to return £605,000 to the tax authorities. Hundreds of thousands of pounds have also been recovered from other white collar tax evaders – surgeons, medical consultants and landlords. Already 57 barristers have been caught evading tax. Yet none of them has been prosecuted. Instead private deals are reached with the Inland Revenue. HMRC estimates that as much as £2bn a year may be lost to the Exchequer as a result of the cash-in-hand culture, yet only about 2 in a 1,000 get prosecuted. In the case of benefit fraud cases, the DWP says it’s 60 prosecutions per 1,000. Could class bias in the operation of the criminal law be more flagrant?

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