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There’s a joke that’s been doing the rounds on social media for the past few months: A banker, a migrant and a UKIP voter are sat around a table. On the table is plate containing 10 biscuits. The banker takes nine of the biscuits and then turns to the UKIP voter and says “watch out there, mate, that migrant is after your biscuit”.

Magicians use a technique known as misdirection to distract their audiences from seeing how a trick is really done.

It is also widely used by the rich and the powerful to trick millions of people into pointing the finger of blame in the wrong direction when things go wrong.

In 2008, as a result of reckless casino banking and disastrous investments into complex financial instruments based on the US sub-prime property market, the global economy was brought to the brink of collapse.

Central Banks had to launch rescue operations. Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) was bailed out with £45bn of taxpayers’ money after its ATMs came within hours of running out of cash.

In the years that followed, the UK economy nosedived. Consumers stopped spending, businesses stopped investing. Company profits, a major source of tax revenue, plummeted.

And so today we have a public debt that has reached £1.4 trillion and an annual deficit (the gap between total income and overall spending) that is the thick end of £100bn.

The age of austerity - massive cuts to public services that hit those most in need – is upon us. These are tough times and scapegoats are required.

If you read certain newspapers, listen to politicians from UKIP, the Conservative Party and, shamefully, some in the the Labour Party, then it is those at the bottom that must be blamed – the unemployed, the “benefit scroungers”, the migrants.

This is not just misdirection, it is an outright lie.

In the last 24 hours we have seen the fallout from a scandal at HSBC, a bank that apparently helped its wealthy clients avoid tax on an industrial scale.

The UK Government estimates that tax evasion is currently costing the country £35bn a year – that’s around 7% of total annual tax revenues. Some analysts put the figure at nearer to £70bn.

Benefit fraud – estimated at around £1bn – is puny in comparison. It would take 45 years of benefit fiddling to reach the level of the RBS bailout, money that was paid out in the time it took to push a button in 2009.

And what of the migrants – those that are supposedly taking our jobs, our benefits, our houses and milking our public services dry?

Net migration (the number of people that came into the country minus the number that left) into the UK last year was 260,000. That sounds a lot. However, it is actually less than 0.5% of the total UK population and therefore almost statistically insignificant.

In one of the most detailed studies of its kind, University College London looked at the economic impact of migrants in the UK over a decade between 2001 and 2011.

Its research revealed that migrants from within the EU made a net contribution of £22.1bn to the UK economy during the period and that non-EU migrants, of which there are far fewer, made a net contribution of £2.9bn.

That’s a total net contribution over a decade of £25bn, or £2.5bn a year. If we insist, as many do, that migrants should “go home” then they are quite entitled to say “can we have our money back, please?”.

Stephen Green, now Lord Green, was chief executive at HSBC from 2003 to 2006 and executive chairman from 2006 to 2010. It was during this period the bank indulged in behaviour that one commentator today said was akin to that of the Mafia.

It allegedly helped thousands of clients hide their money from tax authorities around the world and even allowed them to withdraw vast amounts of cash in Switzerland.

Lord Green was ennobled in 2010 and made a minister for overseas trade by David Cameron. The noble lord is also an ordained Church of England minister and in 2009 wrote a book entitled ‘Good Value: Reflections, on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World’.

It put forward the idea that business people should behave not just legally but also ethically.

In the book, he wrote: “As a matter of fact the ethics of the marketplace are almost by definition universal – everyone knows about the importance of truth and honesty for a sustainable business.”

You really couldn’t make this stuff up.

It doesn’t take Hercule Poirot to figure out who has been stealing our money – not those on benefits, not the migrants. It was the uber-wealthy and the bankers.

Who’d have thought it?