Ours is a broken economic system, rigged in favour of a tiny wealthy elite whose fortunes more than doubled even as the wages of millions fell. It is an elite riddled with contempt for democracy, and will be damned if anybody wishes publicly to scrutinise its affairs. It is happy to treat the state as a cash cow but reluctant to pay taxes to contribute to its upkeep. It drips with machismo and arrogance, believing that rules exist for the little people. It is more interested in short-term profit than long-term innovation and investment, putting the bank balances of a few ahead of the interests either of workers or society as a whole. It has no interest in accepting responsibility for problems it has caused, and will shamelessly redirect blame anywhere else. And if this system were to take human form, it would surely be Sir Philip Green.

Green’s testimony to the parliamentary inquiry into the collapse of British Home Stores was a crude, depressing but revealing insight into the psychology and workings of the upper reaches of British society. Green had the demeanour of someone irritated that elected representatives were impertinent enough to publicly scrutinise him for his role in a company collapse that has left 11,000 people’s jobs and pensions at risk.

He oozed open contempt for the MPs questioning him. “Sir, do you mind not looking at me like that all the time, it’s really disturbing,” he snapped at a Tory MP, like a drunk spoiling for a fight on a night bus. “Are we in the same room?” he ridiculed his interrogators; “Put your glasses on, you look much better with them on,” he mocked the Tory MP Jeremy Quin. As Labour’s Iain Wright noted, Green seemed like “a very dominant personality” but was “extraordinarily thin-skinned in response to innocent questions”. His attitude could be summed up as: “Who do you clowns think you are to have the temerity to interrogate me?”

‘He oozed open contempt for the MPs questioning him.’ Photograph: HANDOUT/Reuters

Green and his wife are Britain’s 13th richest family, after all: who are mere elected representatives of the people to ask him about an economic disaster involving thousands of British workers? His errors were in good faith. If serious mistakes were made, Green was not responsible. Oh no, it was anyone else.

Green handed over BHS for £1 to Dominic Chappell, a failed businessman with three bankruptcies under his belt and no experience of retail. Rather than pay for a thorough vetting, Goldman Sachs did it for free. “Unfortunately, we found the wrong guy,” said Green. But of course he still managed to point the finger at his advisers and Goldman Sachs, despite claiming he didn’t want to “lay the blame at Goldman Sachs’ door”.

Like other economic titans, Green depends on the largesse of the British state. Because he paid his workers wages they could not possibly live on, the taxpayer had to shell out an estimated £367m in tax credits to top up their pay packets. He relies on the state’s education system. Not for himself – this privately educated son of a property developer is no self-made man – but for his workforce, from managers to shopfloor assistants. He needs publicly provided infrastructure. An expensive law-and-order system protects his property.

But though Green will take, he is less happy to give. His businesses are registered under his wife’s name in the tax haven of Monaco, ensuring the millions of pounds he extracted from BHS were kept well away from Britain’s exchequer. “Envy and jealousy are two incurable diseases,” was his retort. Paying tax is for the little people, after all; and if they resent the rich elite draining public resources without properly contributing while services are slashed away, then envy must be to blame.

If BHS was going to have a future, it needed proper investment and innovation. But under Green’s regime, he and other shareholders took £586m from the company, mostly in dividends. Here was money that, rather than being invested in the company, was splashed out on his lavish lifestyle, helping him to build a £150m superyacht while his workforce toiled for poverty wages.

Even when he grudgingly accepted ultimate responsibility for the black hole in BHS’s pensions – him being the business owner an’ all – he still deflected blame on to the “stupid and idiotic” decisions made by others.

But there were some grounds for agreeing with Sir Philip Green. Pushed to justify his tax avoidance, he pointed to all his competitors who weren’t paying tax in Britain either: “That’s not what I designed or set up – that’s the system!”

And here he has a point. No, “the system” doesn’t compel the likes of Green to behave as they do; “the system” didn’t compel him to run down BHS’s pension system; “the system” didn’t force him to drain as much money as possible from BHS.

But the system certainly does allow the likes of Green to get away with such behaviour. Benefit claimants are sanctioned and coerced by the state; wealthy business tycoons are liberated from the constraints of the state. We live in a society structured to give profit more priority than people, where the market comes before the needs of workers or society as a whole. Sir Philip Green is a symptom, a byproduct, a shameless spokesman for an elite in whose favour everything is rigged.

‘He ridiculed his interrogators.’ Photograph: HANDOUT/Reuters

He not only represents a failure of the system. He also highlights the failure of people like me. At the end of The Big Short, a highly amusing but depressing film about the 2008 crash, a money manager who saw it coming predicts: “I have a feeling, in a few years people are going to be doing what they always do when the economy tanks. They will be blaming immigrants and poor people.”

Burning anger at Britain’s multiple social problems has all too often been directed not at the top of the pile, but at the bottom. Immigrants and benefit claimants are blamed and resented, while the Philip Greens of this world prosper at the expense of society. Our failure – as the referendum debate depressingly underlines – to redirect anger at social ills to those actually responsible is indeed a terrible failure.

Green may lash out at the impertinence of politicians for taking time off from scapegoating foreigners and unemployed people to scrutinise the likes of him. But he should take comfort. When the questions stop, and the brouhaha has died down, Britain will still be a society rigged in favour of him and his ilk, and stacked against the workers he betrayed.