Have you ever had the feeling you are being swindled? Not in an illegal way, of course. In austerity Britain the biggest rip offs tend to be more than just legal, they are perpetuated by our own dear (in all senses of the word) government. In short, there seems to be no shortage of taxpayers’ money when it comes to pouring it down the drain.

Hang on, I hear you say, isn’t the whole point of the austerity programme launched in 2010 by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition based on the idea Britain has no dosh left? The coffers are bare, we’ve been assured, following the disastrous rich man’s greed-fest of the 2009 banking collapse. Therefore, your NHS, schools, social services, libraries, police forces and general public sector have to be cut to the bone.

How strange then to keep reading in the news examples of eye-watering sums wasted by these same stern guardians of the public purse.

Take the government’s disastrous attempt to privatise a perfectly successful public institution, the Probation Service. The chair of the watchdog Public Accounts Committee, Meg Hillier, said recently: “Despite warnings from this committee and the National Audit Office . . . the ministry’s attempts to address the failures in the reforms have cost the taxpayer an additional £467m while failing to achieve the anticipated improvements in reoffending behaviour.” Oops, there goes another half a billion. Thank goodness it has ended up in the private bank accounts of already wealthy people.

There has been lots more taxpayers’ money flowing their way. How about the £507m paid by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to corporations Atos and Capita for personal independence payment (PIP) tests between 2013 and 2016, despite fierce criticism of their services by worried charities and MPs. Figures up until September this year reported by the Daily Mirror suggest that 61 per cent of the 90,000 claimants who appealed against a PIP decision by the DWP, based on these companies’ own assessments, won their case at tribunal. In other words, the tests in 6 out of 10 cases were sheer bunkum. Never mind the sheer misery caused by this incompetent, expensive farce to our most vulnerable citizens.

Let’s be realistic about these generous donations from taxpayers to the exceedingly well-off. These are real people, breathing and walking on this earth like you and me, who are trousering our desperately-needed resources to ‘reward’ themselves with more cash than any human being could spend in a hundred lifetimes.

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, for example, will have pocketed at least £306m in dividends from Virgin Trains by the time the firm’s 22-year tenure as a rail operator comes to an end. Analysis by the Guardian revealed that Virgin Rail Group Holdings, the joint venture company, will have collected at least £600m since its launch in 1997.

Branson’s Virgin Group owns 51 per cent of this perfectly legal scam, giving him a £306m share of the overall dividend pot. The remaining £294m was allocated to the Stagecoach transport group, whose largest shareholder is the Scottish businessman Brian Souter, together with his sister, Ann Gloag. Nice work if you can get it.

Why are we ordinary people so generous to the very rich? I cannot help wondering if the fault lies with a media bias for pro-establishment statistics and ‘facts’ keeping people in ignorance of the rip offs all around them. Of course, most of the media outlets in the UK and internationally are owned by the same corporate interests who often benefit from the giveaways illustrated above. Likewise, the top journalists and editors tend to be from the same narrow, privately-educated, well-heeled social class.

As ever when faced with a problem, the natural human instinct is to seek solutions. In this case it is remarkably straightforward and simple. As a society we need to do a comprehensive audit of where all taxpayers’ money ends up – including shadowy tax-havens – and publish it in the public domain. Then we need to phase out privatisation, inefficient outsourcing and public cash transfers to corporate black holes. Perhaps then the resources of the sixth richest country in the world could be directed where they will do most good.