Annual profits of £14 billion for banking transnational HSBC illustrate once more the spurious nature of David Cameron's claim that "we're all in it together."

In reality, the scale of profiteering and brazen pay-outs of £8 million to chief executive Stuart Gulliver and million-plus rewards to the company's tiny elite of 239 staff members sum up everything that stinks about the private banking system.

HSBC was not bailed out by the government in the same way as other banks taken under Whitehall's wing to be fattened up until strong enough to be returned to the private sector.

However, it benefited, as did every other bank, from the regime of quantitative easing, being handed interest-free state finance to strengthen their balances and assist further speculation.

The billions of pounds thrown at the banks didn't fall from heaven. They represent the accumulated taxes paid by people in Britain over decades.

Yet the bank management feels no sense of debt towards the government or the people who assisted its ability to profiteer as never before.

Gulliver and his acolytes acknowledge their sole responsibility as being to HSBC shareholders who apparently have the right to enjoy a consistently improving lifestyle in return for their historical investment in the bank.

No such consideration for HSBC employees who are treated as nothing more than figures on a balance sheet to be eradicated without ceremony.

The bank has slashed 41,000 global full-time posts in the past three years, forcing the remaining 254,000 to absorb the work of their colleagues.

Similar indifference to human suffering is expressed in the bank's decision to bring the staff final-salary pension scheme to an end, causing heartache to workers who won't know how much to expect before negotiating a retirement package with pension providers.

What justification can a company boasting £14bn profits have for axing a decent pension scheme that it can easily afford?

The truth is that it doesn't need to make excuses for such an injustice because its existence is dedicated solely to the piling up of profit, which benefits in the main an infinitesimal section of society.

Labour shadow financial secretary to the Treasury Cathy Jamieson has a case when she suggests implementing a bank bonus tax this year in light of bumper bonuses at Lloyds and Barclays, as well as HSBC.

But as welcome as this would be to many working people outraged at seeing the City elite coining it in while their own pay is held down, it's really tinkering at the edges.

Recent decades have seen a widening of the gulf between rich and poor in Britain, with the wealthy minority creating a financial crisis and the working class expected to pay for it through slashed services, job cuts and reduced pay and benefits.

The gulf has to be narrowed through a systematic reversal of the burden of taxation from bearing most heavily on the working class to targeting the parasitic rich.

A 2 per cent wealth tax on the richest few seeing their assets mushroom during the latest housing boom in London and south-east England could generate £90bn a year.

Windfall taxes should not be restricted to banks. Nor should they be one off.

Indeed given the banks' crooked record of mis-selling insurance, impoverishing small businesses through interest rate swaps and fiddling the Libor rate, there is an increasingly strong case for public ownership in the banking sector.