Unite is right to shine a light on the multibillion-pound cash hoards accumulated by big businesses who refuse to invest it for the benefit of the rest of us.

This obscene withholding of wealth amid austerity for the majority has attracted growing criticism even from capitalist fan club members on the pages of the Financial Times.

Since the 1970s the level of profits churned back into investment in the British economy has plummeted.

Then, private business reinvestment was equivalent to two-thirds of gross profits.

Today it is well below half.

To illustrate the point, last month witnessed a breathtaking statement from clothing retailer Next - a firm at the centre of a long campaign by the GMB union to win a living wage for its low-paid retail employees.

Predicting bumper profits of between £685 million and £700m, the company said it was "now faced with a question as to what to do with the accumulated surplus cash (we already generate more cash than can be invested productively in the ongoing development of the business)."

It has so much cash that it doesn't know where to put it. It did have one bright idea, though - a £300m handout to its City shareholders.

So once again it's a case of austerity for the workers, but bonuses for those who haven't done a day's toil.

Economists estimate that the cash hoard accumulated by Britain's biggest companies, added to a bumper £80 billion in dividend payouts to rich investors last year, totals twice the amount needed to sort out the deficit.

This is where austerity should be falling.

Yet instead the government has proposed the opposite - a rolling series of corporation tax cuts and a war on welfare, wages and the public sector.

And each day Chancellor George Osborne, like a modern-day Sheriff of Nottingham, sends out his henchman to shake social security pennies from the squeezed serfs.

Disgustingly, in the absence of a political Robin Hood, the barons presiding over cash-rich corporations are sitting pretty.

In social terms this situation is a disgrace that drills to the core of the free market's failure.

Against a backdrop of supposed austerity, Next stating shamelessly that it doesn't really need its profits is the corporate equivalent of burning a £50 note in front of an unemployed person.

In economic terms this hoarding holds back the entire country by starving it of the direct investment so desperately needed to create jobs and growth.

It underlines the fact that a bold strategy for reshaping the economy in the interests of the majority will never come from those who peddle the free-market myth.

A democratically accountable strategic investment programme, targeting public cash directly at regions and nations and based on the needs of the mass of the population, is the glaringly obvious answer.

As for finance, we need look no further than these firms that apparently have so much wonga they don't know what to do with it.

If these corporate barons have grown so fat they can no longer bother pretending to "innovate," let the increasingly hungry people of Britain innovate instead.