TWO and a half years in prison for attempting to hide cash and assets from creditors in the context of bankruptcy proceedings.

Former darling of the Centre Court at Wimbledon, and the pro tennis circuit in general, Boris Becker will doubtless, just a few days after being sent down, still be reeling with righteous shock.

As many have pointed out in response to Becker’s sentence, he didn’t kill or physically harm anybody, and nor does his offence suggest that he presents a threat to anybody either. No, this sentence has less to do with justice and more to do with making an example out of a high-profile celebrity who had the temerity to attempt to game a system that games us all on a daily basis.

I’m sorry but very rich creditors, people and organisations who only got to be rich by giving out loans at exorbitant rates of interest, do not belong on the same spectrum of sympathy as, say, the millions of working people and small businesses forced into penury and insolvency by a financial crash in 2008 for which they were not to blame.

Becker is no saint, sure, but then who is? Certainly not Judge Deborah Taylor, who sentenced the now disgraced former tennis star. “While I accept your humiliation as part of the proceedings,” she told him in court before issuing her sentence, “there has been no humility.”

Where is her humility, one is tempted to ask, as the committed servant of a machine that breaks more people on a given day than Becker broke serves when in his pomp?

We seriously need to reimagine our society as something better than the one we currently endure, underpinned by semi-feudal institutions and rituals, such as the farcical gown and wigs justice system that is designed to protect the structural injustice of the status quo rather than dispense justice.

Clearly, Becker is no financial whizz. His refusal to countenance downsizing his lifestyle in accordance with his means proved his undoing. But then, so what? Haven’t we been conditioned to believe that human validation is coterminous with conspicuous consumption, luxury and the quality and quantity of our material possessions?

Becker’s offence, when all is said and done, is that tried to do what the Paradise Papers revealed in 2017 the global elite have been doing for years and getting away with — ie hide his wealth.

Judge Deborah Taylor no doubt went home to the loving bosom of her family after sending Becker to experience the tender mercies of HMP Wandsworth, South London’s notoriously brutal Victorian prison. And she will no doubt have done so comforted by the knowledge that she’d just taken a dangerous criminal off our streets.

“Machine men with machine hearts,” Charlie Chaplin famously warned in his classic monologue from his equally classic movie, the Great Dictator. In Judge Taylor’s case we have a machine woman with a machine heart, the product of a system that prefers to crush rather than create; destroy rather than build.

None other than Erich Fromm described her and her ilk perfectly. Paraphrasing: the bureaucrat is someone who administers things and people, and who relates themselves to people as to things.

Becker inspired and entertained millions around the world as an athlete to whom people could relate as someone unafraid to express his emotions; whether the anguish of defeat or the euphoria of victory. He injected spirit and personality into a bland tournament more concerned with tradition than excitement.

Becker gave everything on the tennis court, playing the game with unbounded heart and guts, and sadly for him has now lost everything off it. Judge Deborah Taylor and the cold, brutal system she and hers serve could never be fit to be Becker’s judge. However society is undoubtedly fit to be theirs.

It’s only when society wakes up to the fact that progress will be made.