As the Guardian has noted this morning:

The Guardian today lost a high court challenge to lift an emergency gagging order imposed on the publication of Barclays bank documents alleged to detail huge tax avoidance schemes.

I’m not surprised. It is a repeat of the stupidity of the British judiciary when faced with issues of substance of importance to their chums in the hierarchy of society. It also makes a mockery of the law. As the Guardian also notes:

There are two aspects of the decision to ban publication of these documents which look decidedly odd. The first is to do with freedom of expression and the law of confidence. … There is something almost comic about a high court sitting in camera in the Strand ordering a blanket of confidentiality over something which, even as they secretly ruminate about secrecy, is being discussed around the world.

The second matter is whether or not the widest possible public scrutiny of the tax avoidance schemes of a major bank should – now, of all times – be prevented by court order.

As they continue:

While the judge agreed the Guardian’s tax coverage was important he seemed to think there was no merit in allowing a wider public to read the detailed documents in which Barclays employees discussed how they planned to structure these schemes and how they would argue their legitimacy with the taxman. It is better, in his view, that banks, tax advisers and lawyers should be allowed to have private conversations with Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs without any kind of wider scrutiny. This ignores widespread concerns – articulated by the Barclays whistleblower among others – that it is precisely the private nature of these conversations that has allowed banks and corporations to get away with such rampant tax avoidance over so many years.

But this is the key point

This is not an arcane dispute between a newspaper and a bank over marginal tax- dodging at the fringes. If Barclays were to be forced to follow RBS into abandoning its tax avoidance adventures, many hundreds of millions would be removed from its annual profits and leave the bank. Shareholders and government need to know what is going on. And the public should be allowed a glimpse into the cosy world of secret negotiations between bankers, lawyers and tax inspectors over who can get away with what. It is a worrying day when a judge thinks he knows better.

This whole Barclays scam is, to put it quite unsubtly, a fraud on the public in the sense that it relies upon a  deception (albeit legitimate, assisted here by the Courts) to secure a financial advantage for Barclays executives at cost to the taxpayer and Barclays shareholders.

The Court thought Barclays’ human rights would be abused by publication. My question is simple: what about the rights of the rest of us?

Barclays is abusing us all. That has to stop.

Tax havens facilitate that abuse. That also has to stop.

Both have to happen now.