YOU honestly couldn’t make it up. Mere days after half the government, including himself, were mired in a massive tax-avoidance scandal Chancellor George Osborne has had the temerity to announce a new “crackdown” on international tax dodging which he claims will “lift the veil of secrecy” that criminals hide under.

They really don’t get it, do they?

They think that just because they have finally, and under considerable duress, published their tax statements, that it is all forgotten and they have a clean slate.

This rather misses the somewhat glaring point that the whole reason for offshore trusts etc is to hide the money from the tax man and therefore merely showing your returns means absolutely nothing.

Well I suppose one could argue that if anyone was well-placed to know about the “veil of secrecy” criminals hide beneath, it’s him.

Osborne trumpeted the “groundbreaking” international deal, claiming that sharing information on the true owners of companies will make it harder for criminals to channel corrupt gains or evade tax.

Under the move, tax and law enforcement agencies from Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain will exchange information regarding beneficial ownership registers, and new registers of trusts, which, it is boasted, will allow for better investigation of financial wrongdoing.

Well … only if the said enforcement agencies are actually doing their jobs, which up until now they definitely haven’t been.

The problem isn’t a lack of information — everyone knows who the biggest tax avoiders are, multinational corporations — it’s a lack of will to do anything about it.

Speaking at a meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Washington, the Chancellor claimed to have dealt “another hammer blow against those who hide their illegal tax evasion in the dark corners of the financial system.”

For Osborne to attempt to rebrand himself as a foe of financial felony is like Josef Mengele setting himself up as the head of a Jewish children’s charity.

“It was Britain that led the world in pushing for the automatic exchange of personal tax data and encouraged the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to develop new rules for taxing multinationals more fairly,” he smarmed.

“Since then, dozens of other countries have followed our example.”

Sadly, that’s the only bit of what he said that’s true.