Whose side are you on?

Tax Research UK director Richard Murphy nailed a good few popularist fictions on Wednesday night when he disclosed the mind-boggling cost to the public purse of Britain's tax-dodging non-doms, billionaires, tax exiles and all the rest of the duckers and divers.

A massive £123 billion was his estimate of the cost of these parasites and that figure, on its own, puts Britain's borrowing deficit in a totally different perspective to the one that has been adopted by all the major parties in Parliament, albeit with different shades of emphasis.

That deficit stands at the moment at £178 billion and the only answer to it that has been posed by the big parties is cuts, cuts and yet more cuts.

In addition to any cuts generated by the present crisis, the long-term target for this government is to reduce Civil Service jobs by 100,000.

So far as the customs and revenue service is concerned, this has meant the closure of 200 tax offices and the loss of 20,000 jobs.

Which is, let's face it, an utterly unrealistic way to deal with the economy when there is around three-quarters of the public debt waiting to be tracked down and collected simply by enforcing the country's declared tax regime.

The only possible justification for such a policy is that the government is unwilling to use its resources to gather in this tax and stamp down hard on avoidance and is, in effect, writing off that revenue.

And that is quite simply unacceptable, because it means transferring the burden from the super-rich tax avoiders onto the shoulders of an unwilling and under-resourced public once again.

It means denying the Civil Service the means to track down and bring to book those people who aren't paying their fair share.

And that doesn't mean just targeting the odd self-employed individual who hasn't declared a couple of hundred quid in his or her annual tax returns, although that certainly makes up a tiny part of the job.

It means targeting a whole industry which has grown up to service the urge of the super-rich to find new loopholes to avoid paying taxes.

It means designing and implementing regulations to plug those loopholes as they appear.

And it means tracking down the bolt holes where the rich hide their ill-gotten gains and closing them.

The super-rich live like rats in the wainscoting of our society, plundering at will and secreting away billions that they have no right to. Their advantage over rats is that they can afford to pay a whole army of high-priced tax lawyers to cover their tracks.

Their companies transfer assets earned in one country to another where the tax burden is less.

They can transfer goods to a profitable subsidiary at an inflated price, at a huge profit for the vendor subsidiary, and thus drive the purchaser into a loss on paper which insulates the company from tax liability.

And that dance with the devil can go on for years, finding tax-free homes every step of the way.

And then, when the cash is finally raked in by the company's owners, you can bet your boiler suit that it will be in a tax haven where the profiteer isn't disturbed by such mundane things as paying their tax bills.

Such operations take years to detect and bring to book. But, by the simple expedient of allowing the revenue authorities the staff to do their jobs, nearly 75 per cent of the public debt could be sorted out.

But the government is choosing to sort it out by sacking those tax officials who could deal with it, leaving the tax-dodgers to continue with impunity.

So, the question arises for this government: Just whose side are you on?