By Rab Bruce’s Spider

The Panama Papers are receiving the sort of response you’d expect from the UK media. They can’t hush it up entirely but are being very circumspect in making sure that most attention is directed at foreign politicians who are, of course, bad almost by definition.

It remains to be seen whether news will come out of any significant involvement on the part of US or UK politicians and public figures but it would not be entirely surprising if this was neatly swept under the carpet because, after all, the media is owned by the sort of people who might be using offshore tax havens to hide their own ill-gotten gains. I do hope I’m wrong but I suspect the media will either play down any stories through a self-imposed censorship policy or will have pressure applied from Establishment figures to ensure such stories reveal only the identities of a handful of expendable sacrificial scapegoats.

It may be that social media could disseminate any revelations but the problem is that the data is, so far at least, being controlled by media organisations and any information released will be at the discretion of journalists. Let’s hope there are enough of them who have the courage to publish the details.

Whether the full details come out or not, the whole episode merely confirms what we already knew; that the wealthy elite are stashing their money away while telling the rest of us that we need to tighten our belts because there is no money to spend on public services. IN a sense, they are right but at least we now know where all the money has gone. It certainly doesn’t seem to have been trickling down into the economy, does it?

It will be fascinating to see how this story develops or, as I fear, does not develop, over the next few days.