IF you think political Twitter is tribal, you’re obviously not a football fan. Last week, some Celtic fans on social media became sudden advocates of tax avoidance when one of their own was implicated in the practice by the Paradise Papers.

Celtic’s biggest shareholder, billionaire Dermot Desmond, was named in a BBC Panorama episode after the Paradise Papers revealed a private jet company he owned used an offshore haven to avoid taxes. Desmond has broken no laws with his tax practices, but the morality of them is questionable.

Desmond’s link with Celtic made this an obvious story of interest in Scotland, but some football fans missed the point – which is ironic, given many of them have spent years slamming Rangers for their controversial tax practices.

But it symbolised a danger with the Paradise Papers that everybody misses the point; there’s a risk that it lies in the public consciousness as a tale of a number of high-profile figures using some questionable, although legal, tax practices in order to hoard all their money away, rather than a deeply ingrained culture of the super-rich avoiding paying their dues to society while people queue for foodbanks, live with the threat of homelessness, and sometimes desperately seek answers from the likes of Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen.

The scale of the injustice revealed can’t be overstated: the extent of this mass tax avoidance renders almost every conversation we’ve had about economics and austerity since the financial crash utterly meaningless.

It’s preposterous that Boris Johnson had the gall to claim that Brexit would inject £350m into the NHS when wealthy Westminster politicians are rubbing shoulders with corporate suits hiding their billions away in tax havens while working nurses are forced towards foodbanks to avoid starvation.

Nobody likes paying taxes, and there’s a general feeling that raising them is somehow unfair. It’s infuriating that right-wing politicians and commentators have so successfully peddled this notion that it’s trickled down to the very people who rely on those taxes for the public services we too often take for granted.

The tax system is a deal that society makes. We agree to pay a proportion of our income into the country’s pot so that it can be redistributed and invested into services like education, the NHS, transport.

The taxes paid by the low-paid are comparatively meagre, but those people feel any financial loss more sharply when they’re struggling to get from month to month. That’s why we should be seething about the Paradise Papers. Rich people are stashing money away so they don’t need to reinvest any of their mighty wealth into the very societies they profit from.

As our services struggle and good people go above and beyond to keep them working, fat cats are laughing and lighting their cigars, proud of how well they’ve screwed the system.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s Dermot Desmond, the Queen, Harvey Weinstein, Bono or Rangers’ notorious EBT scheme under Sir David Murray: the moral and financial damage tax avoidance inflicts on society is extreme.

Tax avoidance is a culture for the elite. They can afford to hire lawyers and accountants who know how to exploit every loophole to ensure clients are able to hoard more money than they’re ever likely to spend in their lifetime. Meanwhile, we’re bombarded with programme after programme about benefit fraudsters, or documentaries portraying poor people as lazy, workshy parasites.

Talk about divide and conquer. While football fans squabble over who the good and bad guys are, and republicans and royalists bicker over the place of a tax-avoiding monarchy in modern society, and while opposing party activists argue about who’s to blame, the tax avoidance machine continues without any effective interruption.

The Paradise Papers show how much contempt the super-rich have for all those considered beneath them, and it will take a brave and long fight to change this system. Next time you see yet another homeless person on the street, consider whether those who invest in tax avoidance schemes are a help or a hindrance. Your conscience knows the answer; it’s time to let your voice catch up.