David Cameron, following on from George Osbourne, has spoken of how he would be happy to publish his tax returns. This links to criticism that many of the ‘Cabinet of Millionaires’ benefit from recent tax changes, the recent ‘Cash for Access’ controversy and, not entirely unrelated, the recent row over Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson’s incomes (you can see Boris’s returns here and Ken’s here)

Not everyone is convinced. Here Liddell-Grainger, the Conservative chairman of the All Party Group on Tax, said publication would be unfair and could trigger “jealousy.”

If you put up people’s tax returns just willy-nilly across the United Kingdom, then you get the envious factor coming in. You’ll get the jealousy. People like myself will be dealing with people whose names have been put on internet sites, Twitter and Facebook.

I don’t think that’s fair on people. They do pay tax. People don’t know what their neighbours are doing these days. Why drag them through the mire if they don’t need to be?

Such publication is common in Scandinavia (see details of Norway here and some analysis by Channel 4.) According to Channel 4, the publication of the details of all tax returns in Norway, where the law on publication was enacted, reversed, and then acted again, led to mixed results as it

Provoked an outcry from privacy campaigners, who claimed it had sparked a “frenzy of snooping”, as people rushed to find out exactly how much their neighbours and co-workers made. Newspapers and media outlets swiftly compiled their own “Top 10” lists, comparing the earning power of celebrity couples, and revealing details of top-earning footballers, actors, and business tycoons.

With details on everyone from reindeer herders to top lawyers freely available, the list seemed to symbolise the best of Nordic openness. As Jan Omdahl, from the tabloid Dagbladet, wrote at the time: “Isn’t this how a social democracy ought to work, with openness, transparency and social equality as ideals?” However a poll carried out in 2007 found most of his countrymen disagreed: just 32% thought the list should be published, while 46% were opposed.

In 2005 in Italy, in a supreme act of ‘last day in the office’ revenge, an outgoing Italian Finance Minister published tax details of the rich and famous.

Publication in Italy also caused quite a stir with allegations that it would be used by organised crime to kidnap the rich and hold them to ransom. Before you ask, Silvio Berlusconi earned £21.9m in 2005 and Giorgio Armani, who earned the most, earned £35m.

The exact point of publishing is not clear, apart from broadly being an ‘open’ thing to do. It is a great example of  the difficult, and unresolvable, balance between openness and privacy. It remains a problematic area in Norway and continues to be contentious. Perhaps this quote sums up the issue, with tax caught between the force of transparency, the voyeurism of celebrity and the irresistible pull of pure nosiness:

What some see as an honest commitment to fairness is for others, an invasion of personal privacy, and a licence for what the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet described as “tax porno”.