Tax avoidance is robbery, regardless of what any silver-tongued outrider of the corporate world tells you. Companies depend on the labour of their wealth-creating workers: a workforce expensively trained up by a state education system, kept healthy by state healthcare, and whose low pay is subsidised by the state.

The private sector depends on a bailed-out financial system, state-funded infrastructure, state support for research and development, and a law and order system to protect them and their property.

Companies that depend on state largesse and yet refuse to contribute are, well, scroungers. They deprive the state of revenue as politicians justify the biggest cuts for generations on the basis that there isn’t enough money. They gain a competitive disadvantage over mainly smaller businesses who cannot afford armies of accountants to exploit loopholes. They ensure the rest of us pay more taxes. As I say: robbery.

That’s why the allegations against Jean-Claude Juncker are so serious. He stands accused of being up to his neck in one of the great scandals of our time. He is the former prime minister of Luxembourg which is – no disrespect to its inhabitants intended – a glorified tax haven. Labour’s anti-tax avoidance crusader Margaret Hodge is rightly demanding to know whether he personally approved such schemes. As president of the European commission, he is now tasked with negotiating measures to crackdown on tax avoidance at the G20 summit. When a European commissioner, Pierre Moscovici, says that “he should not be judged on the past”, he’s having a laugh. The potential complicity of Europe’s most senior bureaucrat in tax avoidance on an industrial scale is what, irrelevant to his current role?

This whole episode underlines why any criticism of the EU cannot be surrendered to the xenophobic, isolationist right. In its current form, the EU is too rigged in favour of wealthy corporate interests, as the menace of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership underlines. Its treaties help to promote policies of privatisation and laissez-faire dogma. Unless it is reformed, it will be impossible to win the confidence of people in Britain or elsewhere. Europeans are ill-served if a president they never voted for is a stooge for a shameless self-serving corporate elite.

Juncker is not the only one with questions to answer over tax avoidance, of course. Today, the Guardian reveals that Labour has received more than £600,000 of research help from PricewaterhouseCoopers to draw up tax policy. But PwC and the other big four accountancy firms not only facilitate legal tax avoidance – they help advise politicians on tax legislation, potentially assisting the firms to then advise their clients on how to exploit those laws. Granting free advice to politicians only helps to cement the hold that the corporate world has over those who are – at least in theory – supposed to be representatives of the people.

Both cases underline just how subverted democracy has become by corporate interests. Tax avoidance has only been driven on to the agenda because of courageous activists like UK Uncut, who occupied tax-dodging shops and businesses. There is a lesson there. If democracy is to be rescued from an elite that becomes ever wealthier as it becomes ever less accountable, it will take a determined push from below.