British taxpayers are so shocked, we were assured by clean-government campaigners yesterday, that something will now have to be done. Really? Ordinary taxpayers shocked by the revelations drawn from 11 million documents leaked from Panama-based Mossack Fonseca? I fear not.

While indignant Icelanders at once massed in the real and the virtual worlds, and forced their beleaguered prime minister to resign; while the German justice minister promised urgent new legislation to end the anonymity of company owners, and the US authorities threatened swift action against tax delinquents, what was the UK government doing? The prime minister was insisting that the UK was on the frontline of the global struggle against corruption and denying that he held shares in an offshore company run by his late father. And that was pretty much that, because, even after seeing the Guardian front page and a paltry half-hour’s BBC Panorama on Monday, we are too jaded and resigned to go rushing the gates of Downing Street. We have heard it all before.

We were encouraged to direct our opprobrium towards the usual suspects: Vladimir Putin; the relatives of Chinese leaders; North Korean VIPs; the chief fixer to the Syrian president. Outrageous, we agreed, that Mossack Fonseca was still doing business with those ostracised by decent global business.

But was your average British taxpayer surprised by all this? I doubt it. The UK has long lived in a world of acute double vision. It holds a view of itself as superior to almost everywhere else, especially in matters of state-level ethics and law. A healthy portion of our aid budget funds anti-corruption programmes in far-flung countries, even though it was only in 2010 that we enacted our very own Bribery Act. Its belated appearance was because we felt we didn’t need one.

We are also good at lecturing those same countries on respect for the “rule of law”. We – and government ministers and NGOs on our behalf – show the same condescension towards continental Europeans, especially southern Europeans, whom we regard collectively as more “tolerant” of corruption than we are. It’s a cultural thing, of course.

Yet this is not how others see us. Practically every year, the UK slips further down the international league tables of corruption, as compiled by the NGO Transparency International. When David Cameron and others talk, as they have done at length, about the need to clean up international finance, make global companies such as Google pay their tax and root out money laundering across the world, there is always snickering, if not outright laughter, in the aisles.

Some of the biggest havens of dirty money, our critics argue, are British overseas territories and the London property market. Until a UK government is prepared to remove the beam in its own eye, rather than wittering on about the motes in the eyes of others, our preaching about the “rule of law” will be taken with the grain of salt it deserves, and our credibility as a country will be compromised. The latest revelations make this more, rather than less, likely, for all that the UK-based beneficiaries of the system try to deflect the spotlight on to familiar villains.

It is not that this government – and more particularly, to its credit, the much-maligned coalition – has been unaware of the problem. Indeed there is legislation shortly to come into force which requires the beneficiary owners of registered companies to be identified. David Cameron initiated it, in what might be seen as a recognition that we have moved on from the world of his late father. He recognises that dealing with anonymous companies is not a good thing, but the new law looks far from watertight. My fundamentalist view is that real companies need real owners with real names. Anything else offers a cover for potential wrongdoing, whether it is used in such a way or not.

While the new UK legislation sounds rather like what the German minister was announcing yesterday, our version is unlikely to be as rigorously enforced as the German law. Those companies concerned are showing little inclination to comply; or at least, they will observe the letter, but not the spirit, and that is the nub of the difficulty. There is a mismatch between the letter of the law and what is moral, ethical, right. There is a space, sometimes a tiny space, for interpretation and manoeuvre, and that is how those who prefer to shelter substantial assets like it – whether their gains are ill-gotten or not.

If most of the UK’s small and honest taxpayers have not been especially shocked by the revelations so far, perhaps they could be raised from their apathy by the realisation that Mossack Fonseca is just one company in one small jurisdiction. Such practices must be replicated many, many times over, including in the overseas territories over which the UK has jurisdiction, and from where money – suitably purged of its taint – returns to inflate the London property market.

The only fractional hint of progress in official UK attitudes in the wake of the Panama Papers disclosures is that no one has denied that what was going on in this one company has parallels closer to home. Yet, regrettably, doing anything about our own home-grown tax havens seems still to be a way off. Interviewed yesterday, the former attorney general Dominic Grieve asked whether we really wanted to ruin the economies of British overseas territories, and insisted that the autonomy of such places had to be respected in the same way the Westminster government had to respect the autonomy of Scotland. But that rather depends on your attitude to wealth built at least in part on dirty money and the exploitation of gaps in the law, doesn’t it?

If the money now metaphorically buried under palm trees and fuelling ocean-going yachts were instead used to fill the gaping hole in the UK’s social care budget, and fund the training of more home-grown doctors and teachers, I suggest that this might be a price UK voters would consider worth paying. If the British Virgin Islands and other British dependent territories then decided that they had to fend off bankruptcy by raising their own taxes, so much the better.