The wealthy have got away with financial crimes for so long they no longer regard them as crimes. When they are caught breaking the rules others must obey, they denounce the timid attempts by governments to enforce common standards as a shocking assault on a natural order in which tax is optional for those with the money to buy exemptions.

In Britain, we have seen the City in open revolt against the notion that foreign billionaires should pay a little more towards the costs of the country that protects them. Meanwhile in Germany, the decision by tax fraud investigators to... er... investigate tax fraud has turned the letters page of the Financial Times into a wailing wall for funny money men the world over.

Perhaps they are right to be alarmed. Maybe for the first time in a generation, governments are seeing the irresponsibility of the rich as a threat as dangerous to a nation's well-being as terrorism or drug trafficking and treating it accordingly. The German authorities are being admirably firm. In a sharp break from the indulgent treatment of the world's elite, Germany is paying informants, receiving stolen documents and conducting mass raids with all the vigour it would deploy against an Islamist terror cell.

The German Tax Union thinks Germany loses about €30bn (£22.5bn) a year in unpaid taxes. Much disappears into the statelet of Liechtenstein, which travel writers portray as Ruritanian idyll. True, there are charming gothic castles and it is governed by the superficially quaint Prince Hans-Adam II or, to give him his full title, His Serene Highness Johannes Adam Ferdinand Alois Josef Maria Marko d'Aviano Pius von und zu Liechtenstein, Sovereign Prince of Liechtenstein, Count of Rietberg and Duke of Troppau and Jägerndorf.

But Johannes Adam etc also owns the $100bn Liechtenstein Global Trust (LGT), which offers 'wealth management' to individuals and companies with the promise of absolute confidentiality.

The secrecy held until earlier this month when Der Spiegel reported that an anonymous man known as 'the informant' had proposed a deal to the German secret service, the BND. In return for €4.2m, he would hand over a stolen DVD listing details of hundreds of rich Germans who had set up accounts in his Serene Highness's bank. The spies passed samples of the informant's secrets to tax investigators, who realised that they had stumbled across a gold mine.

Germany's biggest fraud scandal in living memory is now breaking as a result. A leading German industrialist has already resigned. Tax inspectors have warrants to go through the finances of 900 people and all hell has broken loose in the world of the wealthy.

His Serene Highness and representatives of the tax industry have accused Germany of dealing in stolen goods. 'To advocate bribing bank officials in a foreign country, causing them to commit a criminal offence in their own jurisdiction, is somewhat astonishing,' wrote an investment banker to the Financial Times. The BND 'are authorised to act thus in cases of terrorism, money-laundering, organised crime and nuclear proliferation,' added a lawyer from the tax haven of Gibraltar. But they 'do not have the authority to act in cases of tax evasion with no link to the proceeds of crime'.

All missed the point that tax havens are inherently criminal and would go under without the proceeds of crime. As John Christensen, director of the Tax Justice Network, puts it, they are enemy states, pirate islands that have declared economic war on the rest of the world. It's not just that they happen to be used by individual criminals - drug dealers, kleptomaniac African dictators - they are criminal entities themselves that survive by sucking potential revenues out of wealthy and destitute countries alike. If rich citizens obeyed the law, or tax havens ended their secrecy, offshore banking wouldn't exist.

Peer Steinbrueck, Germany's finance minister, said last week that the 'elite must respect the law' and threatened 'to tighten the thumbscrews on Liechtenstein'. I cannot imagine Gordon Brown or David Cameron talking in the same way about Jersey and the Isle of Man. The idea that David Miliband would authorise MI6 to find informers in offshore banking systems feels equally far-fetched. Britain is a country where councils can bug the phones of fly-tippers and put spy cameras in litter bins, but tax inspectors cannot bug the offices of fraudsters or send spies into Jersey.

After the furious reaction from the City to the government's modest proposals to tax foreign residents and open up offshore accounts, which was, incidentally, the most sustained campaign of organised hypocrisy you are likely to see in your lifetime, the status quo has been reasserted. The received wisdom remains that you can only ask the rich to make a minimum contribution. To do more would drive them abroad. Labour is chastened. After originally proposing the taxing of non-doms, the Tories are back under the control of tax exiles.

Yet the received wisdom cannot last. In democratic countries worldwide, governments are asking the working and middle classes to pay the taxes the rich are avoiding. The status quo isn't merely unjust, but politically unsustainable and more politicians are realising it.

As soon as the Liechtenstein scandal broke, American Democratic senator Carl Levin announced an investigation into American plutocrats hiding money in his supreme highness's bank.

Last year Levin introduced the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act to Congress, which included necessarily draconian measures to stop the rich robbing the rest of society. 'We cannot tolerate tax cheats offloading their unpaid taxes on to the backs of honest tax payers,' he declared.

As with Britain, it is easy to think that his stirring words were so much wind and that nothing will change in an America in which the rich have enjoyed a second gilded age under the Bushes and Clintons.

Still, it is worth noting that a then relatively obscure senator from Illinois co-sponsored Levin's Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act and said that 'we need to crack down on individuals and businesses that abuse our laws, so that those who work hard and play by the rules aren't disadvantaged'. His name was Barack Obama.