If international tax evaders were a band, they would be Radiohead.

Bear with me.

In many ways, 2014’s ‘Lux Leaks’ – the scandal which broke when a whistleblower from PricewaterhouseCoopers published thousands of documents showing some pretty shady tax deals were to be had in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg – was the super-rich equivalent of Pablo Honey.

It was a solid debut, no doubt. It contained some absolute gems – the hyper-complicated financial equivalent of ‘Creep’ or ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ – but you couldn’t help but feeling that we hadn’t really seen their full potential. It was big, but was it big enough? There was a real risk that everyone might nod approvingly, think about it for a while, and then forget.

And then, earlier this month, came ‘Panama Papers’ – the smash follow-up that not even the biggest fans of morally bankrupt tax fiddling could have foreseen. The scale! The ambition! Over 11 million documents stemming from one single law firm, and dragging in everyone from the Icelandic Prime Minister to our own David Cameron. Here, without doubt, was the fiscally dubious counterpart to The Bends.

It’s hard to classify the Panama Papers phenomenon. What word should you use to describe something breathtaking in its shock factor and yet heartbreakingly, crushingly predictable at the same time? How can you quantify something so enormous as tax avoidance on that scale? So brazen that it is able to hide in plain sight?

There is one statistic in particular that brings it home to me, and that’s the fact that 60% of all international trade is intragroup – that’s to say it is conducted between two branches of the same company, rather than between two independent companies.

That means that nearly two-thirds of all transactions that take place anywhere in the world basically have to be taken on trust. How can you know that MegaCorp Sweden is selling widgets to MegaCorp St Lucia at a fair price if the whole thing is taking place within one giant company and with no external competition?

The fact is that you can’t. And so companies take advantage of the fact that national governments have so far been really, really bad at working together on this stuff. MegaCorp Sweden will find out that the tax rate there is a lot higher than in St Lucia. They’ll get the St Lucia branch to lend millions of dollars to the Sweden branch, loading the Swedish branch with debt so that it looks like it doesn’t turn a profit. Voila! No more tax paid in Sweden.

This is happening all over the world, right now, and in much more complicated and egregious ways than that. And it would take a special kind of narrow-minded nationalist to think that one country – even one as influential as Britain – could act alone to stop it from happening.

Tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance thrive when countries refuse to work together. This is something that the European Union understands and is trying – slowly at times for sure, but certainly – to fix.

The EU has introduced new rules to limit the kind of sweetheart deals that we saw in Lux Leaks. Last week, it announced new plans to make multinational companies report publicly exactly where they make their profits and where they pay their taxes. Hard to believe that anyone could object to a principle that simple, and yet some businesses do – but they then come up against the combined will of 28 countries representing 500 million consumers between them, and they start to back down.

The UK would be walking away from all of this if we were to leave the EU. Tax avoidance – and the outrageous, growing injustice it serves to embed in our societies – is one of the major issues the world faces today, alongside other cross-border challenges like climate change, terrorism and mass migration. None of these things can be solved by acting alone.

If the UK voluntarily left the world’s largest and longest-standing attempt for countries to work meaningfully together, the people celebrating will be those whose money is sitting in Panama when it should be paying for British schools and hospitals and easing the burden on the rest of us.  Because there would now be that bit less cooperation in the world – meaning a few more opportunities to make some money in the cracks that would inevitably appear as a result.

Which is where, circuitously, I come back to Radiohead.

Panama Papers is where I want the comparison to end. Because two years after The Bends, Radiohead released OK Computer – arguably the greatest album of the 1990s. And that’s what, stretching my analogy to breaking point, will happen with tax avoidance if we don’t work together.  If countries like the UK, as part of alliances like the EU, don’t step up to the plate then the next round of tax avoidance schemes will be on a scale and of an audacity we can’t even imagine. I’m not prepared to let that happen.

In summary? This is no time to start playing Brexit music.