‘The hearing of a case in public may be, and often is, no doubt, painful, humiliating or deterrent both to parties and to witnesses, ….but all this is tolerated and endured, because it is felt that in public trial is to found, on the whole, the best security for the pure, impartial and efficient administration of justice, the best means for winning for it public confidence and respect.’
“[34] … In my opinion any taxpayer has a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to his or her financial and fiscal affairs, and it is important that this basic principle should not be whittled away. However, the principle of public justice is a very potent one, for reasons which are too obvious to need recitation, and in my judgment it will only be in truly exceptional circumstances that a taxpayer’s rights to privacy and confidentiality could properly prevail in the balancing exercise that the court has to perform. [35] …taxation always has been, and probably always will be, a subject of particular sensitivity both for the citizen and for the executive arm of government. It is an area where public and private interests intersect, if not collide; and for that reason there is nearly always a wider public interest potentially involved in even the most mundane seeming tax dispute. …. in tax cases the public interest generally requires the precise facts relevant to the decision to be a matter of public record, and not to be more or less heavily veiled by a process of redaction or anonymisation. The inevitable degree of intrusion into the taxpayer’s privacy which this involves is, in all normal circumstances, the price which has to be paid for the resolution of tax disputes through a system of open justice rather than by administrative fiat.”