There is no Spirit of the Tax Law

'Hecha la ley, hecha la trampa', as they say over here.

It is an empty concept, not applicable to what is no more than a complex series of instructions about how to do paperwork.

Nick Clegg thinks we shouldn't be using accountants to help us organize our accounts and tax liabilities, because it's a bit much, apparently, to expect Parliament to make laws that actually say what they mean. Therefore we must do what they want us to do, not what the law says we can do. When he talks about avoiding our liabilities, of course, what he means is discovering whether liabilities are less than we thought. Since that is to our benefir, we pay people who know about these things to do it for us.

Tomorrow he will call for the abolition of the legal profession because they make it harder for him to put people in jail.

He might follow that by criticising those who use private medicine and private education, because we show up the incompetence and poor value of the schemes he runs, and we might gain an advantage over the poor souls who have to use state services. But, of course, that's already party policy and has been for years. Like Labour, they despise people who take responsibility for their own lives. Unlike Labour, they pretend that they're on our side, going so far as to call themselves Liberal and Democratic when they are nothing of the kind.