This week's opinion: 22 October 2020

One of my hobbies is collecting old tax books (stamp collecting is too exciting!) and recently I acquired a real treasure – Taxation’s Key to Income Tax and Surtax 1964-5. It was a reminder that at one time Taxation was an independent company which published its own books. I was intrigued by the authorship. It was edited by Percy Hughes (who also edited Taxation magazine) assisted by ‘barristers, accountants and others who have made taxation a life-long study’. Those were the days when there were restrictions on professional people advertising their services: it wasn’t the way that gentlemen behaved.

But what really interested me was an advertisement on the back page for a new publication Tax Harmonisation in Europe. It said that the aim of the book was to ‘draw attention to major points of difference in the taxation systems of the UK and the EEC and to describe the work now being done to secure greater harmonisation and to try to look ahead and forecast what changes are likely to be made’. 

I wonder whether anybody looking ahead in 1964 could possibly have imagined that in 2020 we would still be looking at the very same issue of our tax relationship with Europe. As the old saying has it ‘what goes around, comes around’. I doubt, however, that some of the features in the 1964 book will return: does anybody remember the £40 annual allowance for daughter’s services or the 7/9 wife’s earned income allowance, let alone the 5/6 of tithe rent charges being allowed as a charge on income? What features of our current system will look just as odd in another 60 years?