Chartism and the Income Tax

Abstract

Historians have devoted much attention to the Chartists’ advocacy of non-economic political rights. Almost nothing has been written about the movement’s articulate campaign for the revival of the British income tax. The intellectual content of this grass-roots support for the longest surviving of the world’s income tax regimes is important because, like constitutions of the same era, early income tax laws were skeletal legislative products, dependent for their meaning on prior public debate. The Chartists transformed slogans against heavy consumption taxation into a distinctive statement of the goals of the income tax, including those we now refer to as tax neutrality and vertical equity. Their views on these matters were without parallel in the public discussion before and immediately after Peel’s reintroduction of the income tax in 1842.This material was first published by Thomson Reuters (Professional) UK Limited in Stephen Utz, Chartism and the Income Tax, British Tax Review [2013] No. 2, at page 192, and is reproduced by agreement with the Publishers.