Income tax and national debt both existed 100 years ago
A Facebook post wrongly claims that “Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago”, about a list that includes income tax.
Income tax was first introduced in 1799, and has been “in force every year since 1842”, according to the Association of Taxation Technicians, a professional body for those providing UK tax compliance services. Beer and tobacco levies and the precursor to inheritance tax also existed over 100 years ago in the UK, as we’ve explained before.
It’s also not true that the UK had “no national debt” a century ago, as the post claims. In February 1926, the then-chancellor Winston Churchill told Parliament that the national debt was £7,738 million (£7.7 billion) at the end of 1925. The Office for Budget Responsibility says debt reached 143% of GDP in 1918/19, and “remained high during the interwar years”.
We’ve fact checked similar claims about tax and debt many times before.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because income tax and several other taxes on the list existed 100 years ago, and the UK had a large national debt at the time.
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