One hundred years ago
The government have almost smuggled a Bill through Parliament placing an income tax of 1,per cent on the incomes of CharitieS, for the purpose of paying the expenses of the Charity Commission. The friends of the Charities are indignant, and on Wednesday the Chancellor of the Exchequer was visited by a deputation, so numerous and influential, that he virtually gave up the Bill, admitting that the plan was in details erroneous. So it is, because it perpetuates the absurd exemption of the Charities from general taxation. At present, a Charity pays no income tax, — that is, its managers, whatever their object, compel the State to make a subscription to their purposes of five pence in the pound on all they raise. As,Mr Gladstone once showed, in one of the most convincing of his speeches, there is no reason, either of equity or expediency, for this arrangement; but so fierce and so numerous are the philanthropists, that even he, at the height of his financial fame, was compelled to give way. Sir Stafford Northcote, therefore, will not resist — and the Treasury will go on contributing some £50,000 a year to Charities, of half of which it would, if questidned, disapprove. The proposed tax would have yielded £26,000 a year, and have defrayed all the expenses of the Commission, with a balance over.
Spectator, 17 July 1879.
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