A child's eye view of the 50p tax
When I was small, very few people seemed to refer to tax. Even fewer seemed to understand it. And yet the tax-funded Welfare State, as we know it, had been up and running since the late 1940s.
My earliest memory of anything to do with tax was enshrined in the outrageous Lady Docker. She was emblematic of a big spending, high-rolling creature, who married and outlived three very rich husbands and lived for a time as a tax exile.
It wasn’t the 50p tax she was avoiding; it was what we regarded as the exotic “super tax”, which only the very wealthiest paid.
Lady Docker’s third husband, Sir Bernard, was chairman of Daimler and she had a gold-plated model. The Dockers came to be our childhood reference point for the vastly rich and the tax dodger. She ended up in a bungalow in Jersey where it seemed no one was very interested at all in tax.
My parents, who were on the snobbish side of life, regarded her as “frightfully common”. Indeed, before the Profumo affair ever dawned, Lady Docker was the personification of scandal and of a word I had not known before – “immorality”.
As far as we could divine, this seemed to have something to do with men, naughtiness, and tax evasion – an intoxicating tabloid mix that invaded our Daily Express reading school days.
For a chancellor of the exchequer to be to be tinkering with 50p, or even 45p taxes seems somehow small beer by comparison.
There was something truly enormous about the concept of super tax and I was disappointed that my clerical father wasn’t rich enough to pay it. I remember a boy called Graham in my primary school who boasted that his father did.
Somehow we were led to believe that you could become so rich that you could end up paying 95 per cent tax on your highest earnings. Somehow too, all this seemed to be automatically combined with a life in Monte Carlo, with Marilyn Monroe draped across the bonnet of your car, and Tommy Steel singing rock ‘n’ roll at your birthday party.
What a strange world we kids inhabited.
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