A Tax Lifted

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21735, 17 August 1940, Page 6

A Tax Lifted

A LTHOUGH the news has not been cabled, it was mentioned in a Daventry broadcast this week that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood, yielding to the persuasive representations of a deputation headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr J. 11. Priestley, had decided to exempt books and newspapers from the purchase tax of 12 per cent, which was imposed under the last British Budget. The book trade in the United Kingdom is an important one and the tax would have been a fairly fruitful source of revenue, but it would have been revenue obtained at a price which many people considered to be too great. British people, forced by war conditions to stay indoors at night, have fellen back on books, newspapers and periodicals for entertainment, and it is generally held that this healthy trend deserves encouragement. It was estimated early this year that the publishing firms in Britain sell books to the annual value of £10,500,000, and of this trade about 30 per cent, comes from exports to Ihe Dominions, Colonies and elsewhere. So it can be seen that the Chancellor would hope to obtain something more than £1,000,000 from this source.

The case against the taxation of books and newspapers—and included in the schedule of taxable goods would have been the Bible and prayer books—was forcefully put in the House of Commons by Mr A. P. Herbert, himself a noted author. "The Chancellor,” he said, “with geniality and affabililv, passes from one industry to another like a cheery reveller staggering from pub to pub, nobody bothering to hinder him. Perhaps the Chancellor wishes to limit the production of Bibles and prayer books. If the niche for his statue is still available iu the Commons lobbies, he will go down as the first Chancellor who put a tax on the Word of God.”

Sir Kingsley Wood has probably been subjected to assorted attacks of this kind, and finally he has been compelled to agree that it is wrong to discourage reading in days when the human spirit is so much in need of the solace to be had from books. Once the blinds are fixed in English households and an unrelieved symbolic darkness reigns outside people need more than knitting, cai’ds and radio to sustain them. The Chancellor has at any rate agreed that a taxation barrier to the best diversion of all is unreasonable.

“We must take long views if we would take true views of historical events,” said Dr. Hensley Henson, former Bishop of Durham, in a sermon at Cambridge University. “ ‘The years tegch much which the days never knew.’ In this sense, then, and to this extent, Christendom is the authoritative exposition of Christianity. It shows the broad effect of Christ’s religion on the human material subjected to its influence. Christianity has proved itself to be a quickening principle, bringing into fruitful activity the latent potencies of human nature, and by its presence making civilisation greater, richer, more exalted and enduring than it could otherwise be. It is surely no accident that it is on Christian soil that science and the arts, law and literature, philosophy and politics have flowered most richly.”

Great men are never precipitate. They often look as though they were going to be too late.— Mr J. L. Garvin.