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Compton Mackenzie
AT the end of last month, Mr. Henry Price, a Conserva- tive MP, asked in the House of Commons if the Chancellor was aware of income tax concessions made to members of the entertainment professions in respect of expenditure on *hospitality, clothing and other items. Mr. Henry Brooke, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, replied that members of the entertainment professions_ enjoyed no special concessions. Mr. Price then asked whether the Minister was aware of the case of an actress who was allowed to charge a mink coat as a chargeable expense, and of the second case of Miss Diana Dors who was drawing £60 a week, £50 of which was tax free. Mr. Brooke replied that he was precluded from discussing individual taxpayers' affairs in the House but that he would very gladly look into any information whicht Mr. Price gave him.
How did Mr. Price find out that Miss Diana Dors was allowed £50 for expenses every week ? Did Miss Dors tell him about her expenses in a moment of elation '? Did Mr. Price enjoy a gossip with a friend of Miss Dors to whom Miss Dors had confided her success with an income-tax inspector? And the mink coat of the first actress ? Was that the subject of another little gossip behind the scenes ?
Mr. Price waxed indignant about the way the income-tax authorities allowed actors and actresses to pile up over many years large arrears of income tax and surtax, whereupon Mr. Percy Daines, a Socialist member, asked if there was not something shocking about the fact that men like Mr. Robert Newton could get away with £40,000 tax. Whether in very fact Mr. Robert Newton has got away with £40,000 I do not know, but it was common gossip not so long ago that one' famous statesman owed the Inland Revenue £40,000 when he died, which of course was paid by his estate. Yet I should hesitate to infer from one example that owing thousands of pounds to the Inland Revenue was a habit of all politicians.
I recall an agitation in the popular Press about authors who by living abroad did not pay income tax. One paper exuberantly declared that the Treasury was losing millions annually by the behaviour of these unpatriotic fugitives who were leading a life of luxury on the Riviera at the expense of the British tax- payer. That was in 1025, and when Mr. Winston Churchill !became Chancellor of the Exchequer he played for popularity with the cheap Press by announcing in his first Budget that he intended to prevent authors abroad from escaping income tax by compelling publishers to deduct the current tax from their royalties at source. The Society of Authors failed to protest against such a monstrous piece of discrimination, long before the days of PAYE, against a handful of authors whose sum total of deducted royalties may have amounted not to the millions of rumour but to perhaps £10,000 in cold fact. The petty injustice was lost sight of in the enormity of the blunder of that Budget in putting Great Britain back upon the Gold Standard. Now we are invited to believe that the entertainment professions are being indulged at the expense of the myriads of civil servants whose income tax is deducted at source and for whose livelihood the entertainment professions help to pay.
I read in one organ of the popular Press that Mr. Price, the Member for Lewisham West, sings with a rich baritone at concerts, presumably as an amateur. Baritones who have to earn their daily bread by singing at concerts are mulcted of hap of their fees to help to pay Mr. Price his salary as a Member of Parliament, part of whose professional duties would seem to be ferreting about in the wardrobes iif actresses. This may be a work of supererogation voluntarily undertaken by Mr. Price: that does not make it any more palatable to the unfortunate actresses who are pilloried in Parliament, and as servants of the public by favour they may be excused for -parting unwillingly with their hazardous earnings to support those other servants of the public who are really its masters. This is the heart of the matter. The entertainment professions flourish entirely by the goodwill of the public they entertain, and if members of those professions offend the public their masters have the power to inflict the penalty of dismissal.
I do not believe that income-tax inspectors make special concessions to actors or actresses, but I do believe that income- tax inspectors try to be fair. They are in a much better posi- tion than almost any Member of Parliament to estimate what is a reasonable claim for expenses. If an actress was allowed to charge a 'mink coat to expenses it may be taken as certain that she was able to convince the income-tax inspector that her claim was justified. Nobody gets up in Parliament to ask why British Electric or British Gas or British Railways is allowed to squander the taxpayers' money on fatuous adver- tisements. And there will certainly never be any agitation in the popular Press •to curb such squandermania. Actors. actresses, singers, dancers, radio and television personalities, film stars, musicians, novelists, yes, and prize-fighters, all have special expenses on the way to success and have to quadruple those expenses when they have attained it. We should be hearing questions asked in Parliament about the expenses of famous professional footballers if they received even a small fraction of the transfer fees that their clubs gain from selling them to other clubs.
If a great Trade Union of Entertainment including jockeys and footballers were formed, to which everybody who lives by entertaining the public in any medium belonged, and if such a Trade Union struck until its members were allowed the expenses to which they believed they were entitled, the country would not be consoled for the deprivation of its entertainment by reading Hansard or looking at Whitehall on television.
With every infernal new method of slaughtering humanity that is invented, with every monotonous hour of mechanical labour in a factory, with every rise in the price of tea, with every duodenal ulcer and varicose vein, with every failure of the latest laxative, with every new device of regimentation the Servile State inflicts, the country turns for relief to entertain- ment. If entertainers of every kind who are leading a vicarious existence for the benefit of those too much exhausted by the demands of modem life to enjoy it themselves are denied the liberty, licence if puritans prefer that word, to provide for —themselves the means to lead that vicarious existence, the country will suffer for it.
The legitimate expenses of an entertainer are surely whatever enables him or her to entertain. We,may agree that a 'mink coat is an enviable way of advertising compared with filling half a page of a newspaper with gush about a new detergent, but the actress has as much right to charge that mink coat to the advertisement of herself as the makers of the new detergent to charge that half page in the newspaper to the advertisement of its unparagoned whiteness.
It is often asked why entertainers should be favoured in any way, the implication being that they ought to be thankful they can earn their living so easily. Let us agree that the enter- tainer's life is more amusing than that of the civil servant, but let us remember at the same time that it is immensely less secure. He or she can exist only so long as he or she is able to entertain, and they are not pensioned off when they fall behind. If they were naturally thrifty they would not be so prodigal of their own talents. They are giving all the time and, let it be added, what they were given in the way of talent was given to them by Almighty God. No man or woman can enter- tain the public through rank or wealth or privilege: the egali- tarian spirit of the age is not threatened whatever Mr. Price or Mr. Daines may think.
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