ABSTRACT
Towards the close of the 1926 flat racing season that greatest of Britons, Winston Churchill, at the time Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced a betting tax of 2 per cent on racecourse transactions and 3.5 per cent on those taking place in bookmakers’ offices. As might be anticipated, bookmakers objected vociferously to the tax and actually went on strike at Windsor in November 1926. Racecourse executives blamed the tax for a fall of 16 per cent in attendances between 1925 and 1927. In 1928 the tax was reduced to 1 per cent and 2 per cent respectively and eventually abandoned altogether. The badly drafted legislation was a charter for evasion and less than a third of the anticipated revenue had been raised. Churchill admitted that it had been a fiasco and substituted a turnover tax on tote betting and a fixed sum duty on bookmakers’ telephones. Both these were dropped when Labour came to power in 1929.
