The Fiscal State and Budget Institutions

Abstract

Chapter one introduced the key questions of fiscal sociology: What does the ‘failure of the tax state’ mean? What is the nature of the tax state? How did it come about? Must it now disappear and why? What are the social processes which are behind the superficial facts of the budget figures? These questions provide a structure for this book. In this first chapter within the second part of the book—which addresses “what is the nature of the tax state?”—the focus is: the fiscal state and budget institutions. The origins of tax and budgeting in the UK, from Charles I, to Pitt’s Old Sinking Fund, to Gladstone’s famous budget of 1853, to Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909, all are considered. These are the historical sources of budgeting, and executive power, in the UK. The reach of executive power over budgeting is considered in two, brief examples: struggles between Westminster and local authorities during the Thatcher era, and the role of the Prime Minister as the First Lord of the Treasury.