HMRC's Tax Propaganda for Eight-Year-Olds: Brainwashing the Next Generation of British Taxpayers
Forget teaching children how to build a business, save money or create wealth. HMRC has a rather different lesson plan: convince them that taxation is wonderful, government knows best and life without the taxman would be little short of the Stone Age.
There is something deeply sinister about a government department deciding that children as young as eight need to be educated in the supposed virtues of taxation.
Not educated about how the tax system works. Not taught how to read a payslip, understand National Insurance, calculate VAT or manage their finances.
No. HMRC wants to teach them that taxation is the great benevolent force holding civilisation together.
Welcome to Junior Tax Facts, the Government's attempt to introduce the next generation to the joys of handing over their hard-earned money before they have even had their first Saturday job.
According to revelations published by Guido Fawkes, HMRC's classroom materials, updated this autumn, contain a remarkable series of videos and exercises aimed at children aged between eight and 13. The message is remarkably consistent: tax is good, government spends it wisely, and without it practically everything that makes modern life bearable would disappear.
This isn't balanced financial education. It is a taxpayer recruitment campaign.
And the fact that it is being aimed at primary-school children makes it all the more extraordinary.
Apparently, without tax we'd all be living with woolly mammoths
One of the videos presented to children explains that tax is essentially a giant shared bank account into which everybody pays, with the Government responsible for looking after the money and distributing it for the benefit of everyone.
Already, that is a rather generous description of the relationship between taxpayers and the state.
The video then suggests that without taxation, schools, teachers, hospitals, ambulances, libraries, museums, rubbish collection, police officers and firefighters would all disappear.
Quite a proposition.
The implication is unmistakable: question taxation and you are effectively questioning the existence of civilisation itself.
Another video takes the argument even further, asking children to imagine life in the age of woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and cavemen.
Apparently, without the wonders of taxation, there would have been no teachers, doctors or police officers to protect them from ravenous beasts.
It's difficult to know whether to laugh or despair.
One might reasonably point out that taxation is not the only way of organising and funding services, that different countries operate different systems, and that public services are delivered through a mixture of public institutions, private enterprise and voluntary organisations.
But apparently eight-year-olds are not considered ready for that level of nuance.
Instead, they get the prehistoric horror story.
The missing lesson: governments can waste money too
The most revealing thing about these materials is not what they teach. It is what they leave out.
There is no meaningful examination of the economic consequences of taxation. No acknowledgement that taxes can discourage investment, reduce incentives to work, make employing people more expensive or deter entrepreneurs from starting businesses.
There is apparently no mention of the Laffer Curve, the economic concept illustrating how tax rates can affect the amount of revenue governments ultimately collect.
Nobody seems particularly interested in explaining that higher rates do not automatically produce higher revenues, or that the tax system can influence the decisions people make about working, investing and building businesses.
And what about the other side of the relationship?
Where is the lesson explaining that government spending can be inefficient? That public money can be wasted? That politicians make mistakes? That taxpayers have a right to scrutinise every pound spent?
Children are being taught that the Government looks after the shared bank account.
What they aren't being taught is that the Government is spending somebody else's money.
There is a world of difference between explaining why public services need funding and presenting the state as an endlessly benevolent guardian of everybody's finances.
Children invited to invent new taxes
Things become even more revealing when we move to the materials for secondary-school pupils aged 14 to 17.
One classroom exercise invites students to invent a new 10% tax on an item or service.
They are instructed to give their new tax a name, explain why it is a good idea and justify how it will benefit society.
Read that again.
Children are being asked to devise new taxes and make the case for imposing them.
It is difficult to imagine a more one-sided introduction to the politics of taxation.
Why not ask pupils to invent a new tax cut instead? Why not challenge them to consider whether a proposed tax would damage a business, increase prices, reduce employment or make an industry less competitive?
Why not ask them to debate whether the Government should leave more money in the pockets of the people who earned it?
Instead, the exercise starts with the assumption that a new 10% tax is a perfectly reasonable proposition and asks pupils to sell it to their classmates.
The materials also invite pupils to consider what public services they would be prepared to give up if they could pay less tax.
That is a particularly cynical framing of the debate.
It presents lower taxation as a direct trade-off against essential services, without giving comparable attention to the possibility of reducing waste, improving productivity, reforming inefficient programmes or getting better value from existing spending.
The choice is effectively presented as more tax or fewer services.
How convenient for the Treasury.
The great missing spending departments
Perhaps the most extraordinary exercise is the one asking children aged eight to 13 to rank government spending priorities.
Pupils are presented with six categories:
Health
Protecting the environment
Museums
Armed forces
Education
Police
They must rank them from the most deserving of money to the least deserving.
There are apparently no wrong answers.
Except there are some rather conspicuous omissions.
Where is welfare spending? Where is debt interest? Where are pensions? Where is the cost of government administration? Where is the money spent on benefits, subsidies and the vast machinery of the state?
Children are invited to decide whether museums deserve more money than the armed forces, but not whether the Government should spend less on its own enormous welfare commitments.
They can debate how to divide the pie, but they aren't really invited to question how big the pie should be.
That is the fundamental problem with this approach.
A genuinely educational exercise would ask children how government spending is funded, what the competing demands are, whether spending is effective and whether there is a limit to how much money the state can reasonably take from the public.
Instead, the state gets to set the boundaries of the discussion.
Nearly £1 trillion in tax revenue. And they want more?
The timing makes this particularly galling.
HMRC's own annual accounts show that it generated £966.4 billion in tax revenue in 2025–26, an increase of £90.4 billion on the previous financial year. Actual cash receipts were £937.8 billion.
These are staggering sums of money.
The British taxpayer is already funding a state of extraordinary size and cost. Households face income tax, National Insurance, VAT, council tax, fuel duties, stamp duties and a seemingly endless collection of other charges.
Businesses face corporation tax, employer National Insurance, business rates and a multitude of regulatory costs.
And what does the Government want to do with the next generation?
Teach them that the taxman is their friend.
There is a particularly uncomfortable irony in asking children to accept taxation as the price of civilisation while millions of working people are struggling with the cost of living and wondering why public services can still be so difficult to access despite the enormous sums being collected.
If the Government wants to win public confidence in taxation, perhaps it should start by demonstrating that it can spend the money competently.
That would be a far more convincing lesson than a cartoon about cavemen.
What happened to political impartiality?
There is another question that HMRC and the Government need to answer.
The Department for Education's own political impartiality guidance tells schools that political issues should be presented in a fair and dispassionate way, with a reasonable range of significantly different perspectives.
It also warns schools to review teaching materials carefully where they might promote partisan political views or undermine a balanced presentation.
That guidance is particularly relevant here.
Taxation is not simply an administrative subject. The appropriate level of taxation, the size of the state, the balance between public and private provision and the economic consequences of tax policy are all legitimate and often fiercely contested political questions.
HMRC is perfectly entitled to explain how taxes work.
It is perfectly entitled to explain that taxes fund public services.
But when its teaching materials repeatedly present taxation as an unquestionable social good, invite children to invent new taxes and omit meaningful discussion of the costs and consequences, serious questions arise about whether the material provides the balance children deserve.
HMRC should explain its approach and identify what safeguards are in place to ensure that its educational programme does not become an exercise in promoting the Government's preferred economic philosophy.
The state has form
This is not even the first time HMRC has attracted criticism over its approach to educating children.
Back in 2012, an earlier tax education module prompted controversy after pupils were reportedly encouraged to think about people in their local communities who might be avoiding tax.
Critics likened the exercise to encouraging children to spy on their neighbours.
Fourteen years later, the concern has evolved, but the underlying question remains: how far should a government department go in shaping children's attitudes towards taxation and the authority of the state?
The answer should be fairly obvious.
Teach children the facts. Explain the rules. Encourage questions. Allow them to challenge assumptions.
Do not turn the classroom into an extension of the tax department's communications strategy.
Teach children to think, not just to pay
Britain needs better financial education, not less of it.
Children should leave school understanding income tax, National Insurance, VAT, pensions, savings, mortgages, debt and the practical realities of running a business.
They should understand how wealth is created, why entrepreneurs take risks, how investment generates jobs and why economic growth matters.
They should also understand that government has an important role in society, but that its resources are finite and its decisions deserve scrutiny.
Most importantly, they should learn that taxation involves choices and trade-offs. There are legitimate arguments about how much the state should collect, how it should collect it and what it should spend the money on.
Those arguments should not be hidden from children simply because they might make the Treasury uncomfortable.
There is something profoundly wrong with a system in which an eight-year-old is taught that without taxation the world would collapse into a prehistoric nightmare, while the economic arguments against ever-higher taxes are nowhere to be found.
The Government should be encouraging children to become independent thinkers, not compliant little taxpayers.
If HMRC wants to produce an educational programme, perhaps its next video could explain why people work hard to earn money, why businesses create wealth, why governments sometimes waste it and why citizens should never be afraid to question how much of their money the state takes.
But perhaps that would be a lesson too far for the taxman.
The next generation deserves an education, not an HMRC sales pitch.
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