Fact check: UK trade with the US and taxes 100 years ago
Round-up of fact checks from the last few days compiled by Full Fact.
This round-up of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact-checking charity which works to give people access to reliable information they can trust.
What’s the value of the UK’s trade with the US?
In a radio interview on Thursday, the Environment Secretary Dame Angela Eagle appeared to greatly understate the value of the UK’s trade with the US.
When asked about the recent US midterm election results, Dame Angela said: “It’s important that we maintain our relationships with the US, a great ally of ours, and we do £2.5 billion of business together between our two economies.”
However, the latest figures from the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade put the total annual trade in goods and services between the UK and the US at more than 100 times the figure she cited – £333.9 billion in the 12 months to the end of March 2026.
This includes £203.3 billion of UK exports to the US, and £130.5 billion of UK imports from the US.
When Full Fact asked the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs about the minister’s claim, a spokesperson told us they believed she “misspoke” and had meant to refer to “an economic partnership with the US supporting more than 2.5 million jobs”.
Income tax and national debt both existed 100 years ago
A list of taxes has been circulating on social media in recent months, alongside the claim that “not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago”. (A similar list which we wrote about back in May claimed none of the taxes existed 60 years ago.)
These claims aren’t correct, however. While we have not attempted to look at every tax on the lists, some, such as income tax, have certainly been around for more than a century.
Income tax was first introduced in 1799, and has been “in force every year since 1842”, according to the Association of Taxation Technicians, a professional body for those providing UK tax compliance services. Beer and tobacco levies and the precursor to inheritance tax also existed more than 100 years ago in the UK.
It is also not true that the UK had “no national debt” a century ago, as the post separately claims. In February 1926, Winston Churchill, who was chancellor at the time, told Parliament that the national debt was £7.7 billion at the end of 1925. The Office for Budget Responsibility also says debt reached 143% of GDP in 1918/19, and “remained high during the interwar years”.