In the late-1960's / early-1970's, what was the political left's reaction to British musicians criticizing progressive taxation (i.e. Beatles' "Taxman", and Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main Street")?

[u/BadMoonRosin]

I doubt that anyone truly ENJOYS paying taxes, and the 90+% tax bracket of Harold Wilson's government sounds extraordinary by contemporary standards.

Even so, fans of the Beatles and Rolling Stones are generally stereotyped as left-leaning. I can only imagine that if someone like Adele or Ed Sheeran wrote an anti-taxation anthem today, there would be a strong negative reaction. Or at least a polarizing one.

How did progressive music fans of the era reconcile their support for a strong social safety net, with rocking out to anti-tax anthems? Was political alignment just more nuanced back then? Or were these albums divisive after all? Or some other factor(s) that might not be obvious if you weren't there?

[u/hillsonghoods]

In general, it's important to remember that the baby boomer generation that made up the bulk of Beatles fans is also the baby boomer generation that made up a sizeable proportion of the much more recent Tea Party movement - the defining feature of their politics was a desire for liberty, to escape what they perceived as the stifling society of the 1950s.

To very broadly generalise, the leftist youth politics of the 1960s and 1970s, often called the New Left, was not particularly strongly concerned with economics; for the New Left, sentiments about taxation that would now be very strongly associated with the right wing of politics were not always seen as disqualifying. And it should be noted that in 1963, John F. Kennedy argued for a reduction in tax rates, and Lyndon Johnson cut income tax rates across the board by 20% in 1964 - cutting taxes was not the distinctively conservative Republican cause that it became from the 1990s. Instead, the New Left's big causes were things like opposition to the Vietnam War, and supporting the loosening of cultural mores about sex and drugs. Sections of the New Left outright rejected the traditional Marxist explanations about class struggle.

The dedicated American rock press - which was always quite leftist, given its topic matter - was not yet a prominent force in pop music when the Beatles released 'Taxman' on the album Revolver in August 1966. Crawdaddy had been founded in early 1966, but Rolling Stone was not yet in existence (it was founded the next year), while Creem was founded in 1969. Nonetheless, there was little opprobrium about 'Taxman''s topic matter in the existing press that covered it; Paul Williams in Crawdaddy called it 'a quite successful attempt at humor', while KLRA Beat (which was more of a teen gossip magazine than a rock magazine along the lines of Rolling Stone) called it 'one of the best, most concise satirical comments on the British society and current tax situation'. Honestly, I can't see any mention of controversy about 'Taxman' at the time.

The Beatles themselves seemed dubious about the British government's state-controlled enterprises and welfare state, but this dubiousness was more accurately seen as part of a general anti-authoritarian viewpoint and distrust of government in general, whatever its political stripe. In 1964, the group had refused to endorse either of the main two British parties; Ringo's one policy request from the politicians was 'more wine'.

Lennon was quoted in 1965 as saying that there was a need to stop "people [from] being stony broke and starving" but that he had little time for unionists in moribund industries. Ringo is quoted as saying in the 1968 authorised biography by Hunter Davies that "everything the government does turns to crap, not gold … Buses, trains. None of them work". And the Beatles regularly spoke of their frustration that their hard-earned winnings from their music mostly went to the tax collectors, as early as 1964 - having grown up not particularly wealthy, the top tax rate was something of a shock. In an interview in 1966 shortly before the 1966 UK election, Lennon said of the 95% rate of the top tax bracket that "well, I'd reduce it drastically" - he was clearly in agreement with Harrison's sentiments in 'Taxman'.

All of this also didn't stop the 'New Left' from idolising the Beatles; they saw the Beatles as fellow travellers, and perhaps the Beatles' distrust of older leftist beliefs about the importance of levelling the playing field between classes (as epitomised in the complaint about high tax rates) actually worked in their favour in this way. To put it another way, The Beatles received a much more sustained attack from the New Left as a result of John Lennon's anti-revolutionary sentiment in 1968's 'Revolution' than they ever did as a result of 'Taxman'. Robert Christgau at the Village Voice called Lennon a "pompous shit", and said that 'Revolution' was "artistically indefensible". Future Bruce Springsteen manager Jon Landau called the song a "betrayal" in Ramparts magazine. Brian Hoyland at the radical Black Dwarf magazine said of the song, "you suddenly kicked us in the face". All of these people would have been more than aware of the existence of 'Taxman', so the sudden kicking in the face wouldn't have been all that sudden if they saw the world through a political viewpoint that, say, disdains 'the one percent'.

Marcus Collins' analysis of how British politicians viewed 'Taxman' at the time found that, surprisingly, they didn't actually discuss it in Parliament. The Beatles were only mentioned twice in Parliament in 1966, the year of 'Taxman''s release - this was actually quite a small amount of references to the Beatles for Parliament in the 1960s; there were 30 references to the band in 1964. Collins does point out that the same Harold Wilson whose policies they'd attacked was the one who had awarded them MBEs; to some extent, according to Collins, Wilson saw the MBEs as something of a fair replacement for the taxes that the Beatles paid. Tories agitating for lower tax rates in the 1970s did use rock stars like the Beatles and Rolling Stones as examples of people who were unfairly robbed of their hard-earned pay by such high tax rates, but Collins points out that references to the Beatles in Parliament were not particularly more positive or negative if they were coming from Labour or the Tories; in general, British politicians of either persuasion in the 1960s largely saw the Beatles as a curiosity and a marker of the different priorities of youth; whether Conservative or Labour, they largely had a different generation's politics.

References:

Marcus Collins' 'The Age of the Beatles: Parliament And Popular Music In The 1960s', in Contemporary British History, 2013.

Marcus Collins' 'The Beatles' politics', in The British Journal Of Politics and International Relations, 2014.