A police officer in riot gear stands with another officer against a backdrop of flames during a protest related to the poll tax revolt, with the text 'Poll tax revolt' overlaid in bold yellow.

Double podcast episode about the successful mass direct action campaign against the UK poll tax in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In conversation with Dave Morris from the Tottenham Anti-Poll Tax campaign and Haringey Solidarity Group.

Our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. Supporters also get access to two exclusive podcast series: Fireside Chats and Radical Reads. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory
You can listen to our podcast on the links below, or on any major podcast app. Links to a few below.

Episodes

E110: Poll tax revolt, part 1 – Working Class History

E111: Poll tax revolt, part 2 – Working Class History

More information

Media

Photographs from the poll tax riot of March 31, 1990, all courtesy of James Bourne/Wikimedia Commons, CC by SA 4.0.

Police horses charge protesters, March 31, 1990
Confrontation with police, March 31, 1990
Police and protesters in Trafalgar Square, March 31, 1990
Riot police in front of burning South Africa House, March 31, 1990
Anti-poll tax protesters. Note the prioritisation of not collecting the tax – we discuss this in our bonus episode

Sources

Acknowledgements

  • Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando López Ojeda, Nick Williams and Old Norm.
  • Episode graphic: Courtesy James Bourne/Wikimedia Commons CC by SA 4.0
  • Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can purchase it here or stream it here.
  • Edited by Engin Hassan

Subscribe

Listen and subscribe to WCH in the following ways: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Castbox | Youtube | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Podbean | Radio Public | RSS | TuneIn 

Transcript

Part 1

At the end of the 1980s, after having largely defeated the working-class movement in Britain, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government planned to crown their victory with a new way of charging people for local government services, which became known as the Poll Tax. Instead, they found themselves faced with perhaps the biggest mass movement in British history, with millions of people refusing to pay, the courts full, local councils overwhelmed, and disruptive street protests across the country. First, Thatcher herself was brought down, and the tax soon followed. This is Working Class History.

[Intro music]

Before we get started, we just wanted to remind you that our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work and, in return, get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes every month, free and discounted merchandise and other content. So our supporters can listen to both parts of this double episode now, as well as an exclusive bonus episode with more information and context. So if you can, please join us and help us preserve and promote our history of collective struggle. Sign up and listen today at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

For many workers, activists and radicals, the 1980s in Britain were a deeply depressing time. The wave of workers’ militancy, which grew through the 1960s and ’70s and was boosted by struggles of working-class women, LGBT+ people, Black, Asian, and other people of colour, had come to a crashing halt against the neoliberal counteroffensive of Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Government.

Years of rising wages and living standards, won by workers organising and taking action on the job, started to be replaced by widespread layoffs, deteriorating conditions, and mass unemployment. This reserve army of unemployed workers was then a powerful weapon to wield against anyone still in employment who wanted to fight pay cuts – because they could be fired and replaced by one of the many unemployed.

One of these unemployed workers was Dave Morris.

Dave Morris:  In the 1970s, I was a postal worker in Islington, North London, and by the 1980s, I was unemployed. Most significantly, I was helping to build a claimants’ union which was a union of unwaged and unemployed people in Tottenham, where I lived in North London. The union was very active throughout the 1980s and it helped people with their claims for benefits. We fought for people’s housing and we acted as a social network as well. I think, in some ways, that was a good lead-up to the introduction of the Poll Tax.

Wondering if he wanted to spend the rest of his life working at Royal Mail, like many postal workers ended up doing, Dave fancied a break and so decided to quit to take some time off during which he travelled abroad and mingled with activists in places like Amsterdam, Berlin, and Poland. He then got to thinking about how to apply the lessons he learned from them back in the UK.

Dave Morris:  So the 1980s was a very significant decade in British history and up to the end of the 70s, there was a kind of post-World War II consensus that the ruling class in Britain was quite shocked about what had happened during the Second World War with the rise of fascism, the rise of communism, and communist governments as well. After the war, I think there was a general consensus amongst all key political parties that the welfare state, stability, and an increase in material possessions was the way to keep people happy and keep people quiet.

What Dave is describing here is sometimes known as the ‘post-war consensus’ whereby, following the devastation wreaked by the war, powerful working-class movements pressured governments into offering huge concessions. This resulted in the development of modern welfare states across much of the developed world, with unemployment benefits, public housing, universal healthcare, old-age pensions, workers’ rights and so on.

These movements would grow over the coming decades.

Dave Morris:  In the ‘60s, there was a growth in new movements that were looking far beyond that. They wanted to be free; they wanted to protect the environment; they wanted to have control over their lives and that carried on throughout the 1970s. During this time, the Labour movement was strong and growing with major strikes. There was also the growth of a movement to end homelessness by occupying empty houses and it looked, as far as the ruling elite were concerned, like the post-war consensus wasn’t doing enough to keep people in their place. Margaret Thatcher, whose name you don’t say in public in this country (except in special circumstances) was elected as Prime Minister in 1979. Basically, the Conservative Party had planned for years to get back in power and to start cracking down on the trade unions, which they did and brought in new laws against protesting.

They started privatising the previously nationalised industries: gas and electricity, postal service, and the coal industry and basically rolled back the gains that working-class people had made since the Second World War. So that was the political backdrop. The other thing that the Conservatives were very keen to do was to ensure massive unemployment throughout the 1980s. I think we had something like three million people unemployed. The Claimants Union movement had been built over the last 15-20 years and we were fighting for more rights for claimants on benefits. The government was cracking down all around and they would begin to sell off council houses and social housing. That was the political backdrop. There had been some major defeats in the 1980s. Firstly, there was the year-long miners’ strike which was a colossal struggle and one that the government treated as a war.

The miners’ strike was a pivotal moment in the history of the workers’ movement in Britain. We’ve got a whole series of episodes about it, which you can check out to learn more, and a miniseries with striking miners coming soon.

Dave Morris:  Basically, the government declared war on mining communities and was determined to close down the mining industry in this country if they couldn’t control it. That was an inspiring and heroic struggle, but unfortunately, it was unsuccessful. It was followed by some other major strikes which were all lost.

Another key dispute here was the year-long struggle of print workers at Wapping, East London, against Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. This ended with the effective destruction of the powerful organisation of newspaper print workers in the UK.

Dave Morris:  There were other conflicts, disputes and campaigns that struggled to make any headway against the government which was, again, the other backdrop to when the government brought in the Poll Tax. They didn’t call it the Poll Tax; they called it the Community Charge which made it sound like something really fluffy that nobody could object to. It wasn’t just an unfair tax because, previously, local government was financed by households and each household paid depending on the value of their home, notional value or actual value.

But instead of a tax based on home values, the new tax would be a flat rate paid per adult person.

So, for example, the Duke of Westminster, one of the richest people in the country, used to pay over £10,000 per year on his old estate. But with the Poll Tax, he would only have to pay £417.

Dave Morris:  People who were working and living on his estate, like his butler, his chef and cleaners, who weren’t paying previously, were suddenly having to pay the same amount.

Now, for most people, this seems blatantly unfair. However, this just points to the drastic extent to which the Tories wanted to remake the UK. Their Environment Secretary, Nicholas Ridley, said the following:

“Why should a duke pay more than a dustman? It is only because we have been subjected to socialist ideas for the last 50 years that people think this is fair.”

And while up until this point, the Tories had largely succeeded in making the changes they wanted in the UK, this was the crucial juncture in terms of how far they would be able to push, and they would be able to reshape the very concept of “fairness”, which is often thought of as a central feature of the British national identity.

Dave Morris:  So, it was a colossally unfair tax but it was also an instrument of social control because then everybody, every adult, would have to register, be followed around wherever they lived, and be in some kind of regime where they could be forced to pay this tax.

The Poll Tax register was also going to be compiled from the electoral register, so the tax was also a pretty obvious vote-grab by the Conservatives. The people least likely to be able to pay the tax were the poorest, who were much more likely to vote Labour, and so if people tried to avoid the tax by dropping off the electoral roll, then that would also mean potential Labour votes disappearing.

The Tory Government hoped that most local authorities were Labour Party-run. They hoped that the local authorities, who had to implement the tax, would get all the grief from the public. Inevitably, the Community Charge would be higher in those areas which had to raise more money for the local services. Basically, these were working-class areas rather than leafy, rural areas. It was a political gamble which, because the Conservative Government had won so many battles, they thought they could pull this off.

The tax was the brainchild of the right-wing think tank, the Adam Smith Institute which is a little ironic because Adam Smith, himself, rejected poll taxes.

The Conservatives felt so invincible that they were trying to do something which no British government had attempted in centuries.

Dave Morris:  People were aware that the last time the British Government had tried to introduce a poll tax was in 1381 which had lived in the collective unconscious of this country and had inspired what was called the Peasants’ Revolt. This was a mass uprising against what was dubbed the Poll Tax in 1381 which, ultimately, resulted in that poll tax being scrapped. It’s a long story which I won’t go into but it went down in history. No government in the previous 600 years had introduced a tax on existence and not a tax on households or homes for raising money for vital local services. A lot of people were saying, “Wait a minute! That’s a poll tax. Why are they calling it a community charge?”

Everybody started calling it the Poll Tax. The government was saying, “No, it’s called the Community Charge, not Poll Tax.”

Only one other country in the world had a poll tax at that time, Papua New Guinea, which was actually in the process of abolishing it.

Rather than introducing the tax nationwide, the government planned to introduce it first just in Scotland, in April 1989, and then introduce it to England and Wales a year later.

Dave Morris:  Around 1987, I was involved with the Claimants Union movement and we created a federation of claimants’ unions.

Claimants’ Unions were self-organised groups of claimants of state benefits, like unemployment, also known as the dole, as well as old-age pensions, disability benefits, and so on. Their members would support each other with claims, issues with non-payment, withdrawals of benefits and so on, sometimes using direct action like building occupations. They would also undertake other activities, like putting on social events, and supporting striking workers on picket lines and providing them with advice on benefits.

Dave Morris:  There were about 150 local claimants’ unions all over the UK and we used to have national meetings, holidays, conferences, and all kinds of stuff that we organised for the claimants. We had quite good relations with the Tottenham Claimants Union and a similar claimants’ union in Edinburgh. I remember that there must have been a national conference in London of the Federation of Claimants Unions movement. A guy from the Edinburgh Claimants Union was telling me about the struggle in Scotland against the Poll Tax and I remember saying to him, “Didn’t we beat that in 1381?”

We’d had a forewarning in England and Wales but there was growing resistance in Scotland throughout the first year. The first year in Scotland was all about the government bringing in the registration system. So the first year of its implementation, if you like, was registering everybody; the next year would be each local council setting the rates that everybody was expected to pay; the third year would be actually trying to enforce the payment. In Scotland, they pioneered all the key elements of the resistance. This guy I knew from the Edinburgh Claimants Union said that they’d set up a resistance network called Community Resistance Against the Poll Tax.

They were encouraging the setting up of groups in local neighbourhoods on housing estates in different towns and villages around Scotland. They already had the experience of claimants’ unions, which were autonomous local groups of people supporting each other and promoting solidarity and mutual aid, so there was a kind of natural progression but there were other powerful political tendencies also that opposed the Poll Tax. These other organisations mainly opposed the government but they weren’t necessarily encouraging the kind of movement that would go on to have the success it did. The Labour Party wanted the Poll Tax to be scrapped but they didn’t want people refusing to pay it. They just wanted people to sign petitions and, basically, wait until the next elections to vote for them. They actually wanted the Poll Tax to still be functioning so that if it all started falling apart or was colossally unpopular, the Tory Government would get the blame.

In 1987, a local Anti-Poll Tax Union was formed in the Maryhill area of Glasgow which started going door-to-door, recruiting people to begin a non-payment campaign and signing up members. By January 1988, 2000 people had joined the group and pledged to refuse to pay.

Meanwhile, as well as Labour, other major parties in Scotland weren’t fans of a mass non-payment campaign.

Dave Morris:  The SNP, the Scottish Nationalist Party, which was campaigning for independence for Scotland, took a similar position but they had a more nuanced strategy of encouraging celebrities and people who could pay, not to pay, as a way of protesting. However, they did not encourage people en masse not to pay it because if they wanted to get into government, they, of course, would be relying on people to obey the law and pay their local taxes. At the beginning, we wondered how this tax was going to be defeated.

The SNP made a call for 100,000 Scottish people, who could afford to pay the tax, to pledge not to pay in a move that they said would be enough to force the Tories to back down which, of course, it wasn’t.

In the latter part of 1987, other local Anti-Poll Tax groups started springing up across Scotland, often started by groups of grassroots activists, revolutionary socialists or anarchists. And these were organising for direct action in resistance to the tax.

Dave Morris:  Gradually, the whole non-payment campaign promoted and encouraged non-registration or refusing to register and refusing to pay which became the only way the tax was actually effectively opposed and all the others just faded into the background.

So, following the pattern of resistance to the tax which had begun in Scotland, Dave and others in England and Wales started following suit.

Dave Morris:  We were one of the first groups in England and Wales which was Tottenham Against the Poll Tax. This came out of the initiative of the Tottenham Claimants Union. We said, “We need a big, broad-based campaign committed to non-payment, mutual aid, solidarity and protest. Look what they’ve done in Scotland, where the movement is becoming very successful.” Gradually, lots of local groups started springing up all over London and all over England and Wales. Once we had set up Tottenham Against the Poll Tax, we called a meeting and about 50 people attended. It was now up and running and the idea was to create a mass campaign. We started having stalls in the High Road every week and then other groups were set up in my borough which is called Haringey.

To give you a bit of an idea, London is made up of 32 boroughs, most of which have a population of around ¼ of a million people.

Dave Morris:  So there were four key groups in my borough: Hornsey & Wood Green Against the Poll Tax, Crouch End Against the Poll Tax and Green Lanes Against the Poll Tax. All of those groups started setting up ward-based groups. Wards are more localised and political geographic areas, of which there are 20 in Haringey. We tried to get ward-based groups set up and this was replicated all over the country. The idea was to call for non-registration, non-payment and to generate massive amounts of publicity.

This was, of course, before the internet. In Haringey, we were particularly obsessed with leafleting door-to-door and leafleted all homes in the borough – about 100,000 homes – four times during a two or three-year period of the campaign. We gave advice on how to disrupt the Poll Tax, how to support each other, how to build a movement, and how you could get involved. It was all about empowerment and collective action on one side and, on the other side, it was an A4-sized poster saying ‘Pay No Poll Tax’ with the contact details of what became Haringey Anti-Poll Tax Union which was a kind of federation within Haringey. The poster asked people to put it in their window and, by that time, the Poll Tax was already becoming notorious. People knew they wouldn’t be able to afford to pay it. They knew it was a Tory con. The poster was really popular and hundreds of posters went up in people’s windows overlooking local streets.

We’ll be right back after these messages. If you want to listen to our podcast without ads, join us on Patreon, where you can listen to both parts of this double episode now, as well as an additional bonus episode. Support from our listeners on Patreon is the only way we’re able to devote the time and money it takes to make this podcast. Learn more and join us at patreon.com/Working Class History. Link in the show notes.

After preparing the groundwork, Dave and other organisers eventually arranged for a mass meeting, open to the public.

Dave Morris:  Our first big public meeting was for the whole borough of Haringey. We booked the town hall a part of the borough and a thousand people attended the public meeting. The left-wing groups were really keen on who the speakers were but, as grassroots activists, we thought, “How can we use this public meeting to build the movement? Who cares about the speakers that much?” We decided that we would sign people up at that meeting to become street representatives. They would be the lead person or the conduit for the campaign. They would be the representative for the campaign in their street or their block of flats and we managed to sign up 500 street representatives at that one event.

We then had the infrastructure for a total borough-wide presence and coordination for what needed to be a mass movement. We weren’t under any illusions that the authorities wouldn’t come down hard when push came to shove in trying to enforce this tax. We also had street stalls all over the borough.

With this base level of organisation in place, local communities began to resist the first phase of the tax registration, where local councils would try to get details for every adult resident in each borough to bill. It’s worth remembering that this hadn’t been the case before this point because the previous local taxes were based on households, so the council billing department might only have contact details for one person in each household.

Dave Morris:  This was the registration phase. We had the burning of registration forms and when people would come to events, we’d have a brazier where people chucked their forms onto the fire.

Registration resistance turned out to be pretty effective at causing problems for councils. Finding out who needed to pay the tax in which local authority was extremely challenging in any case. In Inner London boroughs, 55% of the population changed address in a single year; in rural councils, over a third of people changed address. Some council registration officers experienced harassment and violent threats from local residents as they went around trying to register people. Some quit their jobs and one, Fred Trueman, in Bristol, even died by suicide.

In the end, around one million people disappeared from the electoral roll over the period of registration for the Poll Tax. Even the National Census of 1991 reports a significantly lower population than there probably was, which is mostly attributed to people trying to avoid the tax.

Dave Morris:  We did the same when the bills came round for the tax. The year before the implementation of the tax, which was 1st April 1990, was about building the non-payment campaign that would be able to convince people that everybody else wasn’t going to pay.

Outside of Haringey, other similar groups were forming around the country. Some were set up by claimants’ unions, some by grassroots activists, and some were set up by members of left political groups. The most significant one at this time was called the Militant Tendency, known as Militant, now called the Socialist Party. Militant, at the time, was an influential Trotskyist group – meaning they were following the teachings of Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. They primarily existed as a faction within the Labour Party, although significant numbers of their activists, particularly elected councillors, had been expelled from Labour in the previous few years.

They embraced the non-payment campaign and many of their members also helped start or organise local non-payment groups.

Dave Morris:  The grassroots mobilisation was growing. Actually, Haringey was one of the strongest areas and we had links with other groups. We helped to create the London Federation of Anti-Poll Tax groups and our group, Tottenham Against the Poll Tax, was the secretarial group and I was the delegate so, effectively, I was Acting Secretary for the London Federation. There were already hundreds of groups all over London and we had links with other federations around the country. We called a national meeting because we thought there needed to be national coordination. Scotland had its own kind of national coordination because it predated what we were doing in England and Wales. So we called a meeting and about 360 local Anti-Poll Tax groups and unions were represented. That was the first national meeting. Now, Militant had their own plans, so they boycotted that event and organised something two days before just for their own members. They called it a Steering Committee for an All-Britain Federation which was quite a sectarian thing to do.

We talk more about the strategies of other revolutionary left groups in the bonus episode to this double episode, available for our supporters on Patreon, link in the show notes.

But this kind of decision is not a particularly unique one for this kind of socialist group. Part of their typical strategy is to work within united fronts on campaigns and larger groups will often try to lead these campaigns. So, that could mean either trying to take over existing umbrella groups or, if this doesn’t seem possible, setting up their own versions. In this case, though, everyone seemed to agree that the priority was beating the tax.

Dave Morris:  However, we didn’t want to get into a dispute with them, so at that first national meeting, we agreed to work with Militant and the groups that they had set up to create a unified All-Britain Federation. They were already a pre-existing national organisation with 3-4,000 members and they basically engineered the situation where they were completely dominant in the All-Britain Federation. There were only three independent delegates from Haringey, Bristol… and I can’t remember the other areas but it was possibly Leeds Federations that were on the National Committee. So it was a very uneasy alliance at a national level. They didn’t really do much at the national level and all the activity was at the grassroots level. The movement continued to grow and to be coordinated horizontally in all kinds of different ways.

At this meeting in November 1989, in order to build the strongest level of organisation against the Poll Tax, Dave and other grassroots activists essentially agreed to form part of an overall federation controlled by Militant. But, they decided that they also needed to preserve a certain level of autonomy and ability to organise independently of Militant if that would become necessary at some point. Now, at this time, Militant did have elected officials in Parliament and in local councils which could give them a conflict of interest in terms of councils’ legal responsibilities with collecting the tax, so a level of caution around this possibility would seem sensible.

Dave Morris:  What we decided to do is to ensure that national coordination could continue independent of any party control and we set up something called the 3D network which became very important later on. 3D stood for Don’t Register, Don’t Pay and Don’t Collect.

These referred to the three main strategies of the movement in England and Wales: resist registration for the tax, resist paying the tax, and encourage council workers to resist collecting the tax.

In Scotland, by this point, the registration phase for the tax was already complete. There had been debates within the movement about whether or not to try to organise resistance to registration which resulted in most groups there deciding not to resist registration and, instead, focus on non-payment.

Some Left groups didn’t have faith in a community non-payment campaign and so, instead, argued for a focus on trying to get council workers to refuse collecting the tax through their trade unions. Now, we do discuss this in a bit more detail in our bonus episode for our Patreon supporters, available in the link on the show notes. But, not to give you a spoiler, we are not going to talk about this much during these episodes because while a couple of unions did nominally pass motions supporting the non-payment campaign, none of the efforts to encourage workers to refuse to collect the tax really came to anything.

Still, the 3D network did appeal to workers not to collect; although the bulk of its activity was focused on encouraging people not to register or pay.

Dave Morris:  We had our own national network, bulletins and communication channels. Meanwhile, the London Federation became transformed and, basically, taken over by Militant in a kind of uneasy, not-completely-clear way. However, the coordination at the grassroots level across London continued. I was no longer Secretary but everybody agreed that the one thing that, nationally, we all needed to do was to prepare for a mass demonstration in Central London but also in Glasgow, Scotland, on Saturday, 31st March 1990. Certainly, in England and Wales, the big date was 31st March 1990 because the following day, 1st April, was the implementation date when bills would start being sent out by local authorities.

Before the mass, central demonstration in London, there were significant large protests in villages, towns and cities across Britain.

Dave Morris:  Something remarkable happened in the week or two before that date. All over the country, local councils were meeting to set their rates and what they were going to charge. Every single council meeting of that kind resulted in mass protests all over the country, including small, quiet villages, with phenomenal turnouts. In Haringey, I think we had about 1,000 people but, in some places which had a total population of 20,000, they might get 500 people turning up at council meetings to say, ‘Don’t implement the Poll Tax.’ Actually, in Haringey, we had the highest rate in the whole country. I think it was £740 a year that adults were expected to pay.

This is an equivalent of over £2,100 today, so it would be over £4,200 for a standard household of two adults – and, of course, significantly more for people with roommates or children aged over 18.

For some examples of other local protests, 10,000 people marched in Plymouth in a protest organised by a former Conservative party voter; 5000 marched in Taunton; 1500 people took to the streets in Stroud; in the small, quiet town of Midsomer Norton and Radstock, 10% of the total population of 20,000 residents marched against the tax and pelted police with stones, bottles and rotten fruit.

Local battles with police also erupted all over the place, including Bristol, where 26 people were arrested and multiple police officers were injured – one of them was kicked unconscious. In Hackney, East London, after police attacked demonstrators with batons, the crowd defended themselves with bricks, bottles and stones and then began attacking local shops, smashing windows and expropriating goods. Almost 30 police were injured and 57 people were arrested. In Rochester-upon-Medway, the Kent Evening Post denounced protesters who stormed a council meeting as “animals”. In Exeter, four police officers were injured in fights with protesters who also threw food at councillors in the council chamber, reportedly hitting the mayor in the face with a pasty.

Dave Morris:  They had this rolling protest movement at the grassroots everywhere in the country and this was all in the two weeks before the national demonstration. I later learned that the police official estimate for the demonstration in Trafalgar Square, Central London, was an expectation of 20,000 people to turn up. Anybody involved in that movement would have known it was going to be ten times that and that’s what happened. About 200,000 turned up. We’ve had some very large demonstrations since then but, at the time, it was one of the largest in British history. I remember, in Haringey, about 250 people met at the local underground station who were carrying placards. People were dressed for a day out, or a carnival and celebration of the movement. People were angry about the tax but, up until then, it had all been very localised. Everybody was beavering away in their local areas. It was great to come together. Almost every local group had their own banner, like Kettering Against the Poll Tax and also Anti-Poll Tax groups that were based in workplaces or schools. There were all kinds of different groups with banners and placards, all coming together just south of the river and preparing to march to Trafalgar Square for this mass demonstration.

On that day, I decided not to be involved in the London-wide organisation of that march and I focused on mobilising the people in Haringey. I think I may have had a megaphone and that kind of stuff. The organisation of the demonstration was largely left to the All-Britain Federation. People marched in their sections and it was quite fluid in many ways. It was a really fun and positive but angry atmosphere. We marched past Downing Street, where the Prime Minister hangs out. It was huge. We were marching to Trafalgar Square which only has a capacity of about 60,000 people. A few days beforehand, when the organisers realised that it was going to be absolutely huge, they tried to get the police to agree to rerouting the march to Hyde Park which is a massive open space that can accommodate millions but it was refused. When people got to Downing Street, unsurprisingly, some people sat down and had a protest opposite. Normally, that’s not a big deal and, after a while, people get up and move on but, very quickly, the police zoomed in and tried to keep people moving.

Now, according to the excellent book, Poll Tax Rebellion, by Danny Burns, which we have relied on heavily for these episodes, the initial sit-down outside Downing Street, containing the home of the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, only consisted of around 20 people but, two of them were violently arrested by the police. One man in a wheelchair was pulled from his chair and thrown into a police van and one woman was arrested and stripped of her clothes in front of the crowd.

Dave Morris:  This resulted in more people sitting down which resulted in police horses arriving and, reflecting afterwards, it looked like the police wanted a confrontation.

This group sitting down swelled to around 300.

Dave Morris:  Basically, they tried to move people away from Downing Street, force everybody into Trafalgar Square and they would surround the square and contain the demonstration. It wasn’t possible and it didn’t happen. It created a huge amount of resentment and conflict and battles started erupting.

First, demonstrators responded to baton charges using whatever they had to hand – fighting with placard sticks or throwing banner poles and bottles.

Dave Morris:  The whole mood of the demonstration changed. The Police started driving police vans into the demonstration and the whole thing degenerated really quickly into a massive physical battle where people defended themselves from police violence, police with truncheons and cars driving at people. A lot of people were injured by the police. The police completely lost control.

Police drove numerous vans at high speed into crowds of protesters, mowing pedestrians down at speeds of up to 40 miles an hour. So, people began trying to block in police vans with their bodies, banging on the windows, and attacking them with whatever they could, like scaffolding poles. A temporary construction cabin was set on fire, as was South Africa House, the diplomatic mission of apartheid South Africa.

Dave Morris:  It descended into a riot basically and it spread out from Trafalgar Square all over the centre of London, with people barricading streets and there was looting.

In particular, on roads out of Trafalgar Square, like Regent Street, symbols of wealth were violently attacked, like shops selling jewellery and fur coats, and luxury cars like BMWs were overturned.

Dave Morris:  Really, the whole thing just got completely out of control. I think the police underestimated the numbers. They underestimated the depth of anger after ten years of Thatcherism and previous defeats through government intransigence. The police had been militarised in a way that hadn’t happened in the previous ten years or in the previous century. People fought back and it became the most significant example of public disorder in England for probably a century.

By the end of the day, 542 police officers had been injured, in addition to thousands of demonstrators and members of the public who had been indiscriminately beaten by police. 341 were also arrested.

[Outro music – Play at full volume for a few seconds, then fade out to leave it playing under the outro]

Learn about what happened following the Poll Tax riot and the subsequent non-payment campaign in Part 2. You can listen to that now by joining us on Patreon, which is how our work is funded. There, you can also access loads of other great exclusive content, including an exclusive bonus episode with more information from Dave about the campaign, different tactics within it, undercover police infiltration of the movement and more. It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

Otherwise, Part 2 will be out for everyone else next week.

If joining us on Patreon isn’t an option for you at the moment, please don’t worry about it but please do tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

As always, we’ve got more information, sources and eventually a transcript on the webpage for this episode, link in the show notes.

One of the main sources we’ve used for these episodes is the excellent book, Poll Tax Rebellion, by Danny Burns. You can get hold of it on the link in the show notes.

Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Nick Williams, and Old Norm.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Engin Hassan.

Thanks for listening, and catch you next time.

Part 2

Hi, and welcome back to Part 2 of our double episode about the fight against the Poll Tax in the UK in the late 1980s and early 1990s. If you haven’t listened to part one yet, I would go back and listen to that first.

[Intro music]

Before we get started, we just wanted to remind you that our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return, get exclusive early access to podcast episodes without ads, bonus episodes every month, free and discounted merchandise and other content. So our supporters can listen to an exclusive bonus episode with more information. So if you can, please join us and help us preserve and promote our history of collective struggle. Learn more and sign up at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

We left off last week on 31st March 1990, after a police attack on tens of thousands of Anti-Poll Tax demonstrators backfired, resulting in heavy rioting, on the eve of the introduction of the tax on 1 April.

Dave Morris:  The police, the media and the government all laid into the demonstrators. They all immediately blamed the demonstrators. The Labour Party and everybody had it in for the demonstrators.

As a reminder, this is Dave Morris, of the Tottenham Anti-Poll Tax group.

Dave Morris:  They thought this was a very strong, well-rooted, determined movement that was determined to defy the law. So, in their eyes, the establishment thought everyone was a radical but we’re talking about millions of people. They thought they could just attack and insult the intelligence of the whole Anti-Poll Tax movement. I remember speaking to a TV cameraman at Trafalgar Square during the whole battle and he wanted to know, “What do you think about what’s happened?” I gave my opinion and said, “You’ll only put the opinions down that the media wants to put over.” He said, ‘Yeah, that’s true because I’ve spoken to 17 people on this issue and nobody is willing to condemn the demonstrators. Of course, what will appear in the news this evening will be an ordinary member of the public or demonstrators saying, ‘Oh, it was all some troublemakers.’”

Indeed, in the wake of the riot, the British press was incensed and called on members of the public to turn on the rioters. They worked with police to identify suspects and appealed to readers to “hunt the rioters” and “shop them”, i.e. inform on them to the police. The People newspaper, for example, displayed a mugshot of one man it described as a “swarthy Latin or Mediterranean type with a high forehead” who was wanted for allegedly throwing a scaffold pole through the front window of a police car “like a spear”.

But the propaganda didn’t really work.

Dave Morris:  The reality was that there was massive support for people’s right to defend themselves against the police and the government because the tax was so hated. Also, I think people realised that this was a provocation. I think the aim of the police and the government was to try to split the movement into respectable and radical. They thought it would work. It worked in terms of all the official establishment’s media slamming the demonstrators but also Militant or the All-Britain Federation’s main organisers, who, of course, wanted to stay in the Labour Party – that was their long-term strategy of trying to take over the Labour Party – said that they would organise an investigation and name names of the people behind the violence.

As a reminder, Militant was the biggest revolutionary Left group in the UK at the time. Under huge pressure from the press, two Militant activists, Steve Nally and Tommy Sheridan, who were leading officials within the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation, known as “The Fed”, appeared on news programmes to condemn rioters. The general line adopted by Militant at that time was that around 250 individuals “intent on causing trouble” had sabotaged the march. Sheridan said the Fed “condemned it totally” and Nally said they would “conduct an internal inquiry to try to root out the troublemakers which will go public and, if necessary, name names”.

Dave Morris:  The organisers of the demonstration were backed into a corner, where they were condemning the demonstrators for defending themselves against police violence. This completely outraged everybody within the Anti-Poll Tax movement. The organisers of the demonstration had no legal defence contingency plans if anyone was arrested, no solicitors’ numbers, no advice on what to say if people were arrested and there was no pre-thinking about what advice people might need. Also, there was clearly going to be no follow-up because they were actually condemning people for defending themselves.

Now, in the end, this promised “internal inquiry” never happened and no officials in the Fed named any names. But, with the help of the media, the police started identifying more suspects from the riot. In particular, they wanted to catch 300 people they claimed had been caught on film committing serious crimes. Now, in reality, all they needed to do was catch people who looked like those 300 people and they used the riot as a pretext to raid large numbers of homes, particularly of people involved in local Anti-Poll Tax groups. Officers smashed down doors, attacked activists, ripped flats and houses apart, and seized things like address books, pamphlets and leaflets.

Dave and others in the grassroots 3D Network felt they had to support those arrested.

Dave Morris:  Some of us involved with the 3D network, who, of course, were heavily involved with the demonstration, said, “We’ve got to do something immediately.” I think 340 people were arrested at the demonstration but 150 were arrested in the following weeks. There was this hysteria in the media and police raids, particularly around London but all over the country. There was clearly going to be a really quite serious crackdown against the Anti-Poll Tax movement. We had to defend everybody who was arrested. Within 48 hours, we started having small meetings. We didn’t know who had been arrested or where they were being kept so we had to start going to all the police stations and courtrooms to track people down and give them information like contact numbers of solicitors. It was a real uphill battle which could have been much better prepared for before the event. We organised a defendants’ meeting pretty soon after the demonstration and about 60 people, who had been arrested, came along and we decided to set up the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign.

This became really important. The aims of the campaign were to support those arrested, get them legal advice and raise money so that, if people were being held in jail without bail, they could get visits. Maybe, as importantly, it was to get the whole Anti-Poll Tax movement to commit to supporting the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign. The All-Britain Federation didn’t like it and they didn’t want an independent national body. I think they called their own meeting which only two defendants turned up to. Basically, they had to abandon their attempt to create something in competition with the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign. Gradually, over the following months, every federation of Anti-Poll Tax groups signed up to support it which was really important.

Legal support for arrested participants is a vital but often neglected part of any social movement which wants to be successful. And the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign set a great example of how to organise it.

Dave Morris:  It wasn’t just moral support. It wasn’t just money. It also involved the whole movement in tracking down people who had been defendants, witnesses to what had happened and to keep the movement united. That was the most important success of the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign. The attempt by the authorities to divide and rule by splitting people into ‘respectable’ and ‘radical’ was countered effectively. The whole movement remained united. I was heavily involved in the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign for the following year. In fact, as a campaign, we were also supporting anybody who was arrested at local protests, as well as at Trafalgar Square, in order to get the whole movement to take a principled position that they would support anyone arrested in their local areas or even those in jail. Some people were being jailed for non-payment eventually and we thought it was very, very important that the whole movement supported those who were subject to police or bailiffs’ action for being part of the movement.

The defendants’ campaign put on dozens of benefit gigs to raise money and put together a team of solicitors. The lawyers’ group helped do things like gather police video evidence and pass it on to the campaign, which then went through them looking for relevant evidence for different defendants, and editing particular portions for use in different people’s trials.

The campaign also held advice sessions about prison and held weekly meetings, mailing the minutes out to all of the over 250 defendants they were supporting. The Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign, like the movement against the Poll Tax itself, was also infiltrated by undercover police. Learn more about that in the bonus episode with Dave, available for our supporters on Patreon, on the link in the show notes.

Some defendants did end up getting convicted or taking plea deals where they pleaded guilty to lesser offences than what they were initially charged with in order to get lighter sentences. But the campaign and their lawyers did help numerous defendants get off at trial. Multiple people ended up being found not guilty or having their cases dismissed because they were able to prove that the police blatantly lied and falsified evidence. A Mr Hanney was acquitted after police statements were proven to have been falsified and also later edited to match his description rather than the actual perpetrator of the offence. Jurors in the courtroom burst out laughing when they saw the police notes which originally described a man with a shaved head. After Hanney was arrested, who didn’t have a shaved head, the officer crossed that out and instead wrote in “close-cropped” hair.

One defendant, a former miner named Michael Conway, was charged with violent disorder. He did admit throwing rocks at police but he stated that he did so in order to protect the crowd from violent police attacks. He was acquitted by the jury.

The day after the riot, the Poll Tax actually came into force and so the most crucial phase of the campaign began – non-payment. Actually, following through with refusing to pay a tax would be the most difficult and frightening part of the campaign for participants, so we asked Dave how the movement tried to prepare people to take this step.

Dave Morris:  It was really important to get out mass information, encouragement, advice and support, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, across the whole country so that people felt part of something. It wasn’t just something you read about in the media or had a few celebrities or leaders. It was something that had a mass, grassroots character. Obviously, we encouraged people not to pay. People started challenging the bills, saying they’d not received them or that they weren’t the person who was named on the bill. If they didn’t pay the bill, they got a summons to attend court which would result in a court ordering them to pay, so there was a whole ‘Block the Courts’ campaign. Normally, if people don’t pay their local council rates or tax, they wouldn’t attend court and they would just wait until they got an order through the post. We were saying, “Let’s go in en masse to the courts.” Hundreds were turning up. Because of the scale of it, local councils like Haringey might try and deal with 3,000 court cases in bulk in a day but if someone turned up, then they had to have a proper hearing with that person asking, “Are you that person? Do you owe this money? Why haven’t you paid it?” We were advising people to turn up and to challenge the bills. Basically, we were saying to take as much time as humanely possible. This was happening all over the country.

This was causing problems with the courts because there had never been a need to have so many court cases around non-payment before. As some examples, Bristol City Council issued 120,000 summonses to people. In Leeds, it was 110,000 people, with similar numbers in other cities. Councils were regularly issuing summonses to 3000 people or more on a single day which, of course, would not be possible in a courtroom in the allotted time. Demonstrations were held by local Anti-Poll Tax groups on court dates as well. In Warrington, for example, in June 1990, 1,000 protesters took over the court, forcing all cases to be postponed. In Southwark in London, 1,500 protesters appeared at court overwhelming the police. They refused to budge until the court agreed to adjourn all 5,000 of its cases that day.

Dave Morris:  The entire court system was clogged up and really struggling. I mean, it was seriously struggling. It was something like 50% of the summonses that were challenged or where people turned up and so they couldn’t enforce them.

Local groups also worked with sympathetic lawyers to train their members to support non-payers in court which they were able to do in some cases as McKenzie friends, a role in which non-lawyers can provide advice and assistance to defendants. We discuss this role in more detail in episodes 83 to 84 of our podcast about the Angry Brigade and their trial.

A Poll Tax Legal Group was established and, in total, over 1,000 people in England and Wales were trained in Poll Tax law by the movement. They also produced dozens of easy-to-read leaflets and bulletins, as well as a book full of tips on how to disrupt or delay court proceedings, from anything like asking for water, demanding to see ID documents of everyone in the court, or even having people set off fire alarms in the building.

Defendants were also helped by the incompetence of local councils which didn’t have previous experience dealing with this kind of situation. Medina Council on the Isle of Wight, for example, sent out court reminder notices using second-class stamps. This meant that by the time they arrived, defendants did not get the advance notice period they were legally entitled to. So the court threw out all 1,900 cases and the council had to go back to the drawing board.

At this point, it’s worth stressing that the movement against the Poll Tax was overwhelmingly a working-class movement.

Dave Morris:  The majority of people who weren’t paying were people who couldn’t pay. The big slogan was ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’. That was the core of the movement. It wasn’t necessarily the core of those who regularly attended the local groups. I would say it was a predominantly working-class movement and radical activists probably had an influence beyond their numbers but the power of the movement was a whole mosaic of informal networks in pubs, streets and workplaces, which should never be underestimated. It’s not just the people who have signed up to become a member of a campaign but if it’s a genuinely mass campaign, it kind of reaches very, very widely through informal conversations and word of mouth. When we had 500 street reps at one point in Haringey, it was not necessarily that everybody in that street was feeding back to that street rep but somehow, they became a conduit. People thought they were experts and said, “Oh, you’re the street rep for the campaign, so you must know everything about the Poll Tax.” Maybe they didn’t know that much about it but they had volunteered to at least give out leaflets or something. People felt linked into that kind of coordinated network but the strength of it went far beyond the formal organisation. I would say 95% of the non-payers were people who just couldn’t afford to pay. For working-class people, not paying a bill is quite a big step because you know that there’s going to be enforcement down the line. Often, you hear people saying, “There should be rent strikes,” or “People shouldn’t pay their electric bills because they’re too much.” This is quite a challenge for people. Obviously, a lot of people just can’t pay anyway but then they get into debt and that leads to serious trouble. For the first time, possibly in history, there was a collective, non-payment, widespread campaign so that people felt confident that they could take part.

In some areas, local newspapers published lists of the names of non-payers, trying to shame them into paying. This strategy backfired spectacularly because organisers used it to contact non-payers to advise them of their rights. Some people who hadn’t been included on the lists wrote in to papers to complain that they were proud non-payers, upset that their names had been left out!

In addition to the courts, local councils used bailiffs to try to enforce payment of the Poll Tax.

Dave Morris:  The next stage was that people would be sent orders that, if they didn’t pay within six weeks, bailiffs would come. Bailiffs are like official thugs who come around if somebody has a debt and, basically, say, “If you don’t pay right now on the doorstep, we’re going to come in and take your goods. We’ll take them and then the council will sell them to raise money to pay your debts.”

The situation with bailiffs was worse in Scotland than elsewhere. In England and Wales, councils can only send round the bailiffs after courts have granted liability orders and they can only enter your home if you let them in or if they find an open window or door. But in Scotland, sheriff officers can be sent to seize property without court hearings and they’re allowed to break into your house to seize your property and auction it off.

Dave Morris:  There was a whole period of advising people about the powers that bailiffs had. If you don’t let them in or open your door and they can’t get in, they’re powerless, so don’t talk to them and don’t collaborate. There were phone trees and mobilisations if bailiffs were in an area, because they would try to do 50 homes in one go in a particular area. People would have whistles and try to mobilise people because probably a majority didn’t want to pay the Poll Tax. Even if they felt they had to pay, they were still against it. People would mobilise and if bailiffs were spotted in an area, people would make loud noises and gather at houses that were being targeted. It was quite a systematic, extensive solidarity movement at the grassroots.

In Scotland, because of the different legal situation where bailiffs could break into your house, physical defence of homes was much more important. The first attempt of sheriffs to raid a property in Glasgow was the home of Jeanette McGuin. Over 300 people assembled outside her house and the sheriffs never ended up even trying to get into her house.

Local Anti-Poll Tax unions issued guidance advising people facing visits from sheriffs to move their cars away from their homes and move possessions to friends’ houses – and sometimes, they help move the goods as well. In Edinburgh, organisers set up a group called ‘Scum-Busters’ with cars and CB radios to monitor bailiffs’ movements and mobilise the defence of homes. Activists in Scotland also held multiple occupations of sheriffs’ offices. In one instance, protesters demanded that sheriffs abandon an auction of goods seized from a local woman, one Mrs Patton. And this was successful with sheriffs abandoning the case.

Other groups around the UK used tactics like telephone trees and spied on bailiff companies to identify their car number plates, which would be circulated in local areas. Some cars had their tyres slashed and sometimes, entire towns were blockaded. In the tiny village of Bishops Lydeard, with a population of fewer than 3,000 people, one day, significant numbers of residents took the day off work, organised themselves into small groups and built barricades, setting up checkpoints into the village to stop vehicles and ask them about their business.

Dave Morris:  I’m not saying it happened in every case but it happened enough that the Poll Tax was becoming unenforceable. We’re talking about millions who were getting summonses and bailiffs’ notes. Hundreds of thousands were getting visits from bailiffs.

Protesters were demonstrating outside the homes of owners of bailiff companies and many of the companies were getting into financial difficulty, some of them going bankrupt. Bailiffs are only paid on a commission basis, so they only get a cut of the debts they are able to recoup. So if they don’t recoup a debt, they don’t get paid. And they were not doing a great job of recovering debts. In Bristol, for example, in a whole year, bailiffs had only managed to get £54,000 from over 120,000 people who weren’t paying. And in Scotland, a survey by Labour Research showed that after over 40,000 visits to seize property from homes, sheriffs hadn’t managed to sell the property of a single person.

In Scotland, the government resorted to trying to deduct money directly from the bank accounts of non-payers. So organisers advised non-payers to withdraw money from the four major banks and, instead, use building societies or smaller banks. Bank bosses complained to councils about this, and so this option was never implemented in England or Wales.

Another option for councils trying to get their money was wage arrestment – taking money directly from people’s pay packets or state benefits. But this wasn’t very successful either: firstly, because councils had to get a legal judgement beforehand and secondly, if they managed to get that, there were limits on how much could be deducted from someone’s wages or benefits. So even if deductions occurred, they still weren’t enough to cover the Poll Tax. And finally, many people refused to comply with the process. In order to deduct wages, councils had to find out who people’s employers were. So they sent people forms demanding to know where they worked. Now it was a criminal offence not to fill in the form but the punishment was only a £100 fine which, of course, was considerably lower than the Poll Tax people were already refusing to pay. So in Scotland, after a couple of years of the tax, councils had only managed to implement wage arrestments for 14,000 people, and a little under 15,000 seizures directly from people’s bank accounts. This might seem like a lot until you realise that over a million people in Scotland were refusing to pay.

So the only other stick authorities had to compel payment was imprisonment.

Dave Morris:  The next stage was that if the bailiffs couldn’t enforce the debt, they were threatening people with jail. They had to have a court hearing but they could disrupt those. You could always pay at the last minute if all else failed.

So, as a last resort, if people could afford the tax, then they could always just pay it. But a good number of people refused to pay on principle and were imprisoned. And of course, those who just couldn’t afford to pay were jailed as well.

Dave Morris:  Some of the Trafalgar Square defendants had gone to jail but we were also helping them challenge the police accounts of what had happened. Many people, who were arrested on Anti-Poll Tax protests at Trafalgar Square or elsewhere, were found not guilty by jurors. Jurors were generally sympathetic. In local areas, some people did go to jail for non-payment. It was a complex, constantly developing movement.

The first person threatened with imprisonment was a 74-year-old pensioner in Northampton called Cyril Mundin. He was arrested by bailiffs in October 1990 and threatened with 14 days in prison if he didn’t pay his tax. Local residents occupied the office of the City Treasurer in protest, holding him inside for over an hour. In the end, a tabloid newspaper paid his tax and he wasn’t jailed.

The first person actually jailed was a man called Brian Wright in Grantham, who got a three-week sentence. Hundreds of people wrote him letters and cards of support and hundreds more demonstrated outside his prison. Council officers were flooded with hate mail and activists also visited politicians, including his local Member of Parliament (MP) and a government minister. Following the intervention of his local MP, Wright was allowed visitors in prison every day and he was released after just two weeks.

Dave Morris:  Many people did go to jail. I’m not sure how many but I heard one estimate of 2,000 people.

We’ll be right back after these messages. If you want to listen to our podcast without ads, join us on Patreon where you can also listen to an additional bonus episode with more information about Dave’s life, activism, and connection with the current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. Support from our listeners on Patreon is the only way we’re able to devote the time and money it takes to make this podcast. Learn more and join us at patreon.com/WorkingClassHistory, link in the show notes.

Chaos in the taxation system was mounting and so grassroots campaigners wanted to up the pressure.

Dave Morris:  The unease began to grip the Conservative Party and there were mutterings against Margaret Thatcher. All around the world, the Trafalgar Square battle had got massive publicity. That undermined the Thatcher, Iron Lady, propaganda about ‘the lady is not for turning’ and all that kind of stuff. The last gasp, apart from the local struggles and non-cooperation campaign, was that the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign was calling for another national demonstration. Conservative MPs were calling for demonstrations in Central London to be banned or, at least, the police had the power to do so, which they’d never had. We said, “It’s really important to get back to a mass protest in Central London.”

The National Federation didn’t want another mass protest. They wanted a symbolic march of just 75 people across the country, consisting almost entirely of members and supporters of Militant. But the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign and numerous local Anti-Poll Tax groups and federations insisted they wanted a mass protest which would also rally support for those imprisoned, on 20 October 1990, and the Fed decided that it wouldn’t oppose such a move. Dave talks in detail about the debates and preparations for this protest and what happened afterwards in the bonus episode for this double episode, available for our Patreon supporters.

The day before the protest, supporters of the campaign protested in 15 countries around the world, including Norway, Australia, Switzerland, Austria, and the US, and protesters in France occupied the British Consulate.

On the day itself, 25,000 people rallied against the Poll Tax, of whom around 3,500 people marched off to Brixton Prison, where many Poll Tax prisoners were being held. They were met by 3,000 police in riot gear and they clearly wanted revenge for the March riot. They piled in, attacking the crowd.

Dave Morris:  At a certain point, the police just waded in with batons. I got truncheoned on the head and had to go to the hospital. The whole demonstration was broken up.

This was despite the fact that Dave was clearly marked as a protest steward, wearing a pink fluorescent hi-viz vest.

Other demonstrators tried to defend themselves and, by the end of the day, an unknown number were injured: 135 were arrested and 40 police were injured.

But this time, unlike in March, the police were not able to control the narrative of what happened, which was reported in the media. Because of the preparation undertaken by the organisers, including putting together a video crew which Dave discusses in detail in our bonus episode available for Patreon supporters, campaigners were able to show that the police were the aggressors who launched a premeditated attack on a peaceful march.

Dave Morris:  That was really the last attempt by the government, the police and the media to really undermine the movement. That winter, it was announced that 14 million people weren’t paying, which was something like 50% of the adults in the country. The Conservative Party began to implode on the issue. In early 1991, they lost some super-safe seats with massive majorities overturned and they were losing to the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. The general feeling was that the Poll Tax, which had been portrayed as the flagship policy of the Conservative Government at the end of the 1980s, was actually becoming a millstone around its neck. There was talk of challenging Margaret Thatcher with leadership battles inside the Tory Party. Some people were saying, “It’s all down to the Poll Tax. We’ve got to get rid of the Poll Tax.”

Opinion polls were showing Labour as being hugely ahead in national polls – 55% compared with 28% for the Tories. Although this lead was hugely reduced if people were asked if Michael Heseltine was the Tory leader. Heseltine was a government minister who had consistently opposed the Poll Tax. Eventually, with pressure mounting on Thatcher, the Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Howe, attacked her position on Europe and on her autocratic style. Sensing blood in the water, other leading Tories joined in, attacking her and the Poll Tax. And so the party was forced to hold a leadership election between Thatcher and Heseltine, with the Poll Tax being the primary issue at play. Thatcher did come out ahead of Heseltine in the first ballot but she didn’t win an outright majority, which dealt a death blow to her leadership. On 22 November 1990, she was forced to resign.

John Major was elected to replace her, and he appointed Heseltine to be in charge of the Poll Tax and to undertake a review of the policy but, importantly, he was not authorised to abolish it. So the campaign against it continued.

In a desperate attempt to save the tax, the Conservatives tried to lessen the blow to taxpayers by offering rebates to half of all payers which was a move that was mocked by the newspaper of business, the Financial Times, pointing out that even Major admitted that “there must be something wrong with a tax which starts with the principle that everyone should pay and ends with a system under which 18 million out of 36 million people have to be offered rebates”. Then they announced that they would reduce the Poll Tax for everyone by £140 per person – with the difference to be covered by any increase in sales tax (VAT) by 2.5 percentage points.

But this wasn’t enough for opponents of the Poll Tax, who continued to insist it be abolished completely.

In early March 1991, the Tories suffered another devastating by-election loss, losing their fourth safest seat in the country to the Liberal Democrats, with the Poll Tax clearly shown as the overriding issue at stake. Organisers planned another mass protest to coincide with the anniversary of the Trafalgar Square riot.

Dave Morris:  The Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign and the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation planned an anniversary demonstration for 23rd March, 1991. Don’t forget, councils were meeting to set the following year’s rates all over the country. It was the same thing again in the build-up to the next financial year and there were protests all over the country in local areas. We said, “There must be a national demonstration through Central London and not a rally as in October.” This was extremely tense. The Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign blocked Trafalgar Square but this time, the police conceded that the march should go to Hyde Park. I was involved in the meetings with the various senior police officers involved with the demonstration. It was extremely tense. Nobody wanted to be blamed if the whole thing degenerated into a battle. As it got closer and closer to the date, it became a big political issue in the media and in Parliament.

In the end, though, the demonstration proved to be unnecessary.

Dave Morris:  Two days before the anniversary demonstration, John Major announced that the Poll Tax was going to be scrapped. He said, “It’s unenforceable. It’s going to be scrapped.”

Michael Heseltine stated that the Poll Tax would be replaced in 1993 by a council tax, a banded tax based on property value, more similar to the old rates system.

But, of course, they still intended to keep the Poll Tax for a further two years.

Dave Morris:  Following that, the Poll Tax administration kind of carried on but the stuffing had been knocked out of the whole administrative drive to enforce it. Councils couldn’t cope anyway. The registration system was in chaos and, eventually, we announced that there was a statute of limitations and that if the bill was not collected within six years, it had to be written off. We were just calling everyone to hold firm, not to pay and millions and millions of people never paid a penny.

In Lothian in Scotland alone, in 1994, while the new council tax had mostly been paid, there were still nearly £124 million in arrears from Poll Tax non-payers and the Finance Officer for the authority complained of a “hard core” of people who still weren’t paying.

By the time the six years were up, councils in England and Wales had to write off an estimated £5 billion in unpaid bills from four million people.

In Scotland, the debt didn’t expire in six years, so the non-payment campaign technically continued until 2015! Then the Scottish Parliament passed a law writing off the last remaining debt from the tax, of around £425 million, in a move which was still condemned by the Conservatives.

Dave Morris:  A couple of years after that victory demonstration, they had to bring in an alternative tax called the Council Tax, which was based on households and homes rather than individuals. It was a big success. I’m not saying that the Council Tax wasn’t oppressive but it wasn’t as bad as the Poll Tax.

Now this touches on something which, unfortunately, people comment regularly on our social media posts about the fight against the Poll Tax. A typical comment says something like “then the Poll Tax was just replaced by the Council Tax, which was exactly the same”.

But this is just completely wrong. As we discussed earlier in part one, the Poll Tax was a charge on every individual in a household. So a household of two parents and two children over 18 living in a small flat would pay four times as much as a billionaire in a mansion. In Haringey, for example, this hypothetical family would have had to pay £2,288 a year (worth over £6,000 in real terms today), compared with only £572 for the billionaire.

The previous system, domestic rates, was based on households paying a single rate based on the rental value of their home. So a billionaire in a mansion would pay much higher rates than our example household of four. The current system of Council Tax is more similar to the old system. It is based on households paying a single rate but, this time, based on the sale value of their home. So, again, our billionaire would pay higher rates than our family of four. In Haringey, that was £1,363 a year when it was first introduced, with a family in an average flat paying £484-665.

The Council Tax is still a regressive tax because it is not proportional to people’s ability to pay. However, it is a lot less bad than the Poll Tax. So claiming that they are the same is not only wrong but it does a real disservice to one of the most important working-class movements in British history and all of the millions of people who participated.

With the Poll Tax defeated, Dave and other grassroots activists tried to strategise about how they could keep the momentum going to take on other issues in their communities.

Dave Morris:  So, as the Anti-Poll Tax campaigning began to wane and the necessity for it, we, in Haringey, were saying, “How can we build on this? How can we learn from what we’ve achieved?” We encouraged Anti-Poll Tax groups to transform into general solidarity organisations supporting a wide range of campaigns like industrial disputes, claimants and struggles in local areas. What is really needed is ongoing solidarity, mutual aid and support for protests and making society better. That’s what we did in Haringey. All the groups transformed into solidarity groups and then, eventually, coalesced into one Haringey Solidarity Group, which still exists today. We’ve carried on having monthly meetings since 1992 and we’ve supported a wide range of different movements, not just campaigns but also initiatives, like an independent cinema. We do a newsletter which we distribute for free to the public. We’ve initiated various different housing action groups and so on. I don’t know if the same thing happened anywhere else in the UK but, certainly, it’s something essential that every area needs… every area in the world needs where there’s a network of support for challenging those in power, supporting each other and trying to make society better. I think that’s the lesson in real life that we learned from that movement but the wider lesson is that people’s power is unstoppable if it has enough public involvement and public support.

 [Outro music]

That brings us to the end of this double episode. But we have a great bonus episode where Dave talks more about some of the differing Left strategies within the campaign, about how protesters organised the October 1990 demo to monitor the police and push back against their lies, and about the activities of the Haringey Solidarity Group, which is available for our supporters on Patreon who make our work possible. It does take a lot of time and money producing these podcasts and running the rest of the Working Class History project, researching stories and reaching an audience of between 15 and 25 million a month. So if you do appreciate our work, please do sign up to support us and listen to that bonus content now. Just go to patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes.

If you can’t spare the cash right now, absolutely no problem. But help us get the word out about this podcast, tell your friends and colleagues and take a second to give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app, like Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

As always, we’ve got more information, sources and eventually a transcript on the webpage for this episode, link in the show notes.

One of the main sources we’ve used for these episodes is the excellent book, Poll Tax Rebellion, by Danny Burns. You can get hold of it on the link in the show notes.

Thanks to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda, Nick Williams, and Old Norm.

Our theme tune is Bella Ciao, thanks for permission to use it from Dischi del Sole. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Engin Hassan.

Thanks for listening, and catch you next time.

Transcribed by PODTRANSCRIBE

If you value our work please take a second to support Working Class History on Patreon!
Become a patron at Patreon!

Published by Working Class History

History isn't made by kings or politicians, it is made by us: billions of ordinary people.