Checking an anti-Poll Tax article

The Poll Tax Rebellion

March 1990, what a month! All across the country, every night on the telly, every morning in the newspapers, all day conversations in the street, Poll Tax, Poll Tax, Poll Tax. Two years of continuous hard work against the tax in Scotland, a year everywhere else, and at last we seemed to be moving. Protests in Bristol, Brixton, Shepton Mallet, Leeds, Hackney… a rolling circus of hatred against the tax, each action angrier and more ferocious than the last. There was a real sense of excitement—what would happen next?
The March 31st demonstration felt like it was going to be the crescendo, the finale of everything that had gone before: it was the start of the long battle ahead, it would show the government and the councils what a fight they had on their hands—this was where everybody would be together in the center of “power,” this was going to be the big one… and it was.

The Campaign

In the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government, which had already succeeded in imposing several bitter defeats on British workers and poor people, attempted to implement a new flat rate tax. Officially, the tax was called the “Community Charge,” an instance of Orwellian doublespeak if there ever was one; but across the UK it was dubbed the Poll Tax, in reference to an extremely unpopular tax that had sparked a peasants’ revolt in 1381. Because this tax demanded the same payments from everyone without reference to income, a great many people simply couldn’t afford to pay it, and opposition to it was widespread from the outset.
Most of the Labour Party, Britain’s equivalent of the US Democratic Party, paid lip service to this opposition, but still insisted that citizens would have to pay it. Their rationale was summed up thus by one representative: “This is a party that aspires to be in government… I don’t believe such a party can afford selective amnesia when it comes to the law of the land.” Others argued against a campaign of non-payment on orthodox Marxist grounds. One Socialist Workers’ Party pamphlet read:
“Community organization stands in stark contrast to the power of workers organized in the workplace. Community politics diverts people away from the means to win, from the need to mobilize working class activity on a collective basis. And by putting the emphasis on the individual’s will to resist, difficulties and defeats will be the responsibility of the individual alone…
“The biggest danger for socialists is to substitute individual non-payment organized through community campaigns for mass working class action.”
This rhetoric will sound all too familiar to anarchists who have more recently been subjected to arguments against people organizing themselves within their communities as they see fit, rather than according to the dictates of a power-hungry vanguard.
Despite most established organizations refusing to support non-payment, grassroots Anti-Poll Tax Unions sprang up everywhere to encourage and facilitate this form of resistance. Based in informal circles of friends and neighbors, these groups swiftly picked up steam and began to coordinate their actions on a national level. A typical group would cover its neighborhood in posters, set up literature tables on the street, go door to door distributing information, hold weekly meetings, and organize other regular events. Many opened offices with public hours and set up telephone hotlines to provide support for those who could not or would not pay.
This campaign drew attention to the massive numbers of people who were unwilling to pay the tax, which in turn strengthened the courage and resolve of non-payers. Anti-Poll Tax activists circulated petitions committing to non-payment, held public burnings of tax forms, and attacked local offices accepting tax payments. Canvassers who attempted to deliver the forms were also threatened or attacked. Other activists crippled the judicial system by means of delaying tactics, and when non-payers were taken to court, local Unions provided legal support and volunteers to accompany them through the judicial process.
In some cases, bailiffs were sent out to requisition property from those who did not pay; activists distributed information about the limits of bailiff’s legal rights, and in many cases mobilized throngs to defend people’s houses from their incursions. Phone trees were often used to convene a crowd immediately at a house at which a bailiff was due; some bailiffs had their own houses attacked by angry mobs.
As a result of all this activity, many councils could not recruit the staff to implement the new tax, while Anti-Poll Tax Unions received more and more volunteers. In the end, over seventeen million people refused to pay the tax—practically a quarter of the eligible population!
All this local activity was complemented by a series of increasingly confrontational protests. Towns all across Britain held local demonstrations. In early March of 1990, five thousand people turned out for an event in Bristol, and when the police attempted to arrest a few of them, the crowd pulled them free, kicking one arresting officer unconscious and hauling another six officers out of their van. The next day, in London, at a demonstration of equal numbers, protesters attempted to enter the council meeting at the town hall. The police charged, and in the ensuing riot fifty corporate shop windows were smashed.
The stage was now set for the nationwide demonstration that had been called for March 31st. There was some conflict over what to anticipate: Militant, the left wing of the Labour party, which had attempted to obstruct and co-opt radical organizing since the beginning of the campaign, at first only expected 20,000 people to turn out. This gross underestimation was the result of their being totally out of touch with the grass roots of the Anti-Poll Tax movement. They had arranged for the march to end in a rally at Trafalgar Square, but they realized only three days before the event that the crowd would probably exceed the square’s 60,000-person capacity. They requested permission to divert the march to Hyde Park, but the police refused.
The riot that ensued was the biggest in recent British history and, together with the non-payment campaign, had far-reaching consequences throughout British society.

The Riot

In the days before the demonstration, two feeder marches followed the routes of the two armies of the Peasants Revolt of 1381. These arrived in South London at Kennington Park, south of the River Thames, on March 31st; starting at noon, they were joined by between 180,000 and 250,000 people.
The march set off from Kennington Park at one-thirty in the afternoon, and began moving faster than planned because anarchists pushed open the main gates of the park so people were not forced through the smaller side gates. This meant that the march spilled over onto both sides of the road and stayed that way despite police and stewarding efforts.
An hour later, Trafalgar Square was nearing capacity. Unable to continue moving into the Square, the huge march slowed down and eventually stopped in Whitehall. The police, fearing a surge towards the newly installed security gates of Downing Street, blocked off the top and bottom of Whitehall. The section of the march which stopped opposite the Downing Street entrance happened to contain a large number of anarchists and a group called Bikers Against The Poll Tax, all of whom were angered by several heavy-handed arrests, including one of a man in a wheelchair.
Meanwhile, the tail end of the march had been diverted at the Parliament Square end of Whitehall. A large Class War banner was at the head of this diverted and unpoliced march. They led the march up the Embankment for a few hundred yards, then turned off up Richmond Terrace, bringing the diverted march out into Whitehall, directly opposite the entrance of Downing Street.
Mounted riot police were brought up and charged the crowd, ostensibly to clear people out of Whitehall—despite both retreat and advance being blocked by further lines of police. The Whitehall section of the march resisted and eventually fought its way out into Trafalgar Square.
The mounted riot police then charged straight into the packed crowds in Trafalgar Square. Soon thereafter, four riot vans drove directly into the crowd outside the South African Embassy, apparently attempting to force their way through to the entrance to Whitehall where police were re-grouping. The crowd attacked the vans with sticks, scaffolding poles, and other items in order to slow them down and protect the lives of those in their path.
The police then closed all the main Underground stations in the area and sealed the southern exits of Trafalgar Square, making it difficult to disperse. Buses had been parked south of the river, so many people tried to move south. Sections of the crowd, reported to be unemployed coal miners, climbed scaffolding and rained debris on the police below. The builders’ portakabins below the scaffolding were set on fire, followed by a room in the South African Embassy on the other side of the Square. The smoke from the two fires caused near darkness in the Square.
The police finally opened the southern exits of the Square and slowly forced people out. A large section of the crowd was moved back down Northumberland Avenue and eventually allowed over the River Thames to find their way back to their buses. Two other sections were pushed north into the West End, where they commenced wrecking and looting. Police ordered all pubs in the area to close; together with apparently random police assaults on shoppers, spectators, and tourists, this heightened tensions by forcing drunken and disgruntled crowds onto the streets.
Fighting between rioters and police continued until three in the morning. Rioters were selective in their choice of targets: they attacked The Body Shop, McDonalds, Barclays Bank, Tie Rack, Armani, Ratners, National Westminster Bank, and Liberty’s, as well as banks, Stringfellow’s nightclub, and car showrooms. Expensive cars such as Porsches and Jaguars were overturned and set on fire, while other potential targets—such as pubs, small shops, older cars, and the offices of the Irish airline Aer Lingus—were left untouched.

The Aftermath

The riot left over five hundred police injured, and ten times that many human beings. Three hundred forty one people were arrested during it, and another one hundred and fifty were arrested in the course of a police inquiry that included dawn raids on the houses of local Anti-Poll Tax activists and tabloids printing photos of police suspects.
Not only the Thatcher government, but also the police, major labor unions, and the Labour Party all blamed the riot on extremists, hoping thus to discredit the non-payment movement. But membership in Anti-Poll Tax Unions tripled in the weeks following the riot; it had not alienated the public, but instead catalyzed revolt and shaken the foundations of power.
To handle the legal fallout of the riot, the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign was set up: an independent, defendant-controlled group committed to unconditional support of all defendants and to providing general legal support for all involved in resistance to the poll tax. The front organization through which Militant attempted to control the Anti-Poll Tax movement had initially condemned the rioting and looked to wash its hands of the arrestees; now it belatedly attempted to set up a competing group of its own, but ultimately was forced to concede defeat and support the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign.
The Campaign was mysteriously able to acquire more than fifty hours of police video tapes covering the riot. These contributed to the acquittals of a great number of defendants, as they proved that the police had fabricated and inflated many charges. The Campaign also organized a solidarity demonstration and march the following October, which was again violently attacked by police. This time, however, the legal support network was organized well enough that this was a PR disaster for the authorities. In conjunction with the trials of the demonstrators of March 31st, this confirmed serious public doubts about the policing methods which had been introduced during the previous decade.
Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister before the end of the year; in his first parliamentary speech as Prime Minister, her successor John Major announced that the Poll Tax would be abolished. Thatcher’s downfall is largely traced to the debacle surrounding the attempt to introduce the Poll Tax.
The Poll Tax rebellion also called into question the legitimacy of the British left wing. Almost all its parties and organizations had opposed a non-payment campaign, and yet it was exactly such a campaign that defeated the Poll Tax and the politicians who instituted it. Just four months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Poll Tax riot offered a vivid image of what effective political activity looked like, in contrast to the bumbling and obstructing of the Left.