Can't Pay, Won't Pay

The Fight to Stop the Poll Tax

Simon Hannah

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786806055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Affairs & Administration
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Thirty years ago, a social movement helped bring down one of the most powerful British Prime Ministers of the 20th Century. For the 30th anniversary of the Poll Tax rebellion, Simon Hannah looks back on those tumultuous days of resistance, telling the story of the people that beat the bailiffs, rioted for their rights and defied a government.

Starting in Scotland where the 'Community Charge' was first trialled, Can't Pay, Won't Pay immerses the reader in the gritty history of the rebellion. Amidst the drama of large scale protests and blockaded estates a number of key figures and groups emerge: Neil Kinnock and Tommy Sheridan; Militant, Class War and the Metropolitan Police.

Assessing this legacy today, Hannah demonstrates the centrality of the Poll Tax resistance as a key chapter in the history of British popular uprisings, Labour Party factionalism, the anti-socialist agenda and failed Tory ideology.

1

A Brief History of Tax Resistance and Revolutions

Everyone complains about taxes: that they are too high, that other people should be paying more, or that tax revenue is not being properly spent by the government. Some people even complain that taxes exist at all – they think all government is tyranny and that we should be left to the tender mercies of the free market and our individual capacities. The concept of a government taking money from the people it rules over is, however, as old as government itself; indeed, it is what provides the financial basis for the political and administrative rulers of our lives. Many of the earliest tax revenues were not allocated on the basis of need, but were used to pay for military adventures or grand palaces for despots. Securing taxes from the lower orders often involved barbaric violence from armed men – the dreaded bailiffs – would arrive at your door and demand payment on behalf of the local lord or the king. For many people their only experience of government was this seizing of their money or goods as taxes.

This process was often bound up with religion too. The tithes you would pay to the church were bound up with a financial obligation to save your mortal soul – better to pay what little you had now than languish in hell for all eternity. In the Islamic states a special tax known as the Jizyah was levied on non-believers. In the Holy Roman Empire, Jews, who were considered the property of the Crown, had to pay an additional tax known as the Leibzoll. This was paid so that Jews would be ‘tolerated’ in European countries. It was still being levied in some places in the early nineteenth century. Others enjoyed a privileged position when it came to tax – the scribes of Ancient Egypt, for example, avoided conscription or hard labour in return for administering taxation on behalf of the pharaohs.

Because taxation is so bound up with the social and political order – it being the primary way in which people engaged with their rulers before the introduction of liberal democracy – it often throws into sharp relief some of the contradictions at the heart of societies. Taxes are essentially a political question. As such, the question of taxation has on occasion caused massive social upheaval. The most famous example is that of Britain’s American colonies. The British government wanted to assert its right to tax the colonies, extracting finance from them just as they extracted raw materials from colonial lands. When the government allowed the British East India Company to trade tea from England without customs tax, while imposing onerous taxes on American colonists (backed up by soldiers and warships), the pro-independence Sons of Liberty threw crates of tea into the sea at the Boston docks. In the 1770s, the slogan ‘no taxation without representation!’ expressed the colonists’ anger at being subjects of a king and parliament over the sea while having no say in the laws governing their own communities. Thus began a revolutionary struggle for independence that culminated in the formation of what became the most powerful capitalist country in the world.

The British too have a long history of grievances against overbearing taxation. There is the famous legend of Lady Godiva, a noblewoman in the eleventh century who was so distressed by her husband’s excessive taxation on the people that she begged him to reduce them. He agreed to do so only if she rode naked through the streets to prove her commitment to the cause. Sitting naked on a horse, her body shrouded only by her long hair, her act of public shame persuaded her husband to lower the taxes.

The English Civil War began in large part over a dispute between the Crown and Parliament over who could levy taxes and for what ends. It was a revolutionary struggle waged by the nascent British bourgeoisie, struggling against the stifling restrictions of the feudalist monarchy and seeking a degree of sovereignty over their own affairs. The resulting conflict changed the course of history and led to the only period in British history in which there was no monarch on the throne. As also illustrated by previous conflicts like the German Peasant War, the right to raise taxes is inseparable from the question of who has control – of who the ruling class is and what kind of state they can create.

Rebellions over tax collection were recorded in Worcester in 1041, in Scotland in 1725 (over taxes on malt) and across England in 1733, when Prime Minister Robert Walpole imposed an excise tax on goods which infuriated shopkeepers and traders. That particular crisis was again caused by Parliament needing to raise money for its wars as the national debt was ballooning, meaning that more revenue streams had to be found. Since import and export tariffs on goods were usually raised at docks, this had the effect of encouraging smuggling on an almost industrial scale. In response, Walpole proposed excise duties that gave extensive powers of search and seizure to tax officials as they checked goods not at the port of entry but in warehouses or even shops. Petitions to MPs gave way to angry protests and the threat of a possible uprising, causing Walpole to withdraw the excise duties. Claiming that ‘the act could not be carried into execution without an armed force, and that there would be an end of the liberties of England if supplies were to be raised by the sword’,¹ Walpole only obscured the fact that throughout history tax collection has always ultimately been a question of force and power, just as government is more generally.

Another tax whose results can still be seen today was the Window Tax of 1696, an ‘assessed tax’ which was a way of squeezing the upper classes. The seventeenth-century gentry who flaunted their wealth with powdered wigs, male servants (far more expensive to keep than female servants) and large houses with many windows, found themselves taxed on all these items. Some thrifty well-to-do bricked up their windows to frustrate government officials. These bricked windows are a sight you can still see today in some parts of Britain.

Such examples aside, the burden of taxation has often fallen on those least able to pay. The early nineteenth century was dominated by issues around taxation, another symptom of the growing strength of the capitalist class and their struggles with the aristocratic landowners and their own working classes. The hugely expensive Napoleonic Wars had bled most people dry. The many resulting economic and social issues were compounded by the disastrous 1816 ‘year without a summer’ (also known as ‘eighteen hundred and starve to death’), when crops failed after the sun was blotted out by a volcanic eruption the year before in Indonesia. In addition, the Corn Laws – a mixture of tariffs and outright bans on imported grain – led to artificially high food prices, all to preserve the profits of the big landowners. In those days the majority of wages was spent on bread because it made up the bulk of working people’s diets. The clamour for constitutional and political reform grew louder. The government responded with violent suppression: the riots at Spa Fields in 1816, and the Peterloo massacre of 1819.

The crop failures and high food prices led to an upsurge in the Radical Press – newspapers with an explicitly liberal message, usually paid for by industrialists struggling against government policy that they felt favoured the landowners over the capitalist class. The government retaliated with a newspaper tax in 1815, intended to price such publications out of the hands of the urban poor. This led to the creation of ‘penny papers’: cheap mass-produced newspapers designed for popular consumption, the Poor Man’s Guardian being the most famous. Pioneering radical journalists like William Cobbett wrote disparagingly about the ‘tax-eaters’, the bloated and corrupt sinecures, who lavished money to ‘build new palaces and pull down others, and to pay loan-mongers and all that enormous tribe; and to be expended in various other ways not at all necessary to the well-being of the nation’.²

People fought back. The Anti-Corn Laws League (ACLL) was led by John Bright and Richard Cobden, one a liberal manufacturer, the other a Quaker and noted orator – some said the best of his day. Their campaign recruited mass forces, vying with the far more radical Chartist movement for support among working people. The Corn Laws were eventually repealed in 1846, representing a victory for the industrial classes and their free trade cause. The repeal brought cheaper food but also ushered in an economic boom which strengthened the forces of industrialisation and commercialisation in Britain.

For the purposes of this book, however, the most famous historical precedent for a Poll Tax (essentially a tax on people) in Britain occurred in 1377–81. The young Richard II imposed the new tax on everyone to help fund the Hundred Years War against France – at that point in its 43rd year. The Poll Tax was levied repeatedly, with the amount growing each year and the peasants’ ability to pay getting harder. More people were vanishing into the woods to become outlaws in order to escape the tax officials. A mass uprising saw peasant armies from Kent and Essex invade London, behead the king’s Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and burn down the homes of the rich. The uprising was brutally put down and its leaders hung, drawn and quartered – the fate of all traitors to the Crown. However the fear that the uprising provoked in the ruling elites meant that the idea of a Poll Tax imposed on the masses was finished for over 600 years.

That is, until the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. It is a surprise, then, that by the time Thatcher came to consider the Community Charge in the 1980s, she had not learnt from history that it can be perilous to play around with taxes.

The moral economy

Taxation is, in its simplest form, a political question of the redistribution of resources and wealth. Taxes presuppose some kind of money economy (or at least commodities that can be seized in kind) and the existence of a state with a bureaucracy that requires funds in order to operate. As a general rule, the more complex the state the more complex the tax arrangements. And as history demonstrates, the political question of taxation is one which derives both from the practical realities of the governing apparatus requiring funds and the philosophical basis of that apparatus. As human society developed and the concept of individual rights and social contracts became more commonplace, the idea of governing by consent and not by explicit force meant that taxation had to be carefully considered and calculated by the ruling classes. As a result taxes can be either regressive, based on onerous calculations over who should pay which target the poorest, or progressive, based on sliding scales linked to ability to pay or specifically targeted at the rich through wealth, capital or corporation taxes. Taxes at their worst involve the powerful bleeding dry the lower classes for their own designs, while at their best they lead to a degree of social cohesion based on the state paying for welfare and healthcare, an approach that became synonymous with European social democracy.

There are times, however, when the priorities and needs of people become dislocated from the legal framework of the ruling class. When that happens people decide their own rules on a community level. There is a popular term for this that both historians and sociologists like to use: the moral economy. This refers to the way that ethical questions govern everyday economic decisions ranging from consumerism to economic production itself. It might be part of the moral economy to steal, if you are starving. An early win, indeed arguably the key win for the Anti-Poll Tax movement, was to clearly embed opposition to the tax in the context of a moral economy, such that it became a good and a right not to pay it.

Edward P. Thompson writes about the role of the moral economy in The Making of the English Working Class, focusing chiefly on the importance of the apparently spontaneous outbreak of mass resistance and direct action. Thompson uses the example of bread riots in reaction to shopkeepers putting up prices during shortages to make more profit. The intense anger about this tapped into ‘traditional’ forms of moral economy: that it is wrong to profiteer from poverty, that there are bonds of community more important than making some extra cash from desperate people. In Thompson’s words: ‘behind every such form of popular direct action some legitimising notion of right is to be found’.³ Taking that as a starting point we can see that the Anti-Poll Tax movement also fostered a strong moral economy, harkening back to older traditions of popular resistance, and even invoking the near revolution of 1381. The notion of a right to refuse to pay an onerous tax became a material force in the minds of millions.

In such ways the question of fairness comes to dominate the national debate. People will generally put up with all manner of deprivations and suffering if they believe that it is somehow right to do so. Naturally what is considered fair over time changes as society moves to the left or the right on any given political question. In one context people may think it is fair to take in refugees and those suffering from oppression and wars abroad. In another context those same people might consider an influx of foreigners to be an outrage and a scandal. The same applies to the evolving social contract with the government.

Taxes are inevitably seen through this prism of fairness, in terms of the moral economy of whether it is right or just to pay a tax and who pays it. This is not to conceive of taxes in a simple liberal sense: in a bourgeois democracy the concept of fairness is a complex one, run through with class politics. Fairness in a class-based society is a complicated issue. Clearly, an economy that allows some people to get rich beyond any reasonable measure of need, while others are made homeless or rely on food banks, is not a ‘fair’ society. Nevertheless, ideologically, the notion that our capitalist society is rooted in human nature, and that our rulers have a right to rule while we have a right to vote for who rules us, is a hegemonic belief.

The taxation our rulers impose on us is a class question, but it is always mediated by the general sense of a just and right balance of responsibility. In the 1970s, income tax on the very rich was 83 per cent, a price that – it was argued – had to be paid for wealth redistribution and funding the welfare state. It was Thatcher’s great revolution (alongside Ronald Reagan in the United States) to rapidly reduce the top rate of income tax – today it stands at levels of around 20 per cent. The rich now believe that it is ‘unfair’ to ask them to pay more. This is why tax dodging by corporations and tax evasion by the super-rich are politically charged issues – if they become too widespread they create a sense of unfairness and therefore begin to erode the legitimacy of the ruling class. The hegemony can falter and crack. As such, the first question to ask when it comes to a historical account of the Poll Tax is: why was the tax not considered fair?

2

Why a Poll Tax?

‘There is an alternative. A poll tax is clearly feasible, fair and desirable. What is needed now is the political will to introduce it.’

Michael Forsyth, Conservative MP

The 1980s in Britain was a decade of the haves and the have-nots. Thatcher sold people a fantasy of self-reliance and individualism that was the closest Britain ever got to its own version of the American Dream. Some people got very rich and saw substantial improvements in their standard of living. This was the ‘loadsamoney’ generation: yuppies, stockbrokers and speculators enjoying life after the Big Bang of financial deregulation, flaunting their wealth with pin-striped suits and mobile phones that had batteries the size of large bricks. Some sections of the working class who bought their own homes or who sought to escape their class background cashed in on the new money economy, flash boys looking to make a buck from the rolling back of the public sector. To grease the palms of the rich further, the top rate of income tax was steadily cut throughout the decade in successive budgets.

Britain did not have a Wild West mythology to fall back on, so the new frontier to tame was the inner cities, populated by the urban poor. They became the equivalent of the bandits and ‘savages’ of White American folklore. By the mid-1980s the Tories were riding high on a short-lived economic boom fuelled by cheap credit and tax cuts. Privatisation had boosted some businesses, and the deregulation of the City of London was being heralded across the media as a bold and revolutionary step towards making Britain a finance capital powerhouse. The miners had been beaten and the left in local government had been crushed. The New Right had convinced a generation of their vision. All that was needed was their continued votes and their faith that the rewards would eventually come.

But for the poorest 10 per cent life did not improve. They earned on average £151.58 a week in 1979 but only £158.57 in 1990 – an increase of just 4.6 per cent. Child poverty doubled during Thatcher’s reign, from 1.7 million in 1979 to 3.3 million in 1990 – an increase from 13 per cent to 30 per cent.¹ Some parts of the country were economically abandoned, notably in the North. Industrial centres where generations of families had worked the docks, forged steel or dug coal wer...