Thatcher’s poll tax began to roll out in to strong opposition; in Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister in the face of riots and widespread tax refusal; in her pet tax was abolished. A total disaster.
But it seemed like a splendid idea at the time to the tories! Here’s a premature victory dance from the British right-wing, as found in the Spectator:
From [Wat] Tyler to Thatcher
Michael Trend predicts the failure of the great “poll tax” protest
“Remember !” proclaimed a banner gaily swung
aloft a “Stop the Poll Tax March” in Islington’s Upper Street
. I had happened
upon the dissenting brothers and sisters of that borough by accident; but
stayed to watch them troop by with some delight. The head of what I thought
was going to be a lengthy serpent of revolt was colourful enough with a
motley band of unkempt-looking youths dressed in peasant-like tatters. But,
alas, all too soon there were the police vans and coaches bringing up the
rear, with dozens of sleepy-looking constables peering out of the windows.
“We had expected many more,” said one enforcer of law and order; and then
shared with me his opinion that the general appearance of the marchers was
not supposed to be, as I had thought, a subtle historical reference to the
age of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw but was just “their normal life-style, if you
know what I mean.” But could there have been so few — a mere 50 souls — in
the people’s republic of Islington who felt so strongly on the pressing
subject of the oppression of the people by “Thatcher’s brutal poll tax”?
“Or, community charge — if you don’t mind,” as Mr. John Gummer, the minister
in charge of its implementation, puts it when being interviewed on the
subject. Noting how people refer to the new local tax that is going to
replace domestic rates has been of great interest to me since I visited
Scotland in . Many
Conservatives there then and, as I have since found, many in England
go on referring innocently to the
“poll tax” unaware of the supposed tremendous power of the name.
The Government itself has conceded that there is a problem of nomenclature as
its leaflet on the “community charge or so-called ‘poll tax’ ” shows. (Mr.
Paul Thomas in ’s
Spectator caught this particularly well in a
cartoon showing the Government’s leaflet for the “Community Charge or
so-called effing poll tax”.) But I suspect that as with the march
in Islington there is not a lot of mileage left in the game of the name. A
recent leaflet from the Association of District Councils and Association of
Metropolitan Authorities advertised a one-day seminar on “How Scotland is
coping with the ‘so-called poll tax’ ”. When a so-called “poll tax” becomes a
“so-called poll tax” we have reached a level of absurdity that shows we are
probably ready to drop the whole business.
The historical connection with the dark days of the Middle Ages has also worn
pretty thin. For all the university Left’s attempt in
to present the
Peasants’ Revolt as some glorious movement of early Chartism, that
depressingly brutal episode in our history (in which the 14th-century poll
tax played only a limited role) means next to nothing to our historically
illiterate population these days.
So I say, “Forget !”, and look back instead
to — in Scotland. When,
, I went to speak to
Mr. John MacKay,
head of the Conservative organisation there, I could tell that the view put
forward by Labour and the
SNP that
the poll tax would be a serious blow to the Government was treated with some
respect by the Tories. By this spring, however, when I was back in Scotland,
that view had changed and Mr. MacKay was a much happier man. In particular,
he pointed out, the standing of the Tories in the Scottish opinion polls had
not been damaged at all by the introduction of the new tax. In contrast his
party had recovered somewhat; the slump had come during the re-rating
exercise — the final straw that finally broke the back of the old rating
system north of the border.
I was in Edinburgh just as the collection of the new tax was beginning and
saw that the
SNP’s
“Can pay, but won’t pay” campaign was a flop. A promised list of 100,000
supporters never turned up. I noted a tiny crowd of protesters — fewer even
than their Islington brothers — gathering outside local municipal offices
with SNP
banners, “Say No to the Poll Tax.” Twenty minutes later I passed that way
again; a light drizzle had come and they had gone. In fact almost everybody
in Scotland has registered for the community charge — the only dispute is
over whether the official figure is 98 or 99 per cent. This, of course, is
very much in the interests of the large local authorities (mostly Labour) who
never wanted to see their finances and electoral rolls drop. Now, much to the
satisfaction of the Conservatives, these same local authorities are having to
work flat out explaining to their voters something, curiously, that they had
not mentioned before — the rebate system for those who genuinely can’t afford
to pay. The “Say No” campaign had a good year, but, like all good things, has
come to an end.
There were many special reasons why this should have been so and why the
English experience is, and will be, different. Many Scots felt
, with some justice, I think, that they
were being used as guinea pigs. Scotland is a Labour stronghold (its only
stronghold, some would add) and the Conservatives under Mrs. Thatcher are
widely hated there; moreover the anti-poll tax campaign proved to be a useful
focus of all the opposition forces. This pattern is not being repeated this
year in England as the registration forms now begin to go out here. The great
fear for the Conservatives about the community charge south of the border has
been that it would become the mid-term nightmare of this parliament much as
the abolition of the
GLC was
of the last. When the legislation was going through the House of Commons
there were many Tory
MP
fainthearts who voiced anxieties about what they saw as the electoral damage
that the charge would bring them in their several seats. When I asked John
Gummer about this earlier this year I could tell that he was keenly aware of
the GLC
analogy and was absolutely determined not to become another
Patrick Jenkin.
In recent weeks he has pressed ahead with great signs of confidence (although
the public relations razzmatazz of his launch, when he opened himself to
ridicule from Labour as “Postman Pat,” was a mistake). Many attempts have
been made by the opposition to stir up the “Scottish experience” in the
introduction of the community charge in England but they have made little
headway. In particular Greenwich’s attempt to “stop Gummer’s leaflet” proved
ineffective and very expensive (no doubt the good burghers of that borough
will not mind paying for it). The public response to the community charge in
England has been much more muted than in Scotland and it really does begin to
look likely that the nightmare will not happen after all. The earlier careful
thought that went into the planning of the charge at the Department of the
Environment — whose officials knew better than anyone else that the rates
system was beyond redemption — is beginning to pay off.
Many local Conservative associations are reporting that, taken overall, the
simplicity of the community charge (everyone pays the same) is a positive
feature; the argument that local authorities will be made more accountable to
their voters through the tax is beginning to be looked at more carefully — it
was used as a campaigning point by the Tories who recently won control of
Bradford. Mr Gummer’s most pressing problem now is to persuade the press that
they have been deprived of the “story” they have become so used to writing on
the new tax; maybe he should point them towards an alternative scare story
for this mid-term Government (there are, surely, many to choose from).
That would leave him with only one further problem; for the surest sign that
political opinions of the community charge have changed is the growing number
of institutions and individuals who are lining up to take the credit for it.
Among these have been the Adam Smith Institute — well-known boasters — who
have taken to claiming in their literature that they “invented” the charge.
More significant, however, have been the gentle noises coming from Mr.
Kenneth Baker (who ran the original working group that set out the terms of
the new tax) that he would be quite happy to take the credit for this
necessary reform done as painlessly as possible. Mr. Gummer would do well to
keep a closer watch henceforth on his political friends who have an eye to
the future rather than his political opponents with their eye on the past.
