Welsh Miners Refuse to Pay Income Tax

The 17 May 1919 issue of The Spectator gave me a little bit more about the tax strike of Welsh miners that year (see ♇ 1 December 2012):

…Another thing which the public will not stand is that the miners should pretend that they are advancing the rule of the people when they are really claiming privileges for themselves at the heavy expense of others. A good, or rather a bad, example of this tendency is provided by the Welsh miners, who are refusing to pay Income Tax. Some miners have been earning as much as £10 and £12 a week. Of course not all earn so much, but an appreciable number of miners earn more than is earned by clerks who pay their taxes like men. As Labour Members in the House of Commons recently asked Mr. Chamberlain to remove all indirect taxation, the contention of a great many working men seems to be that people who earn less than £250 a year should not pay any taxes at all, and that a man who earns his living with his hands should not pay any taxation, however large his income may be! What kind of democratic government does all this lead to? The aristocracy of former days put forth many foolish and wicked claims in the interests of a small class, but probably nothing more unashamedly aristocratic in spirit than this.

This piece comes from the 27 May 1843 Monmouthshire Merlin but is there credited to the Carmarthen Journal.

Rebecca and her Daughters.

There was a meeting of the respectable inhabitants of the hundred of Derllys, held at St. Clears, on Wednesday last, when resolutions were passed praying that a rural police be not established, the expense of which will fall heavily on the farmers and rate-payers of that hundred. Do not those hardened ruffians in crime, Rebecca and her Daughters, think they have already done enough of mischief, by destroying the gates and the toll-houses of the different trusts, as well as burning the plantation of that generous friend to the poor, Timothy Powell, Esq., of Penycoed, that they must inflict upon the innocent farmer punishment of the pocket, which is most dearly felt, by continuing their wicked acts, and thus compel the magistracy to form a rural police, which, as a matter of course, cannot be efficiently kept up without undergoing an immense expenditure. We sincerely hope that those lawless persons will see the propriety, by their peaceable and honest conduct, of not compelling the magistrates to introduce a rural police to protect the property of the people of that part of the county.

Henry Tobit Evans, in his book Rebecca and Her Daughters, writes that Timothy Powell was “a magistrate active against Rebecca” and that four of twenty-two acres of his plantation were burned on 30 April 1843.