Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Britain / U.K. (see also: Ireland, Scotland, Wales) →
Poll Tax Rebellion, 1987–91 →
Danny Burns
Danny Burns’s book Poll Tax Rebellion (AK Press, 1992) tells the story of the grassroots tax resistance campaign that sank the poll tax in Britain and dragged Margaret Thatcher’s decade-long reign as British prime minister down with it.
Background
Margaret Thatcher’s span as British prime minister included a paring down of the welfare state, aggressive attempts to reduce the power of organized labor, privatization and deregulation, and a flattening of the tax rate.
You may recognize this deck of cards as being similar to what Ronald Reagan played with in this same time period (), and indeed the two were influenced by a similar set of economists and ideologues.
The poll tax was meant to replace local property taxes, which had been set on a local, council-by-council basis.
Thatcher-aligned Conservatives disliked these property taxes, which were often raised by left-leaning local councils, and which applied only to property owners (or, indirectly, to renters).
Using an argument familiar to those following current debates about the personal income tax in the United States, these critics said that because many voters did not pay these taxes, but received the benefit of the government services the taxes paid for, they were biased toward ratcheting up the tax rate to effectively confiscate and redistribute wealth from property owners, which was unfair to those taxpayers and had negative consequences in general.
To fix this problem, they believed the tax should instead be applied to everybody alike.
And in case the resulting voter pressure wasn’t enough to keep the rates down, the central government should have the ability to cap the poll tax and prevent spendthrift councils from raising it too far.
And so the poll tax was born.
It faced immediate opposition, but at first it was unclear how this opposition would take form.
The Labour party wanted people to petition and protest against the tax, but they mostly wanted people to resent it and to identify it with the Conservatives because Labour saw it as a winning issue — the party had no interest in trying to actually defeat the tax as they felt it worked to their advantage.
In addition, Labour worried that if people tried to avoid the tax, for instance by not registering as residents of a tax district, they might also try to stay off the voter rolls and thus reduce Labour’s pool of potential voters.
To those targeted by the tax, though, resentment and protest were not going to be enough.
For people at the bottom of the income and wealth scale, the poll tax was a considerable hit, and resistance wasn’t just an option, but a necessity.
Mass-resistance to the tax was organized in a strikingly grassroots fashion, often confronting antagonism not only from the government but also from establishment opposition parties and organized labor.
The resistance to the poll tax was widespread, varied, and ultimately successful.
In 1990, Thatcher resigned as prime minister and a new team took over the Conservative party and immediately flung the albatross of the poll tax from its neck, replacing it with a tiered-rate property tax.
Today I’m going to review some of the tactics that made this campaign successful.
Propaganda and spin
The very name “poll tax” was a propaganda coup for the opposition.
The government had rolled out the program with the benign-sounding name “community charge,” but the “poll tax” name stuck.
Poll taxes are never popular, and resistance to poll taxes has a resonance in British history with previous popular struggles.
The victims of the poll tax were a sympathetic lot, including pensioners, the disabled, poor families, student nurses, and people with elderly live-in family members, and the resistance movement was not shy about using this to its advantage.
Public burning of tax bills, and frequent leafletting and postering kept the resistance in the public eye and made sure people knew there was an ongoing resistance campaign.
A community arts group created a travelling performance about the poll tax and how to resist it, and enacted it in various communities.
Take pride in resistance
Some councils tried the old trick of publishing a list of people who were behind on their taxes as a way of “shaming” them before their neighbors.
Instead, when this happened, people who were resisting their taxes but who were not on the list wrote letters-to-the-editor of the periodicals where the lists appeared to ask why their names had not been included on the roster.
Myth and legend
The resistance movement summoned up images from respected tax resistance campaigns of Britain’s past as a way to make its movement seem more respectable and part of a patriotic lineage.
There were references to the women’s suffrage movement and the American revolution, but even more often to Wat Tyler’s poll tax rebellion of .
The phrase “No Poll Tax Here,” seen on many of the signs and posters used by the resistance movement, also hearkened back to the Reform Act-related tax resistance of , in which people placed “No Taxes Paid Here” signs in their windows.
(The anti-poll tax resistance was so popular and successful that nowadays it is the model hearkened back to by movements like the current resistance to the Household Tax in Ireland.)
Surveys
On at least one occasion, the resistance movement took a door-to-door survey of households both to gauge their interest in resisting, and as a pretense to spread the resistance idea.
One result of the surveys was that between the people who planned to pay, and the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay was a large (55%) middle-ground of people who were sympathetic with resistance and would be willing to resist if they knew enough people were with them.
On seeing this result, Burns says, “we knew that non-payment was going to be massive.”
Another clever variety of survey was this:
[One] group then mass-produced a window poster which said “No Poll Tax Here.”
The poster was dropped through the letter-boxes of 2000 households and the group waited to see who put them up.
Posters appeared in about 100 windows.
Activists the went round and spoke to these people individually, inviting them to attend the next organising meeting…
Drown them with paperwork
Implementing the poll tax required registering everyone in the United Kingdom, and keeping track of them as they moved from one council district to another.
The people who designed the poll tax program underestimated how difficult it would be to do this adequately, even if there hadn’t been a lack of enthusiasm for the project by the individual councils or outright opposition from those being taxed.
Some of the earliest resistance tactics aimed at exacerbating this problem, and the only tactic promoted by the Labour party that could be described as an actual resistance tactic falls in this category:
[The “Stop It” campaign’s] one serious initiative was the “send it back” campaign, which told activists to return the registration forms and ask awkward questions of the council officers.
Its aim was to delay the system and to make “a legitimate protest.”
Burns notes that this was of questionable effectiveness, in part because it was not pursued very vigorously, and in part because by encouraging people to register in any form — even in a temporarily obstructionist way — this provided registration information to the poll tax collecting authorities that could later be used against resisters.
Clogging the bureaucracy with paperwork was nonetheless an effective tactic, particularly later in the resistance struggle as the councils had to go through the process of pursuing those who did not pay:
…councils were inundated with correspondence.
Many people genuinely didn’t understand what the Poll Tax was about.
Others mounted campaigns to delay registration by endlessly asking questions about the form.
All of these had to be answered.
Councils sat under a mountain of paper.
Everything they did seemed to create more work.
The paper-work involved with administering the charge is enormous — and likely to get worse.
Backlogs switch from one area of activity to another.
Indeed, local authorities cannot really do anything without generating more paper-work.
If they attempt to canvas more people for registration they will also produce more people who will refuse to register.
―Poll Tax Legal Group
Make enforcement expensive
Whereas in the past, summonses issued by councils against people in arrears on their taxes had been pro forma things, rubber-stamped by judges without the summoned defendant even being expected to turn up — when people were given summonses for their poll taxes, the resistance movement encouraged them to go to court and to use whatever means they could to stretch out the time of their court appearance.
Mathematically, if even a fraction of the people summonsed actually turned up in court and were given even a few minutes of time to explain themselves, the courts would be unable to handle the load.
Local Anti-Poll Tax unions trained members in the law so they could help individual resisters stand up for their rights in court.
There were frequent examples in which thousands of summons were dismissed for technical errors or just because the courts were overwhelmed.
Warn people enforcers are coming
In a strategy modeled on one used in South Africa’s apartheid-era townships, neighborhoods declared themselves “no-go” areas for sheriffs, and posted watchouts to warn people if bailiffs or other enforcers were on the way.
Activists in Edinburgh formed a group called “Scum-busters” which was equipped with CB radios and squadrons of cars.
Telephone trees were organised; bailiff companies were monitored; their car registration numbers were taken and distributed to activists in all the local areas.
The Camden group recruited taxi firms to keep an eye out for bailiff vehicles while they did their rounds and to call in their spottings.
Try to win over tax collectors and collaborators
The movement tried, without success, to convince local councils — many of which were left-leaning and not sympathetic to Conservative policies — to resign their offices, or to illegally refuse to enact their budgets according to the poll tax law.
They also failed to convince the labor union representing the workers who worked in the bureau enacting the poll tax to refuse to implement the tax.
The movement had unexpected allies, of a sort, in the bailiffs who were assigned to distrain goods from tax defaulters.
Being used to unorganized, ashamed, impoverished pushovers, these collection agencies were overwhelmed by organized resistance and found themselves unable to recoup the expenses of collection.
For this reason some went bankrupt, while others were reluctant for merely financial reasons to handle cases of distraint for failure to pay poll tax.
Social boycott of tax collectors and collaborators
The movement also used the threat of shunning or boycott to discourage people from cooperating with the poll tax.
The government tried to recruit newsstands to be deposit points for poll tax payments, as convenient supplements for government-run depots like post offices.
But when the resistance movement got wind of this, “communities made it plain that they would no longer use the shops” of those who collaborated in this way.
Intimidate tax collectors and collaborators
In some cases, the intimidation went beyond threats of boycotts and shunning to vandalism and violence:
Windows have been smashed and graffiti daubed over businesses which have become agents… to collect the community charge… one agent in Patchway has now declined taking an agency after a brick was thrown through his window… [another] had the words “Poll Tax scab” and “you’re the first” scrawled in white paint across his window.
A Circle K store in Cardiff… had its door locks jammed with superglue.
Posters implicitly or explicitly threatening bailiffs and judges with lynch mob justice were not uncommon:
One showing a vicious dog, read “Bailiffs? Make my day!”
Another showing a picture of Malcolm X holding a machine gun [sic] looking out from behind the curtains, read: “Bailiffs we’re ready.”
A third showed a picture of a bailiff swinging in a noose.
It read “Dead bailiffs don’t knock on doors.”
In some areas bailiffs and registration officers were photographed and their portraits were reproduced on posters which read “wanted” and listed their “crimes.”
Some canvassers quit their jobs under the pressure of such violent threats, and one committed suicide with his family blaming it on being “sworn at and threatened” by those he encountered.
On one occasion, molotov cocktails were thrown at an (unoccupied) poll tax office.
A large group of protesters converged on and surrounded the home of the head of a bailiff company.
Finding him not at home, but his garage door open, they held a mock auction of his property.
Destroy or disable collection apparatus
There is one plausible story in the book of a poll tax office’s database being compromised and a large percentage of registered people being deleted from the system.
On one occasion, a bailiff’s vehicle had its tires slashed.
On another, resisters occupied the poll tax office, took up stations at the payment windows, and told people who had come by to pay their taxes to go home instead as the tax had been rescinded.
Blockades, occupations, and barricades
Several attempts by bailiffs to seize property from resisters were foiled by blockades of hundreds of protesters, several deep, surrounding the resister’s home and preventing access.
Sometimes this would extend to barricading the streets of a neighborhood, and in at least one case, of an entire town.
There were also several examples of groups of protesters occupying government and law-enforcement offices, courtrooms, and council chambers in such a way as to make business there come to a halt.
Publish and distribute how-to guides
A group of legal advisors assembled a series of bulletins and a how-to guide to help people become familiar with their legal rights and with the process the law was likely to take in their cases.
This gave them the confidence to pursue their resistance up to the limits of their comfort level, and also the techniques to make their resistance most effective.
Census resistance
Non-registration was as important as non-payment, and had to be pushed early in the campaign, while the Labour and other mainstream liberal opposition was still advising people to register but be angry about it.
When resisters were served with a liability order, it would be accompanied by a questionnaire that included questions about the resister’s employment (which could be used to help the government seize the resister’s paycheck).
Although it was legally mandatory to fill out these questionnaires, and penalties were threatened against those who refused, only about 15% of the people who received such questionnaires returned them.
Engender and maintain activism and solidarity
Everybody potentially had a role to play in the resistance.
People who did not owe tax could be legal advisors or join phone banks.
Even children served as lookouts to watch for bailiffs.
The most successful groups used a bottom-up organizing model, where most decisions were made independently in small, locally-convened groups of resisters.
This served to empower individuals and to encourage them to rely on their own initiative rather than on the decisions of a far-off activist elite.
Here’s an interesting technique for bringing people together:
An independent television company approached the Easton group in order to work with us on a film about the Poll Tax.
The film was never shown, but the way the community was engaged in the process of making it is instructive.
The film producers wanted a shot of all the doors in the street, opening one by one as the occupants came out of their houses with banners and signs.
Charles, the local street rep, went round to people’s houses every evening for a week and explained to them what was wanted.
Out of 30 houses in the street (a cul-de-sac) 28 agreed to participate.
The street is multi-racial with a fairly wide class mix.
It was inspiring to see white working class men standing shoulder to shoulder with Asian women and their kids, holding the same banners and engrossed in conversation.
Some of them had never spoken to each other before.
…[V]irtually every one of those households joined the Union, and most still had posters in their windows a year later.
People were brought into the campaign, not through a leaflet or a canvasser, but through an interesting activity.
They didn’t have to go to the campaign, it came to them.
Support and assist arrested & imprisoned resisters
When people received summonses, they could call a hotline number to get an information package in the mail.
These numbers were posted on walls and utility poles all over.
Volunteers were given legal training so that they could help summonsed people as informal legal advisors, and a more formal and credentialed legal advisory group in turn advised them.
Brian Wright, the first resister imprisoned for failure to pay, got 800 cards and letters from well-wishers while in jail, and hundreds demonstrated outside his cell.
The police cracked down on anti-poll tax demonstrations, in what seemed to the demonstrators like a deliberate attempt to turn them into bloodbaths, intimidate people from participating, and divide the movement into “lawless” and “respectable” factions.
This seemed to work to some extent, at first, as some prominent spokespeople for the anti-poll tax movement distanced themselves from those arrested for “rioting.”
But an independent group formed and dedicated itself to defending anyone arrested at these demonstrations, and organized itself in such a way as to be solely representative of the defendants (not of any other organization).
Volunteers were sent to every police station to welcome demonstrators as they were bailed out, and the organization was able to share resources (like videotape disproving police testimony) and tactics among legal teams representing different defendants.
…a prisoners support group was set up… supporting 27 long-term prisoners. …
The TSDC made sure each prisoner was written to at least once a week by members of the campaign and visits to prisoners were coordinated through the campaign.
Those who had been inside offered support and advice to those who were about to be convicted, and a newsletter was produced which published the letters of prisoners.
The campaign… paid for newspapers and books; a Walkman cassette player for every prisoner; £10 a month income (the maximum they are allowed).
In addition to this some of the families were offered limited financial support for visits…
Conclusion
The resistance campaign that defeated the poll tax was diverse and creative in its tactics, and its success makes it a model worth learning from.
Danny Burns’s book about the campaign is a helpful overview of these tactics and of the dynamics of how they were applied.
Tax resistance campaigns have occasionally utilized buycotts and boycotts to
give businesses incentives to support tax resisters or withdraw support from
tax collectors. Today I’ll summarize a handful of examples:
The Addio-Pizzo Movement
Boycotts and buycotts are the signature tactic of the Addio-Pizzo movement
in Sicily, which is trying to encourage businesses to stop paying taxes to the
mafia. The movement launched when one hundred Palermo businesses announced
that they would no longer pay the tax (another 100+ businesses later joined
them), and 9,000 residents signed a pledge to only buy goods from businesses
that joined the refusal.
The movement also launched its own supermarket — “Punto Pizzofree” — that
stocked nothing but products grown or manufactured by resisting suppliers, and
it held a “pizzo-free” street festival. It called the strategy “Critical
Consumption” and encouraged consumers to break the back of the “pizzo” (mafia
tax) by changing their shopping habits.
Poll Tax Rebellion
During the poll tax rebellion in the United Kingdom in
(see ♇ 6 September 2012) the
government tried to recruit newsstands and convenience stores to be
collection points where people could pay the tax. Poll tax resister Danny
Burns recalls:
In Bristol, the city council identified twenty newsagents who they hoped
would collect the Poll Tax. Within weeks of the list being circulated six
pulled out. Local communities made it plain that they would no longer use
the shops if they continued to collect.
Liberty Bonds
The United States government raised money to fight World War Ⅰ by selling
“Liberty Bonds.” Some Americans who opposed the
U.S. entry into
the war were alleged to have threatened to boycott banks that handled the
bonds. According to one newspaper account:
Efforts to prevent banks from handling the bonds have centered chiefly in
Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and
Oklahoma. The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that his
depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn many
thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty Loan.
These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on
the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan. The
two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.
The Carrotmob Model
A new buycott model has been developed in recent years that, though it has not
to my knowledge been used by a tax resistance campaign, may have some promise.
In this model, an organization holds out the promise of a mob of buycotting
activists swarming a business on a certain day to buy its products, then it
asks a number of businesses to bid for the right to be the targeted business
by promising to use the profits from that day’s business in a particular
way.
For instance, one liquor store won a bid by promising to devote that day’s
profits to improving the energy-efficiency of the store’s refrigerators.
Customers lined up around the block to make their purchases at the targeted
stores on Carrotmob day, and everybody came out a winner.
Tax resistance campaigns might use a similar approach to encourage businesses
to stop stocking goods with high excise taxes, or to stock alternative
tax-free goods, or to stop collecting or remitting certain taxes, or to stop
participating (as in the Poll Tax Resistance campaign above) in tax collection.
Mark Wilks was arrested and sent to Brixton Prison for failing to pay his wife’s income taxes.
The case became a cause célèbre in the British women’s suffrage movement and an embarrassment to the British government and its tax authorities.
This is a good example of how careful study of the law can help tax resisters find and exploit flaws that hold the tax system or its enforcement arm up to ridicule, make them unworkable, or make them vehicles for additional resistance or propaganda opportunities.
Ethel Ayres Purdie, resident tax law expert of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, discovered the vulnerability.
The Income Tax Act, she wrote, “is a most fearsome piece of composition.
Its language is archaic and tautological, it rises wholly superior to punctuation, and proceeds breathlessly through one hundred and ninety-four clauses.”
But one of those clauses held a fatal flaw.
The “Married Woman’s Property Act” of was a reform that allowed married women to maintain control of their property rather than relinquishing it to their husbands’ control upon marriage.
But the earlier () Income Tax Act still considered the husband to be solely liable for the income taxes of both the husband and wife.
At first, when Elizabeth Wilks began resisting her income tax, the government responded by seizing and selling her property, but when this quirk in the law was discovered, tax resisters like Wilks protested that the government could not legally seize her property since as a married woman her taxes were legally owed by the him in the marriage.
So the government went after Mark Wilks instead.
Mark Wilks, for his part, insisted that he could hardly fill out an income tax return since he had no legal right to demand information from his wife about her income!
Besides, his modest income and lack of property in his own name meant that he could not afford to pay the taxes on his wife’s considerably larger income (he did pay the tax on the portion of their joint income that was attributable to his own income, though his income was low enough that by itself it would not have been taxable).
“I am informed that I am liable for taxes levied on her income,” he wrote “while at the same time the law places all her property entirely beyond my control.”
Meanwhile, the Women’s Tax Resistance League trumpeted the arrest of Mark Wilks and his indefinite imprisonment — “for non-payment of taxes not his own and due on an income over which he has no control and whose amount he can only guess at” — as proving their contention that not only should women resist the income tax, but that married women were not even legally obligated to pay it and those who were paying it were operating under a legal delusion.
The imprisonment of Mark Wilks was a propaganda coup:
For what do the arrest and imprisonment of Mark Wilks mean?
We are perfectly certain that it will not last long.
Stupid and inept as it has been, the Government, we are certain, will not risk the odium which would justly fall upon it if this outrage on liberty went on.
A Government which has much at stake and which lives by the breath of popular opinion cannot afford to ignore such strong and healthy protest as is being poured out on all sides.
To us, who are in the midst of it, that which seems most remarkable is the growth of public feeling.
In the streets where processions are nightly held, we were met at first by banter and rowdyism.
“A man in prison for the sake of Suffragettes!”
To the boy-mind of the metropolis, on the outskirts of many an earnest crowd, that seemed irresistibly funny; but thoughtfulness is spreading; into even the boy-mind, the light of truth is creeping.
If it had done nothing else, the imprisonment of Mark Wilks has certainly done this — it has educated the public mind.
Wilks was released after less than a month in prison, without official explanation, and without paying the tax.
A tax resistance campaign is almost always one that butts up against the law, and it can be helpful to have campaigners who know a thing or two about legal matters.
As Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it when she was considering a tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage in America,
One thing is certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation, and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.
Today I’ll summarize some examples of how legal study and the assistance of attorneys have made a difference in tax resistance campaigns.
Poll Tax rebels in Thatcher’s Britain
Understanding the law and the legal process was important in the poll tax rebellion — to give confidence to resisters, to support targets of government reprisals, and to make the process of tax enforcement costly and unmanageable.
Anti-poll tax volunteer Danny Burns writes:
In Bristol when the court cases started, each person with a summons, who rang into the office, was logged and sent an information pack.
The same personal attention was given to people with notices from the bailiffs.
At the peak of the campaign, the Bristol office was staffed morning and afternoon five days a week by different volunteers.
, it was receiving over 200 calls a week.
… [The volunteers included] at least five court support workers…
In every part of England and Wales local groups mobilised to provide support for non-payers in the courts.
Tens, if not hundreds of activists in each region attended legal briefing sessions.
These were run both by activists and sympathetic local lawyers.
People were given ideas about how they might disrupt or delay the court proceedings.
These included simple things, like asking for a glass of water because their throat was dry, demanding to see the identity cards of everyone present in court, to fainting in court or arranging for fire alarms to go off.
People were told to demand their rights to see and read every document which was produced as evidence against them.
They were also given briefings on the basic technical arguments.
By , when most of the court cases had started, virtually every Anti-Poll Tax Union in the UK had trained at least two or three of its members to become conversant with the Poll Tax law.
Throughout England and Wales over a thousand people were trained to do court support work and could quote the relevant legislation.
This is unique in the history of popular campaigning.
The Anti-Poll Tax Unions hoped to use the legal precedent of McKenzie versus McKenzie (), which said that a person can “attend a trial as a friend of either party (to) take notes and quietly make suggestions and give advice to that party.”
This person would be known as a “McKenzie friend.” McKenzie friends had no right to address the court, but they could advise the non-payer what to say.
In this way everyone would be able to offer technical defences and thereby delay the proceedings.
The campaign needed lawyers only in the most technical cases.
Lawyers were often seen as a liability, because they represented an individual client, and it was in their interest to get through the procedure as quickly as possible.
It was in the campaign’s interest for everything to proceed as slowly as possible.
Nevertheless, legal knowledge and guidance was essential.
This arrived with the creation of the Poll Tax Legal Group… [which] researched legislation and case law.
It set up a network of lawyers throughout England and Wales who could support the legal challenges of Anti-Poll Tax groups and produced over 30 accessible legal bulletins on the Poll Tax and a book called To Pay or Not To Pay.
These underpinned the legal needs of the movement and helped ordinary people to get to grips with the law they needed to use.
Delaying tactics were mixed with serious legal technicalities.
Councils were challenged for sending notices to the wrong addresses.
Given the rate at which people moved houses, it was difficult for the councils to keep up, and as a result many cases were dropped because people hadn’t received proper notice.
Big legal challenges were also made over “correct procedures.”
These came in the first few weeks and resulted mostly from the inexperience of councils in dealing with this sort of process.
The first day of Medina Council’s cases (on the Isle of Wight) is probably the most famous example.
The reminder notices were sent out with second class stamps, they consequently arrived late, people didn’t receive the statutory notice which they were entitled to, and the court threw out all 1,900 cases.
The council had to start again.
When police attacked an anti-poll tax demonstration in London, many of the demonstrators fought back, and hundreds were arrested.
Elements of the campaign leadership distanced themselves from the defendants, embarrassed to have the campaign associated with violence.
So other activists helped to form and coordinate an independent group — the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign — with the following mandate:
The campaign will:
Unconditionally defend all of those arrested on .
Be controlled by and be accountable to the defendants
Be totally independent of any other organisation.
Seek support from the whole Anti-Poll Tax movement and all other sympathetic organisations.
Seek to co-ordinate the legal defence of all those arrested.
Seek to build a coherent picture of events of from the point of view of those arrested.
Publicise the points of view of defendants.
Raise money for a bust fund, controlled by the defendants to cover their legal and welfare costs.
Ensure that at all future Anti-Poll Tax events there will be proper legal cover and support for anyone arrested.
This will include an office and workers to visit places of detention and look after prisoners’ welfare.
Danny Burns again:
About a dozen people volunteered to carry out the court monitoring process.
They attended every hearing, systematically took notes of everything that was said, recorded the numbers of police officers and approached the defendants asking them to attend the now weekly TSDC meetings… By the summer, over 250 of the defendants had been contacted.
The TSDC ran advice sessions on prison, produced legal briefing notes and mailed out the minutes of the weekly meetings to every defendant every week.
A solicitors’ group was established with a core of three, but at the peak of early activity they managed to get over fifteen solicitors involved.
This proved important because the solicitors’ group managed to get hold of over 50 hours of police videos and handed them over to the campaign.
The police videos were crucial in getting a lot of people off, and a number of people in the campaign worked extremely hard editing videos and rejigging them for particular trials.
The solicitors’ group also got the Crown Prosecution Service to hand over a full list of all of the defendants and the names and addresses of their lawyers.
The lawyers were all contacted and, although many were initially reluctant to co-operate with the campaign, they soon realised that TSDC had a lot of information which their clients needed.
Every possible legal angle was pursued by the campaign’s legal team — down to legal definitions of what constituted a householder, making the councils prove that the person they had summonsed actually lived at the address, that they owned the property, etc., etc. We weren’t doing this because we had any illusions in the impartiality of the court system.
We knew that even though we were successful in finding various legal loopholes these would all be closed one by one and that the judges would be doing their best to facilitate the councils.
This was demonstrated most clearly when a judge in Swords invoked the Public Order Act to close several streets around the courthouse to prevent a protest outside it.
But by contesting every detail of every summons we could make the system unworkable.
There were tens of thousands of non-payers.
After several months the councils had only managed to get a couple of dozen cases through the courts.
Someone calculated that at the rate they were managing to proceed it would take them something like 220 years to process all the cases.
And it was costing them more in legal fees than they could ever hope to take back in charges — even if they managed to bully everyone into paying.
Any time the council did manage to get a court order, it was appealed — again the objective being to clog up the system.
George Cony’s aggressive lawyers
When Oliver Cromwell knocked the English king off his throne, he did so in part in the cause of Parliamentary democracy.
Upon assuming charge of the English government, however, he grew impatient with Parliament and decided to enact some taxes on his own.
One of Cromwell’s more radical supporters, George Cony, taking Cromwell at his word (Cromwell had said that “the subject who submits to an illegal impost is more an enemy of his country than the tyrant who imposes it”) decided to refuse to pay one of these arbitrary taxes.
Cony’s lawyers argued his case so successfully that Cony’s tax evasion case threatened to call the legal underpinnings of Cromwell’s regime into question.
The judges in the case seemed sympathetic, and Cromwell was so alarmed that he had all three lawyers imprisoned in the Tower of London until they repented, upon which the chief-justice who was hearing the case resigned.
Hugh Williams and the Rebecca rioters
Radical lawyer Hugh Williams was of great help to the Rebecca movement in Wales — some say he was more than a legal advisor, but one of the instigators of the movement, or even “Rebecca” herself!
One account says: “[Williams] did all the legal work for the rioters, also drafting various petitions for them.
He was a prominent member of the Chartist movement, acting as their solicitor, and he defended the prisoners at Welshpool Assizes in July, 1839, for taking part in the Chartist Riots.
He rendered similar services to the Rebecca prisoners gratuitously; but was eventually reported to the Lord Chancellor and struck off the Rolls.
He, however, continued to do a considerable amount of legal work, and whenever it became necessary for him to appear in court, he invariably employed [another attorney] to appear for him.”
His familiarity with the law and the legal process helped him help the Rebeccaites translate their grievances into formal petitions, which in turn helped the Rebeccaite “people power” movement effect change in government policy.
White supremacists in Reconstruction-era Louisiana
When white supremacists in New Orleans decided to actively withdraw their consent from the mixed-race Reconstruction government of “scalawags” and “carpet-baggers” there in , they formed “The People’s Association to Resist Unconstitutional Taxation” and declared a tax strike.
Fifty-eight New Orleans attorneys signed the following statement of support:
The undersigned attorneys at law, citizens of New Orleans, engage themselves, without compensation, and as a matter of public service, to defend professionally all citizens, residents, or property-holders in this city, who shall desire their assistance in resisting the collection by municipal authorities of the taxes known as the “school-tax,” the “park-tax,” and the “metropolitan-police tax,” and other taxes the collection of which may be lawfully resisted.
The Smith sisters of Glastonbury
Abby & Julia Smith refused to pay taxes to a local government that denied women the vote and that took advantage of this by excessively taxing women’s property in order to ease the tax burden on male voters and to redistribute the money to male patronage recipients.
In response, the government periodically seized and auctioned off the Smith sisters’ cows (“Votey” and “Taxey”).
That failing to discourage the Smiths, the town decided to fight dirty, and the Smiths fought back legally in a way that brought further attention to their cause:
[A]n inconspicuous advertisement in the Hartford Courant announced the sale at public auction of fifteen acres of Smith pasture land on , a date contrived to fall just before the grass would be cut.
Though the sisters set out on that day with ample funds, the collector adroitly shifted the meeting place, and when the two women caught up with the auction, the gavel had just gone down transferring for $78.35 land worth nearly $2,000 to none other than a covetous neighbor who had tried for years to get possession of it.
Abby and Julia were daughters of a lawyer.
They brought suit against tax collector George C. Andrews on the grounds that he had violated a law which plainly stated that movable property must first be sold for unpaid taxes before real estate could be seized.
The case was tried in the home of Judge Hollister of Glastonbury, who gave a verdict in favor of the sisters and fined Andrews damages of $10. Threatening terrible consequences, Andrews appealed the case.
The new trial, which lasted three days in the Hartford Court of Common Pleas, had a farcical aspect.
There were misplaced records; there was distorted evidence.
The judge, in absentia, reversed the Glastonbury decision and decided in favor of collector Andrews.
At this point the Smiths’ lawyer backed out.
Abby and Julia, both now in their eighties, began the study of law with the intention of conducting their own case.
Happily a capable lawyer finally agreed to place a second appeal before the Court of Equity.
For two years a wide and sympathetic public followed this devious litigation.
Across the nation, even in England and France, editors and columnists lauded the Glastonbury cows in prose and poetry.
Reporters visited the town, drank tea in the elm-shaded farmhouse, admired the cows, polled public opinion in Glastonbury, and returned with highly flavored and often inaccurate stories.
With whatever condescension these reporters arrived, they seem, one and all, to have found the Smith sisters irresistible.
The hospitality, wit, and charm of the two elderly spinsters captivated the world beyond Glastonbury.
When the final verdict was made in their favor, in , women the country over rejoiced.
To be sure, Julia and Abby did not vote in Glastonbury, but from that time on their property was undisturbed.
The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement
The current Greek “Won’t Pay” movement, which is resisting a number of stealth taxes the government has added to things like utility bills and road tolls, has also carried its struggle into court — at one point winning an injunction that forbade the state power company from cutting the power of people who were refusing to pay the new utility bill tax.
Newly-enfranchised Pennsylvania women
When women in Pennsylvania won the vote, many discovered to their chagrin that they had also become subject to taxes to which they had previously been immune.
Thousands of them, deciding the package was not worth it, decided to refuse to pay.
And they were able to take advantage of a quirk in an law that did not permit the authorities to send women to prison (though they could imprison men) for tax refusal:
Nothing herein contained shall authorize the arrest or imprisonment for non-payment of any tax of any female or infant or person found by inquisition to be of unsound mind.
It took a few years for the state legislature to pass a law allowing for the jailing of women who refused to pay their taxes.
Maurice McCrackin’s lawyers
Not all legal help is helpful.
When American war tax resister Maurice McCrackin was convicted of refusing to cooperate with an IRS summons, he was following a strategy of complete noncooperation that he kept following right into the courtroom — where he refused to stand for the judge, refused to plead to the charges, refused to answer questions, refused to consult with his court-appointed attorney, fasted while behind bars, and had to be wheeled into and out from his court appearances because he wouldn’t walk there under his own power.
For the same reason, upon his conviction, he emphatically said that he was not interested in pursuing an appeal: “I said I wanted to file no appeal, nor did I want steps taken to keep the door open, so an appeal could be perfected later.
I do not recognize any appeal on my behalf… My position is not changed.
This is a moral, not a legal, struggle.”
One of the lawyers who had been assigned to defend him, however, convinced that the judge had betrayed bias against McCracken in his statements from the bench, said that he intended to appeal anyway.
“Constitutionalist” tax protesters
And then there are the “Constitutionalist” “show me the law!”-style tax protesters.
For years they have been bedeviling the IRS with their baroque, ever-evolving, quasi-legal arguments and pleadings based on the real Constitution, or common law, or tortured interpretations of excerpts from a variety of cherry-picked statutes and court rulings.
While they typically know just enough about the law to get into trouble, without knowing enough to get out again, there’s no question that they cause headaches a-plenty for the powers that be.
Alas, this does not seem to actually be their objective.
Instead, they seem convinced that they’re not just whistling Dixie, but they’re right, and if they can just figure out how to pick the lock of the court system with the right argument, they’ll be able to walk out free into a new world where their Constitution holds sway and the perverters of the true law are vanquished.
Alas, most of what they have discovered is an enormous and inventive catalog of things that don’t work, so in spite of all of their creativity and effort, they have given the rest of us little to work with.
But if you ever have a “that’s so crazy it just might work!” idea about going up against the IRS, you might want to research these folks first — they may have already tried it.
And every once in a while they rack up a courtroom victory — not often one that amounts to much in real terms, but it fuels the movement.
One observer of the movement reacted to a twist of this sort by saying: “This is going to encourage thousands more people who were on the fence, who were paying taxes only because they were afraid they would be criminally prosecuted.
If too many people do this, the tax system will collapse because it is based on people voluntarily complying.”
(I’m most familiar with the U.S. variety, but similar groups exist in Canada, the U.K., and probably elsewhere.
Earlier this year in England, for instance, hundreds of Constitutionalist tax protesters stormed a courtroom where one of their number was on trial, whereupon they attempted to put the judge under citizens arrest, and began making their own rulings from the bench!)
Rallies outside the courthouse or prison are one way of supporting resisters who are looking at doing time for taking their stand (see The Picket Line for ), and supporting their families while they’re being held captive is another (see The Picket Line for ).
Other ways to show support are to accompany resisters as they go to prison, to visit them or correspond with them while they are inside, and to be there to meet them when they are released.
Today I’ll give some examples of these ways of showing support for imprisoned tax resisters.
Sylvia Hardy
Accompanying resisters to prison
When elderly council tax rebel Sylvia Hardy was threatened with jail in , her supporters organized a convoy of cars to accompany her to the jail as a show of support.
In , Annuity Tax resisters in Edinburgh, Scotland, would go to prison in a parade of protesters.
One description of such a procession read:
[H]e was marched off to the Calton Jail, accompanied by the usual hasty muster of people carrying flags and poles, having placards on which were a variety of devices and inscriptions…
His daughter, a fine young woman, in a fit of heroic indignation which overmastered her grief and the natural timidity of her sex, seized one of the flags, and would have walked before her father to prison with the crowd, but was prevented by him and the interference of the humane bystanders.
When Kate Harvey went to prison for her resistance as part of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, fellow-resisters Charlotte Despard and Mary Anderson accompanied her to the prison gates.
When Elizabeth Knight was imprisoned on similar charges, she was accompanied to Holloway by resisters Florence Underwood and Isabel Tippett.
Visiting resisters in prison
Thomas Story, an English Quaker who was visiting the American colonies, was able to help two Quakers from Rhode Island who were in prison for not paying a militia exemption tax after having been drafted and refusing to fight.
Story helped them hold a Quaker meeting in the prison itself, and also (having some legal experience) tried to assist them in court.
When Zerah Colburn Whipple was imprisoned for failing to pay a war tax in , it was a comfort to him to have friends on the outside trying to get in.
He wrote: “Our friend John J. Copp, proved himself a true friend indeed.
Knowing that I would be lonely in the jail, he visited me every day after he learned that I was there, and when the keeper refused him admission, he demanded it as his right to visit his client, and claimed the right to see me alone too, which was granted.”
The Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign helped to organize prison visits to people who had been imprisoned in the Poll Tax rebellion.
Corresponding with imprisoned resisters
I’ve done a lot of volunteer work with the Prison Literature Project in Berkeley, California.
Most of the letters we get are from prisoners requesting books — which makes sense, because that’s the sort of letter we explicitly ask for.
But a pretty hefty percentage of the letters we get are just expressing gratitude for the books and letters we previously sent — heartfelt, often heartbreaking gratitude, especially since many of the prisoners are of limited means and can barely afford to put a stamp on a letter.
This impresses on me how meaningful it is for people behind bars to get letters from friends outside.
The Anarchist Black Cross of New York City held a letter-writing evening for imprisoned war tax resister Carlos Steward in .
Brian Wright was the first person thrown in prison for Poll Tax resistance, during the rebellion in the United Kingdom, in .
While there he received over 800 cards and letters from supporters.
The Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign made it a policy to ensure that at least one personal letter per prisoner per week came from someone in the campaign.
When Kate Harvey had barricaded herself in her own home to try to defeat government attempts to seize her property for taxes, a supporter sent her a poem to keep her mood up:
Good luck, my friend, I wish to thee,
In thy brave fight ’gainst tyranny.
Bracken Hill Siege will bring good cheer
To those who hold our Freedom dear,
And fight the good fight far and near.
And when oppression is out-done,
And Liberty, at last, is won,
When women civic rights possess,
They’ll think, I hope, with thankfulness,
Of those who bore the battle’s stress.
When a Colorado doctor was jailed for refusing to pay federal income taxes that fund weapons of mass destruction, it was reported that “[l]etters of approval have been pouring in to Dr. Evans, and since he is only allowed to write very few, his mother in Philadelphia has taken up the task of acknowledging them, sending at the same time a typewritten sheet explaining the affair in detail.”
Welcoming resisters back from prison
The campaign to resist Thatcher’s Poll Tax organized a march to Brixton Prison, which held most of the resisters then in custody.
Police attacked the march and arrested 135 people.
“That evening,” says campaign volunteer Danny Burns, “volunteers were sent to every police station to welcome those who were released on bail.”
This served not only to show solidarity, but also to make the arrested people aware of the legal support available to them and to encourage them to cooperate in their defense.
When Constance Andrews of the Women’s Tax Resistance League was released after having been jailed for a week for failure to pay a dog license tax, “a very large crowd — described in the local press as ‘an immense gathering’ — collected outside the prison to cheer Miss Andrews on her release.”
A procession with suffrage banners walked along with Andrews as she walked from the prison to a reception held in her honor.
When Mark Wilks was released from prison for failure to pay his wife’s income tax in , the Women’s Tax Resistance League held a reception for the Wilkses, saying that “not only do they wish to do honour to those who have made such a brave stand for tax resistance, but to use the occasion, as one of many others, to keep before the public mind the necessity for the alteration of the laws.”
Katsuki James Otsuka served a 120-day sentence for refusing to pay war taxes to the U.S. government (and then refusing to pay the fine he was given for his initial refusal) in .
A group of supporters demonstrated outside the prison at the time of his anticipated release, though “four carloads of state police” broke up the demonstration at one point, smashing a picket sign that read “You did right in refusing to pay taxes for A-bombs.”
During the white supremacist rebellion against the Reconstruction state government in Louisiana a man named Edward Booth was imprisoned for 24 hours for refusing to pay a license tax.
[I]t was agreed among his immediate personal friends, the members of the tax resisting association and their sympathizers, to make a grand demonstration, at the hour of his release, and escort him to his place of business, to show their sympathies, and in what approbation he was held for having become the object of an oppression, in the defence of his personal rights.
Before the hour of his release, a large concourse of people assembled before the doors of the prison, to hail the deliverance of the prisoner, and the anteroom was thronged with friends anxious to proffer the hand of sympathy and condolence. …
Mr. Booth filed out of the room and stepped into a carriage in waiting, amid rousing cheers and a stirring air from the band.
The carriage led off, followed by the band and the large concourse of people, who gradually fell into an orderly line of twos, to the number of about 400.
The marchers hung an effigy of the Reconstruction governor from a lamp post while loudly cheering.
When the procession reached Booth’s place of business, he gave a speech thanking the crowd for their support and urging them to renew their resistance.
William Tait, editor of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, was imprisoned for refusing to pay the Annuity Tax in that city, which went to support the official church, of which Tait was not a member.
After four days, he was released.
The Scotsman covered the story:
[Tait] stepped into the open carriage, drawn by four horses, which stood on the street…
At this moment, one of the gentlemen in the carriage, waving his hat, proposed three cheers for the King, and three cheers for Mr. Tait, — both of which propositions were most enthusiastically carried into effect.
The procession was then about to move off, when, much against the will of Mr. Tait and the Committee, the crowd took the horses from the carriage, and with ropes drew it along the route of procession…
As the procession marched along, it was joined by several other trades, who had been late in getting ready; and seldom have we seen such a dense mass of individuals as Prince’s Street presented on this occasion.
In the procession alone, there were not fewer than 8,000 individuals; and we are sure that the spectators were more than thrice as numerous.
Mr. Tait was frequently cheered as he passed along, — and never, but on the occasion of the Reform Bill, was a more unanimous feeling witnessed than on that which brought the people together yesterday afternoon.
Tax resistance campaigns have found it useful to identify resonances with popular myths, esteemed tax rebellions of yore, and semi-fictional heroes.
Here are some examples:
Just about every tax revolt in the United States (and many elsewhere as well) appropriates the example of the Boston Tea Party as an evocative reminder of a grassroots uprising, the recent “Taxed Enough Already” TEA Party movement being just the latest of many, many examples.
John Hampden pictured on a banner of the Women’s Tax Resistance League
In Spain, the tancament de caixes plays a similar role to the Tea Party in America, with modern Spanish tax resisters comparing their campaigns with that legendary struggle.
In England (and the British empire), John Hampden has long been the exemplar of choice, with his example being used from South Africa to Ireland to India to prove that celebrated patriots can refuse to pay their taxes.
The phrase “no taxation without representation” has such resonance, especially in the descendant nations of the British Empire, that it gets trotted out even to support tax resistance campaigns in which representation isn’t really an issue at all.
It was especially potent in the American revolution and in the women’s suffrage movements.
The Rebecca Rioters in Wales, painting their faces and dressing in drag to destroy tollgates and mete out justice in the middle of the nineteenth century, were tapping into a folkloric form of grassroots justice that was centuries old.
“Jack a Lents” painted their faces and dressed in women’s clothing to tear down turnpikes in England a century before, and I’ve found references to protesters led by men in women’s clothing and using the shared pseudonym of “Lady Skimmington” in the Western Rising in England a century before that.
Resistance to the “Foreign Miners Tax” in California in gave birth to the myth of Joaquin Murieta, a sort of Robin Hood-like outlaw who became a desperado when he was forced off his claim by the tax.
The Robin Hood myth itself has taken on a tax resistance theme in recent years.
The popular Disney animated version of the Robin Hood story makes the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham a tax collector, and Robin Hood’s robbery of him a case of redistributing the taxes back to the people they’d been seized from:
While he taxes us to pieces And he robs us of our bread King Richard’s crown keeps slippin’ down Around that pointed head Ah!
But while there is a merry man in Robin’s wily pack We’ll find a way to make him pay And steal our money back
Urban legends helped to fuel tax resistance during the French Revolution.
Rumors that the King had abolished taxes led people to refuse payment or to destroy the obsolete offices and apparatus of taxation.
Here is a similar example from Russia (as found in James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance):
After the emancipation [of the serfs] in , the peasants in Biezdne (Kazan Province) were demoralized to discover that with redemption payments, labor dues, and taxes their burdens were, if anything, heavier than before.
When one of their number claimed that the emancipation decree granted them complete freedom from such dues — the term volia (freedom) appeared in many contexts in the decree — but that the squires and officials had kept it from being implemented, they leapt at the opportunity, now sanctioned from on high, to refuse payment.
The myth of the czar’s benevolence, which was of course promoted by the czarist government, could backfire in this way when peasants refused to pay onerous taxes or obey other commands of the czar’s subordinates, under the theory that because the czar was so good he could not possibly have ordered such terrible things:
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the myth was its plasticity in the hands of its peasant adherents.
First and foremost, it was an invitation to resist any or all of the czar’s supposed agents, who could not have been carrying out the good czar’s wishes if they imposed heavy taxes, conscription, rents, military corvée, and so forth.
If the czar only knew of the crimes his faithless agents were committing in his name, he would punish them and rectify matters.
When petitions failed and oppression continued, it may simply have indicated that an impostor — a false czar — was on the throne.
In such cases, the peasants who joined the banners of a rebel claiming to be the true czar would be demonstrating their loyalty to the monarchy.
… In a form of symbolic jujitsu, an apparently conservative myth counseling passivity becomes a basis for defiance and rebellion…
Scott also talks (e.g. in his paper Everyday Forms of Resistance) about how “much of the folk culture of the peasant ‘little tradition’ amounts to a legitimation, or even a celebration, of [resistance]…”
In this and other ways (e.g. tales of bandits, tricksters, peasant heroes, religious myths, carnivalesque parodies of authorities) the peasant subculture helps to underwrite dissimulation, poaching, theft, tax evasion, evasion of conscription, and so on.
While folk culture is not coordinational in any formal sense, it often achieves a “climate of opinion” which, in other more institutionalized societies, might require a public relations campaign.
The very name “Poll Tax,” which came to be the most widely-accepted name for what Thatcher’s government hoped would go down as the “community charge,” was a potent propaganda coup for the resistance movement.
Danny Burns, a chronicler of that successful tax rebellion, says that “the story of [Wat Tyler’s] peasants revolt against the Poll Tax in 1381 was told in virtually every meeting.
Calling on these traditions was an important part of explaining why non-cooperation was needed…” Signs that people would hang in their windows reading “No Poll Tax Here” also hearkened back to the tax resistance accompanying the Reform Act agitation in the .
Today, tax resistance actions like the ongoing Household Tax resistance in Ireland compare themselves in turn to the successful Poll Tax revolt.
The Lady Godiva myth concerns a “noblewoman who, according to legend, rode naked through the streets of Coventry in order to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation imposed by her husband on his tenants.”
A motley variety of myths about “common law,” about the True Constitution, about the significance of fringed edges to flags, and other what-not, fuel the often bizarre Constitutionalist tax protester movement in the United States.
an early tax form, from when paperwork was fired in clay
Tax agencies live by bureaucracy and paperwork.
Many of the earliest examples of writing in the worlds’ museums are tax records.
But some mischievous tax resisters have discovered that this is a vulnerability that can be targeted.
For example, , a video blogger going by the name “StormCloudsGathering” considered the idea of “filling out thousands of random tax returns with nonexistent names and numbers… so suddenly they get flooded with a bunch of returns that don’t make sense…”:
What’s even more brilliant about [this] option is that even non-U.S. citizens — people living in other countries — could participate.
You could send in hundreds of tax returns even if you’re an Indonesian.
You know: Americans can live in Indonesia, and they’re required to file taxes… there’s no way for them to be sure, just because it’s coming from Indonesia, that it’s not a valid tax return.
They would have to do the investigation, and that costs resources.
He recommends filing in the name of particular, offensive, multinational corporations, but I think the average person would have a difficult time filing a sufficiently complex return to serve as a convincing decoy in such a case.
Another option would be to file corporate returns for nonexistent corporations, or individual returns for phantom (or dead) people.
War tax resister Ed Hedemann has already made plans for what he calls “zombie war tax resistance” — filling in years of tax returns ahead of time and putting them in pre-stamped envelopes so that his survivors can continue to file (but, of course, refuse to pay!) after he’s gone.
“Why give the government a break from having to deal with your resistance when you die?”
he asks.
Hedemann also makes a point of periodically filing Freedom of Information Act requests for any information the IRS and other government agencies have been collecting about his activities — hundreds of pages — and he’s put together a guide for other tax resisters to follow in making their own requests.
Currently in the U.S. there is an epidemic of tax fraud in which the fraudsters file for phony tax refunds in the names (and taxpayer identification numbers) of other, real people.
This often causes the tax collection bureaucracy to swing into action against the victims of the identity theft, which is both a waste of resources and a way of further alienating the population from the government and its tax bureaucracy — potentially a model that a tax resistance campaign could benefit from.
The IRS has made a big shift in recent years from processing paper income tax returns, filled out by hand, to electronic filing.
This is more efficient for the agency, as it no longer has to hire as many people to laboriously transcribe the numbers from paper returns into its computer databases.
The agency estimated that it cost about 35¢ on average for the agency to process an electronically-filed return, compared to an average of $2.87 for a paper return.
This suggests that one way to make a minor dent in the agency’s budget and efficiency is simply to file paper returns rather than file electronically (this is still a legal option for individual filers, even those who go to professional tax preparers).
But if this became a strategy of a mass-campaign it could even cripple the tax collecting bureaucracy.
George Jakabcin, IRS assistant deputy associate chief information officer for systems integration, said in that the agency “would be in a world of hurt” if even half of the people who had switched to electronic filing at that time decided to switch back.
“We no longer have the capability to process the additional 43 million returns manually.
We no longer have the facilities, we don’t have the IT infrastructure in place to support them, we don’t have the people, and some would argue that we are beginning to lose the expertise.”
The IRS has tried to crack down on people who send them paperwork just to waste their time.
They have come up with something called the “frivolous filing penalty” and can use this to ding you $5,000 each time you file any sort of paperwork with them that takes a position they consider to be “frivolous.”
They can do this immediately and on the whim of whichever bureaucrat is handling your forms, without going to court, and you are only allowed to appeal your fine before a judge if you pay it first!
War tax resister Karl Meyer wasn’t about to let the IRS think it could intimidate him with such tactics.
So in , when the “Cabbage Patch Kids” dolls (each one slightly different) had become ubiquitous, he invented when he called “cabbage patch resistance” — filing a different, blatantly “frivolous” tax return every day.
He was assessed $140,000 in penalties in alone (though the penalty was only $500 back then).
The IRS never collected the money though.
The best it could manage was to seize and sell his car, for a little over $1,000.
“Constitutionalist” and “sovereign citizen”-style tax protest groups in the U.S. are fond of harassing tax officials and other government employees with lawsuits, liens, bogus quasi-official court filings, and so forth.
In one example, Eddie Kahn’s “Guiding Light of God Ministries,” filed some 2,000 misconduct complaints against IRS agents.
A newspaper article about a subsequent legal case against the group noted that:
Some agents have said that their supervisors ordered them to back off from audits or collection efforts in the face of [such] threats, just to avoid investigations by the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.
Some paperwork tricks are more like “hacking” in that they treat the IRS as a system that processes input and produces output, and note that certain examples of pathological input can result in output unanticipated by the system designers.
For example, the IRS gave out $20 million dollars in the filing season when people figured out that if they substantially overpaid a tax return with a bad check, the IRS would cut them a hefty refund check before they noticed they’d been had.
Here are some more examples of paperwork hacks being used against the tax collecting bureaucracy:
South Carolina’s state government recently passed a law that required all organizations that “directly or indirectly advocate, advise, teach or practice the duty or necessity of controlling, seizing, or overthrowing the government of the United States, the state of South Carolina, or any political division thereof,” to register their activities with the South Carolina Secretary of State and pay a five-dollar filing fee.
A member of the Alliance of the Libertarian Left (which probably qualifies, at least in its more ambitious moments) decided to register, but with a twist:
When belligerence and inhumanity prevail, the peaceful and the humane must find honor in being categorized as the enemies of the prevailing order.
Please keep me updated as to the status of our registration.
I look forward to hearing back from you as to our official recognition as enemies of your state and its government.
… P.S. I am told that there is a processing fee in the amount of $5.00 for the registration of a subversive organization.
Our organization is in fact so dastardly that we have refused to remit the fee.
Prussian farmers in used the bureaucracy against itself.
A New York Times report noted:
[T]he big agrarians… are determined to resort to sabotage of all the tax laws…
[A correspondent in East Prussia says] “They have all filed protests and demanded that they be relieved from paying the tax until the protests are settled.
That means a delay of at least three years in collecting the taxes, and it is said that the Provincial Treasury is inclined to grant this request.
The big agrarians declared that they would do the same thing with all the tax laws.
In Berlin the people might decree what pleased them, they (the agrarians) would not pay the taxes or subscribe to the compulsory loans.
They want to sabotage the whole taxation system that they hate, and consequently they want to make so much work for the Treasury officers that the latter don’t know which way to turn.”
During the Beit Sahour tax strike against the Israeli occupation, Elias Rishmawi worked to get a suit challenging the legality of the tax accepted by Israel’s court system.
He remembers: “I had never had an illusion that the Israeli supreme court would give any justice to Palestinians.
… [T]he appeal formed the legal coverage by which I and others were able to continue resisting from one side not paying taxes, since there is a case in court and they cannot force me pay until the case is solved they cannot take any actions against us since we have this case, and we kept challenging the system through different means.… This was impossible to achieve without the legal coverage of the supreme court.
Because then, I and the others, would have been considered as inciters and then might be imprisoned for ten years.
That’s why we needed that coverage.”
An early form of resistance to Thatcher’s Poll Tax was called the “send it back” campaign.
The idea was that people would register for the tax, as required, but would accompany their registration with questions that would require further manual processing by the individual councils that were processing the tax:
Government regulations state: “…if for any reason you consider that you are not a ‘responsible person’ please let me know and return the form to me without completing it.”
Stop It wants people to take up this offer by writing to ask if they should be the “responsible person” and suggests they ask who will have access to the information supplied and why the authorities require exact dates of birth.
The implementation of the tax was dependent on an accurate register and the protest campaign could make the register “wildly inaccurate,”… Labour MP Brian Wilson, chairman of [the anti-poll tax campaign called] Stop It, said: “It is a campaign of obstruction within the law that does not lead people to incur the substantial penalties that are built into the legislation.”
The aim was to have the legislation amended or abandoned.
For this and other reasons, the councils were inundated with paperwork, for which they were unprepared.
“Councils sat under a mountain of paper.
Everything they did seemed to create more work,” wrote campaign historian Danny Burns.
He quotes from the Poll Tax Legal Group:
The paper-work involved with administering the charge is enormous — and likely to get worse.
Backlogs switch from one area of activity to another.
Indeed, local authorities cannot really do anything without generating more paper-work.
Kate Harvey, a tax resister for women’ suffrage in 1913, once wrote: “I have just received the first demand note for this year’s taxes.
I have torn it up, put it in the envelope in which it came, and re-posted it to the Tax Collector.
I suppose it is now reposing in his rubbish basket.”
The Association of Real Estate Taxpayers in Chicago during the Great Depression led tens of thousands of property owners to demand reassessments of their property, which effectively swamped the Board of Review and allowed the property owners to legally delay tax payment.
When trying to bring new tax resisters into a movement, there are lots of hopeful short-cuts, but sometimes there is no substitute for addressing potential resisters individually: whether that be through letters, petitions, or face-to-face meetings.
When the United States approved a billion-dollar military aid package to the government of Colombia in , the president of the Mennonite Church of Colombia, Peter Stucky, and Ricardo Esquivia, the director of that church’s Justapaz organization and the coordinator of the Evangelical Council of Colombia’s Human Rights and Peace Commission, wrote a letter to their sister churches in the U.S..
In that letter, they explained the disastrous consequences of fueling the civil war and the military wing of the war on drugs there, explained how the church there was trying to respond more productively to the crisis, and called on churches in the U.S. to do their part:
In reality, the government of the United States, using the tax-payers money, is supporting the Colombian government in what we consider to be a negative form.
This means that the message arriving from the North to the Colombian people becomes a message of death and destruction.
For that reason we are calling the churches in the North to redeem their taxes, on one hand by demanding that the U.S. government invests this money in life-producing projects, and on the other hand by redirecting part of their taxes toward a different project in your community or the world that promotes abundant and dignified life, as our Lord Jesus Christ has commanded us.
The American Mennonite Central Committee responded by urging taxpayers to redirect their taxes from the U.S. government to the Mennonite-run “Taxes for Peace” fund, which in turn would be dedicated that year to peace-building efforts in Colombia.
This sort of advocacy can be dangerous, as this next example will show.
In , R.W. Benner, a Mennonite minister, got worried reports from members of his congregation who were being told in no uncertain terms that they would buy so-called “Liberty Bonds” to support the U.S. war effort, or they would answer for their refusal.
Benner wrote to his bishop, L.J. Heatwole, who responded with a letter in which he reiterated the position of the church that Mennonite brethren “Do not aid or abet war in any form… [and] Contribute nothing to a fund that is used to run the war machine.”
He noted:
In a number of places where brethren have refused to contribute to the different war funds, outlandish threats have been made and in a few cases have been put into execution — such as, tar and feathering, painting houses yellow, decorating autos and buildings with flags to test them out on their principles of nonresistance.
But he urged his fellow-Mennonites to keep the faith and to embrace this sort of martyrdom like good Christians.
Benner conveyed this message to his flock.
For this, both of them were charged under the Espionage Act and convicted.
(To give you some idea of the railroading involved, Heatwole did not learn that a guilty plea had been entered on his behalf by his court-appointed attorney until after he appeared for the trial!)
Letters, or “epistles,” from war tax resisting Quakers to their fellow-Friends were an important way of spreading and maintaining the practice in the Society.
American war tax resistance can be said to have begun on , when John Woolman, Anthony Benezet, and several other Quakers addressed a letter in which they explained to other Friends why
as we cannot be concerned in wars and fightings, so neither ought we to contribute thereto by paying the tax directed by the [recent] Act, though suffering be the consequence of our refusal, which we hope to be enabled to bear with patience.
David Cooper reflected on how thoughtful letters like these helped him maintain his war tax resistance in times of doubt:
I read with singular satisfaction the piece which you lent me respecting taxes, as it was very strengthening to my mind, which before was somewhat encompassed with weakness on this account.… I have since felt much weakness, and had come to no solid conclusion of mind, until I read your little manuscript, which caused my heart to rejoice, under a feeling sense that it is the truth which leads those who walk and abide in it to hold forth this testimony unto the world.
And oh, says my soul, that I may yield faithful obedience to its monitions, let what will be the consequence.
Yearly Meetings would sometimes send letters to Quarterly or Monthly Meetings to reiterate the Quaker position on war tax resistance and give instructions as to how it should be enforced.
For instance, this is from an letter from the North Carolina Yearly Meeting:
…all our members should stand firm, and be faithful in bearing their testimony against war and military operations; taxes and fines appertaining thereunto, either directly or indirectly; or any way conniving or compromising with the specious and plausible offers of the legislature, by the tax proposed in the late act, to screen us from muster fines or military services.
And in order that all our members may be clearly informed on this subject, and be fully prepared to meet the trial likely to come upon us by this law, we have thought it best to send it down in this epistle.
An organizer of the Dublin water charge strike recalls:
…months of work had been done in local areas convincing people of the primacy of [non-payment].
This was done through local public meetings, door-to-door leaflets and even knocking on doors and talking to people… The building of the campaign in this way was crucial.
Local campaign groups were built and then came together and federated, rather than a central committee being formed first and then coming along to organise people.
…it became clear that while people might not have come out to the meeting, they had kept the information about the campaign and the campaign contact numbers had their place on a lot of fridge doors.
American women’s suffrage activist Anna Howard Shaw wrote a letter to women in the movement in , urging them to refuse to fill out income tax returns.
“In this manner we can show our loyalty to those who struggled to make this a free republic and who laid down their lives in defense of the equal rights of all free citizens to a voice in their own Government.
… Let our protest be universal, and let every believer in justice unite in this mode of passive resistance and steadfastly refuse to assist the Government in its unjust and tyrannical violation of its fundamental principle that ‘taxation and representation are one and inseparable,’ and thus prove ourselves worthy descendants of noble ancestors, who counted no price too dear to pay in defense of liberty and equality and justice.”
She told a reporter: “Since my letter was sent all over the country, I have received letters of encouragement and support from all directions,” and she soon thereafter won support for her stand from the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage.
Only some of the women’s suffrage activists in Britain were responsible for paying taxes, so although tax resistance was an important part of the campaign there, it was a part not everybody could participate in.
The movement made a special effort to find women who had taxes they could resist.
For example, at one meeting in , Margaret Kineton Parkes “asked anyone present who knew women who paid taxes to send in their names, that they might be approached by her society.”
In , Marie Lawson launched what she called a “snowball” protest: a sort of chain letter in which she sent out letters that advocated tax resistance (and protested on behalf of an imprisoned resister) and that asked the recipients to join her and to in turn send the same letter “to at least three friends.”
Public burnings of poll tax notices were good excuses for people to join in festive resistance activities.
The campaign to resist Thatcher’s Poll Tax used some creative outreach techniques (quotes from Danny Burns’s history of the movement):
“The Aberdeen Anti-Poll Tax group was formed when people from the radical bookshop came together with a community arts group:
“…The local community arts group had a theatre group called “Wise Up” and they got a show together about the Poll Tax.
They took this show around the estates with information for people about registration and how to fight it, to encourage them to set up local groups and support networks.
The plays were performed in local community centres.
Attendance for the plays varied from about 10 to 40 or more.
The meetings which followed were encouraging because people gave their names as contacts or asked people to set up future meetings.”
“In my local group… the union was built up through a door-to-door campaign.
A group of five or six people (mostly friends) formed the core.
They advertised a public meeting on the Poll Tax and about 50 people turned up.
Out of these some joined the organising group.
This small group then mass-produced a window poster which said ‘No Poll Tax Here.’
The poster was dropped through the letter-boxes of 2000 households and the group waited to see who put them up.
Posters appeared in about 100 windows.
Activists then went round and spoke to these people individually, inviting them to attend the next organising meeting; about fifteen did — enough to form the core of a group.”
“[Our] network was strengthened by a door-to-door survey of over 500 households.
The survey was not intended to be scientifically accurate.
Its purpose was to give the APTU a fairly accurate picture of what was happening on the ground, and, perhaps more significantly, it was a pretext for engaging people in conversation about the Poll Tax, informing them of the non-payment campaign and encouraging them to join their local APTU.… Over a third of the people canvassed became paid up members of the union.
By the end of the exercise Easton had over 300 members and street reps for almost every street.
The canvass was not left there.
The key to its success was the second visit.
The group compiled all the statistics on a street by street basis and many of the reps then went back, door-to-door, and told people the results of the survey in their street and the neighbouring streets.
A newsletter was delivered to everyone telling them what the overall results were for Easton.
This meant that people knew how few of their neighbours were going to pay and it gave them confidence not to pay themselves.
They had spoken to the canvassers personally, so they knew that the survey was genuine.”
“An independent television company approached the Easton group in order to work with us on a film about the Poll Tax.
The film was never shown, but the way the community was engaged in the process of making it is instructive.
The film producers wanted a shot of all the doors in the street, opening one by one as the occupants came out of their houses with banners and signs.
Charles, the local street rep, went round to people’s houses every evening for a week and explained to them what was wanted.
Out of 30 houses in the street (a cul-de-sac) 28 agreed to participate.
The street is multi-racial with a fairly wide class mix.
It was inspiring to see white working class men standing shoulder to shoulder with Asian women and their kids, holding the same banners and engrossed in conversation.
Some of them had never spoken to each other before.
The film was made, but more importantly, as [a] result of making it, virtually every one of those households joined the Union, and most still had posters in their windows a year later.
People were brought into the campaign, not through a leaflet or a canvasser, but through an interesting activity.
They didn’t have to go to the campaign, it came to them.”
A tax resistance campaign can benefit its recruiting efforts, engage public sympathy, and constrain the response of the government, by getting a good spin out in the media.
Here are some examples:
The Bardoli tax strike was media savvy, both in terms of national establishment media, and in terms of local, down-to-earth outreach methods:
“A campaign like this could not be carried out without a publicity department,” wrote Mahadev Desai.
“The peasants could not be asked to subscribe to daily papers or even to the weekly Navajivan, and outside papers could at best give an outside view of the campaign.
… The arrangement was to issue a daily news bulletin and publish Sjt. Vallabhbhai’s speeches in pamphlet form and to distribute them free to the agriculturalists all over the taluka.
… The arrangement answered most admirably, the villagers waiting anxiously for the patrikas every morning and devouring the contents with avidity.
All the Gujarati and almost all the English dailies of Bombay reproduced them verbatim, and as the movement gathered force, every important town and village in Gujarat began to get copies of the bulletin with the result that over and above ten thousand copies distributed in Bardoli, four thousand copies were subscribed to by places outside.”
In the course of describing the organizational structure of the nonviolent resistance army, Mahadev Desai noted: “[U]nder these officers were privates ready to march anywhere and everywhere, at any hour of the night and day, and ready to do the lowliest of duties, from carrying a message to drawing water from the well.
… The round of duties of most of them began often as early as 3 A.M., when they started with their orders for the day to the various villages where they would distribute the daily news bulletins issued by the Publicity Bureau.
… All were to go amongst the peasants, acquaint themselves with their needs and difficulties, cheer them up, and explain to them the instructions of the Chief.”
Mahadev Desai continues: “And at the head of them all the Sardar, ever on the move, without haste and without rest, ever vigilant, his iron discipline ever unrelaxed, paying the penalty of his exclusive prerogative — speech-making — often at midnight, and often at three or four places in a day.”
… “The Bardoli victory was not won by a miracle.
It was the inevitable fruit of patient and incessant toil, the inevitable result of the teaching that the Sardar wore himself out to impart day in and day out.
During the first two months he gave three days in the week to Bardoli, but as soon as the Ahmedabad Municipality released him, all his waking hours were given to the people of Bardoli, the day usually beginning at 5 P.M. and ending at 2 A.M., with four or five speeches a day on average.”
The case of Valentine Byler, an Amish man who refused to participate in the American Social Security system for conscientious reasons, was notable for how it played out in the media.
Part of this was due to the clumsy heavy-handedness of the IRS, which seized Byler’s horses out from under him literally as he was working his field.
Asked about this, the IRS Chief of Collections said: “Plowing never occurred to me.
I live in an apartment.”
The frame of thoughtless-urban-bureaucrats vs. godly-heartland-people attached itself to the story, and editorialists across the country who were already skeptical of welfare state policies jumped on it.
“What kind of ‘welfare’ is it,” wrote the New York Herald Tribune, “that takes a farmer’s horses away at spring plowing time in order to dragoon a whole community into a ‘benefit’ scheme it neither needs nor wants, and which offends its deeply held religious scruples?”
Byler got letters of support from around the country.
And Congress eventually felt enough of the pressure that it carved out an exception for the Amish exempting them from the Social Security law.
Abby and Julia Smith, who were taxed excessively by an unscrupulous local government for which they, as women, had no voice in electing, knew how to make their struggle attractive to the news media.
Julia prepared a speech for the town council, which fell on deaf ears — but she then released it to the editor of a nearby newspaper, which reprinted it and compared the sisters’ actions to those American Revolutionaries who fought for the principle of “no taxation without representation.”
An accompanying editorial concluded: “It will not be creditable if Abby Smith and her sister are left to stand alone… to fight the battle of principle unaided.”
Sure enough, they found support — rhetorical and practical — from many quarters.
“[M]uch of the nation’s interest in the Glastonbury case was the work of Abby,” wrote Elizabeth George Speare in recapping the case, “who willingly took pen in hand to keep her public informed.
Though she once reminded a Toledo editor that she could not give quite so much time to answering such distant requests, she seems to have welcomed every opportunity to recount, in her pungent style, a tale which lost nothing in constant retelling.”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League in Britain made sure to have speeches and propaganda ready to deliver at any events — such as tax auctions — that the media might cover.
Such speeches might form the core of an overtaxed reporter’s coverage of such an event.
When Dora Montefiore barricaded her home against the tax collector in , she recalled:
In a bailiff had been put in my house, a levy of my goods had been made, and they had been sold at public auction in Hammersmith.
The result as far as publicity was concerned was half a dozen lines in the corner of some daily newspapers, stating the fact that Mrs. Montefiore’s goods had been distrained and sold for payment of income tax; and there the matter ended.
When talking this over in with Theresa Billington and Annie Kenney, I told them that now we had the organisation of the W.S.P.U. to back me up I would, if it were thought advisable, not only refuse to pay income tax, but would shut and bar my doors and keep out the bailiff, so as to give the demonstration more publicity and thus help to educate public opinion about the fight for the political emancipation of women which was going on.
They agreed that if I would do my share of passive resistance they would hold daily demonstrations outside the house as long as the bailiff was excluded and do all in their power outside to make the sacrifice I was making of value to the cause.…
…From the day of this simple act of closing my door against the bailiff, an extraordinary change came over the publicity department of daily and weekly journalism towards this demonstration of passive resistance on my part…
On the morning following the inauguration of the siege, Annie Kenney and Theresa Billington, with other members of the W.S.P.U., came round to see how we were getting on and to encourage our resistance.
They were still chatting from the pavement outside, while I stood on the steps of No. 32 Upper Mall, when there crept round from all sides men with notebooks and men with cameras, and the publicity stunt began.
These men had been watching furtively the coming and going of postmen and tradesmen.
Now they posted themselves in front, questioning the suffragists outside and asking for news of us inside.
They had come to make a “story” and they did not intend to leave until they had got their “story.”
One of them returned soon with a loaf of bread and asked Annie Kenney to hand it up over the wall to my housekeeper, whilst the army of men with cameras “snapped” the incident.
Some of them wanted to climb over the wall so as to be able to boast in their descriptions that they had been inside what they pleased to call “The Fort”; but the policeman outside (there was a policeman on duty outside during all the six weeks of a siege) warned them that they must not do this so we were relieved, in this respect, from the too close attention of eager pressmen.
But all through the morning notebooks and cameras came and went, and at one time my housekeeper and I counted no less than twenty-two pressmen outside the house.
A woman sympathiser in the neighbourhood brought during the course of the morning, a pot of home-made marmalade, as the story had got abroad that we had no provisions and had difficulty in obtaining food.
This was never the case as I am a good housekeeper and have always kept a store cupboard, but we accepted with thanks the pot of marmalade because the intentions of the giver were so excellent; but this incident was also watched and reported by the Press.
When I read stories from newspaper archives about the tax strike in Beit Sahour during the first intifada, I’m struck with how much more sympathetic the English-language press was toward the Palestinian people at that time.
They are depicted as human beings, with families and aspirations, and their grievances are taken seriously and explored and analyzed and given credence.
The contrast with the coverage in today’s media is stark.
Beit Sahour was a high water mark of sorts.
This can partially be explained by the fact that most of the resisters were Palestinian Christians, and so did not trigger the anti-Muslim bias that shapes much of the English-language reporting from the area — one news account made much of the fact that the Israeli military had seized “Christian crosses carved of olivewood and the statuettes of the Good Shepherd and the Madonna” from one resister.
But the resisters were also very deliberately media savvy: they stuck to nonviolent tactics, which, besides being tactically sensible under the circumstances, also made the draconian Israeli crackdown seem particularly bullying; and they used slogans, like “no taxation without representation” that could not help but fall on sympathetic ears in the English-speaking world.
Another article noted that when the Israeli military lifted its siege of Beit Sahour, “hundreds of residents gathered at a central intersection to celebrate and to escort journalists to homes and shops from which troops had seized goods.”
During the campaign against Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax, the very name “poll tax” was a propaganda coup.
Thatcher had launched the tax under the benign name “community charge,” but the opposition movement used “poll tax” right off the bat, and the name stuck.
That name had resonance with anti-poll tax campaigns of the past, dating back as far as the rebellion of Wat Tyler.
The movement also pitted the government against pensioners, the disabled, student nurses, families with live-in elderly relatives, and other such victims that made for a sympathetic media narrative.
“Stories like this flooded both the national and local media,” writes movement historian Danny Burns.
“One minute the focus was on the nurses, next on the disabled, then on the pensioners.”
The IRS includes a publicity strategy with their enforcement actions, and grades itself with how much publicity it gets when it cracks down on a tax evader, thus “sending the message to taxpayers that violations of the Internal Revenue Code and related financial crimes are being investigated and prosecuted.”
Since the IRS is already doing the work to make sure the press is aware of the action, and of course giving out their own spin, it makes sense for tax resisters to be prepared with their own message.
“Never let a lien, levy, seizure, auction, summons, Order to Show Cause, or indictment pass without taking the opportunity to publicize opposition,” advise the authors of the book War Tax Resistance: A Guide to Withholding Your Support from the Military.
“The IRS is very sensitive to adverse public opinion.
It is probably the most disliked agency of the government.
You may be surprised at the amount of support and sympathy you will get from the general public and media when struggling against the IRS — if you take care to organize properly.”
NWTRCC has some ideas on how to make a bigger media splash, including propaganda leaflets, props & costumes, theatrical protest ideas, penny polls, tax form burnings, bake sales, banners, vigils, and so forth.
Today I’m going to start reproducing some excerpts from this material that concern specific tactical and strategic activity and decision-making by the people involved in this successful tax resistance struggle.
3D was the newsletter of the “3rd September Steering Committee” which was one of the coalitions of groups organizing the poll tax resistance.
Its first issue (undated, but probably published around ) included an update from Danny Burns about the progress of the resistance movement in Bristol and Avon.
Some excerpts:
In , campaigns started to get off the ground in Bristol.
By there were around 12 local groups and a federation was formed to coordinate them.
In we have over 50 affiliated groups.
We have had a heartening response from local trade union branches and are starting to involve a whole range of Bristol-wide voluntary organisations.…
In the community charge registration officer for Bristol informed us that they normally take 10,000 people to court each year for non payment of the rates.
Their own estimates based on ability to pay suggest that even without a non payment campaign they will have to take 60,000 people to court.
With such a campaign it is likely to be over 100,000. Our interpretation of the English law shows that every one of these cases will have to go to a civil court for a liability order, and every one can be challenged in court.
This will not be remotely possible for them to implement.
But are we going to achieve these levels of non payment?
We are convinced because the initial returns of our canvass (which we hope by will have gone door to door in every household in Bristol) show that 95% of the population are opposed to the tax.
The vast majority have indicated that they will either be unable to pay the tax or it will cause them severe financial difficulty and in some areas up to 70% have said they will refuse to pay as long as they are part of a mass non payment campaign.
These results have been reflected in the level of activity on the ground.
In Easton (my local anti poll tax union) in a single ward over 300 households have actively joined the union (50p per household); when we have finished the canvass we expect the figure to be nearer five hundred.
This is over 25% of the local population and is nearly ten times the membership of the local ward Labour Party.
How has this been achieved at a local level?
A small core initially called a public meeting, leafletting all 2,000 households.
This meeting formed the embryo of an anti poll tax union.
Following this a “no poll tax here” poster was produced, which was distributed to all households.
The anti poll tax union then identified all the houses who had put the posters up in their windows and talked to them directly (about 100).
The vast majority joined the anti poll tax union, and by this stage we felt strong enough to break down into 12 neighbourhoods.
Leafletting for further local and regional meetings and rallies was organised from this base until with the onset of the Avon-wide canvass.
At this stage we identified street representatives for the whole area.
Ultimately these will be the key to creating the local support and communication which is necessary to keep people from feeling isolated in their struggle.
Back to the Avon Federation!
How are we organised?
All anti poll tax unions and affiliated organisations have a right to two voting delegates at the federation.
We hold federation meetings on a three weekly basis.
We usually get between 50 and 60 people to each of these delegate meetings.
We have recently set up an action group which is working on setting up new groups in every area where there are no groups.
There is a regular petition in the Centre of Bristol which collects names and addresses from the whole of the city.
These are later divided into areas and form the basis of the new groups.
These areas are then leafletted; a public meeting is advertised and then local people are left to get on with it (obviously with the support of the federation).
These approaches have proved very effective and it is likely that by we will have around 80 affiliated groups.…
The lead editorials in issue #2 and #3 urged people to spur their trade union branches to organize workplace anti-poll tax groups.
This was in part because local government workers would be called on to enforce the poll tax, and also to bear the brunt of budget cutting if the tax could not be collected.
But also, this was because councils would probably try to seize unpaid poll tax from the paychecks of workers, and unions could act to try to prevent or ameliorate this.
The editorial noted:
In London a trade union dayschool has been organised to raise the issue of Poll Tax in workplaces and union branches.
The Greater London Association of Trades Councils and the All London Federation support this initiative.
Such dayschools should be called in other areas as a step in building the campaign in workplaces.
Another article in issue #2 noted one way government workers were refusing to cooperate with tax enforcement.
Several clerical workers in inner London social security offices were refusing orders to register recipients on the poll tax rolls.
In doing so, they were defying their union leadership, which was sticking to a compliant line.
Union workers in other parts of the Kingdom “have now been threatened with suspension from the union for debating and overwhelmingly carrying a motion calling for DSS workers to refuse to make ‘poll tax deductions’ from claimants.”
Another article in the same issue mentioned actions to disrupt local council meetings at which the councils were setting poll tax rates.
These included mass protests, resignations of councillors, blockades, and burning an effigy of Margaret Thatcher.
The article also mentions “ ‘harassing’ sheriff officers to stop poindings” in Scotland.
A theme developing in these reports is the challenge of partisanship.
On the one hand, Labour, the ostensible opposition party, was only willing to offer rhetorical resistance to the poll tax, while its elected officials on the local councils were busy implementing it.
On the other hand, the Socialist Workers Party was trying to hijack the anti-poll tax resistance movement to try to bolster its standing — attempting to turn all of the anti-poll tax actions into SWP rallies, and to wrest control of the movement leadership.
(This reminds me a lot of the American Scylla and Charybdis for left-leaning activists of the feckless Democrats/MoveOn liberals on one side and the noxious ANSWER tinpots on the other.)
At one point, a number of officers of the All Britain Federation of Anti-Poll Tax Unions resigned their posts, complaining in an open letter that they had been marginalized by SWP leadership.
Issue #3 noted that “housing staff all over Sheffield walked out following the threat of disciplinary action against area managers who refused to tell staff to attend Poll Tax training events.”
It also reported that the annual delegate meeting of the National Union of Journalists had signed on to a campaign of “Mass non-payment of the Poll Tax”
Another article in that issue noted some of the actions resisters were taking to defend against government reprisals:
The… Campaign has co-ordinated the closing of their bank accounts — no handbag snatchers here, thanks Maggie!
The campaign is threatening to mount a picket and refuse to let anyone in to the home who tries to sell off their possessions to recover the £398 Lothian Council is demanding from them!
In the wake of the poll tax riots, some of the poll tax resistance opposition leaders were embarrassed, and tried to distance themselves from association with the violence by throwing those arrested under the bus.
The “Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign” took a different tack: coordinating the legal defense of those on trial.
On the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign was launched at a meeting at Conway Hall in London, attended by defendants, solicitors, and anti-Poll tax activists.
It was agreed that the campaign would:
unconditionally support all those arrested
be run by and accountable to those arrested
be independent of all other organisations
demand the support of the whole anti-Poll Tax movement and other sympathetic organisations.
The meeting also agreed to seek out and contact all defendants, co-ordinate legal defence, publicise what happened at the demonstration from the point of view of those arrested, and call for donations and fund-raising for a bust fund for legal and welfare costs.
Issue #4 began by reporting on some encouraging non-compliance statistics, and on the difficulties councils were having in their pursuit of defaulters:
Medina council, on the Isle of Wight, was the first to make themselves look immensely foolish for not investing in a decent stock of first class stamps.
So the magistrate ruled that insufficient notice of the summons had been given — the cases collapsed amid street parties.
South Tyneside and Wandsworth took fright and shelved their plans to issue summonses immediately.
All this gives us more time to organise against court cases.
If we get only 1 in 37 people down to the courts the system will become inoperable.
Tactics mentioned in a sidebar included marches, leaflet distribution, “hundreds of people stop[ping] the bailiffs,” a 28-hour occupation of a sherriff’s office, and labor strikes.
Meanwhile, the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign “now has the support of the whole anti-poll tax movement” in its campaign “to force the prosecution, police, and media onto the defensive” which included, in addition to its legal work, pickets of right-wing media outlets and demonstrations at jails where defendants were being held.
Issue #5 led off with an article on resisting the bailiffs (collection agents).
Excerpts:
It quickly became clear that a large number of South West councils were going to use the same bailiffs — a company called Roach and Co. based in Bristol.
The Avon Federation moved into action.
We watched their movements for a week and identified all their cars (they had a series of Nissan vans).
We looked them up in the Companies Register.
We examined their premises and discovered that their compound was at the end of a cul de sac (ideal for pickets…).
We put this information out to local groups who in themselves turned up a load of information about the bailiffs — some knew them personally, others had useful “dirt” for the press campaign.
The action began on .
In the previous week Roaches had been both to Bishops Lydeard (a small village near Taunton) and Barri (in South Wales) to deliver a “walking possession” notice.
This meant (in two cases where they had been able to gain access to the houses) that they were in a position to take people’s possessions.
We called a blockade for .
People turned up from APTUs across Bristol.
No vehicles were able to leave the compound, and we got massive press coverage.
In fact a number of vehicles left from the bailiffs’ private homes.
They were spotted by our people crossing the Severn Bridge at .
They never arrived, but the van was discovered sometime later with its tyres let down.
Meanwhile in Barri and Bishops Lydeard, the whole community was mobilised.
In Barri over fifty people were outside the houses of the threatened families; telephones on the window sill; another two hundred people ready to respond to a phone call; vehicles roaming the area watching for bailiffs; kids, prams, icecream vans creating a carnival atmosphere.
In Bishop Lydeard half the village decided to take the day off.
All the roads in were sealed off by the community.
All cars going through were required to identify themselves.
The bailiffs never got near the village.
These scenes prove that the non payment figures are not just empty statistics which will crumble as the threats get stronger.
The community is proving its strength — this has inspired people throughout the South West.
It has sent shockwaves through council and government.
Another article gave some advice about how to do outreach to defendants as councils began to take non-payers to court:
At the court we must do our best to make sure that people know what is going on at all times, through leaflets and personal contact.
A team of activists should take on the job of approaching defendants on arrival, explaining the situation to them and directing them to our solicitors and “McKenzie friends”.
Council officials will be doing the same, attempting to “help” make arrangements for people to pay out of court.
We should organise creches for kids and refreshments for hungry bellies.
This level of organisation will be difficult to maintain over several weeks.
In Leeds we are planning for individual anti-Poll Tax groups to run things on separate days — organised well in advance so activists can take time off work.
Normally the courts will deal with the cases of all those who attend before proceeding against non-attenders.
Sometimes as at South Tyneside they have attempted to adjourn the cases of all those present till a later date, enabling them to proceed with the absentees very quickly.
We will argue against this, explaining that people have arranged time off work or organised childcare to enable them to be present and have a right to have their cases heard.
People can be represented by either solicitors or McKenzie friends.
McKenzie friends are lay representatives who can take notes and give advice to the defendant.
They do not have an automatic right to address the court but may be allowed to do so in the interest of time.
Liability orders may be sought from several people at once.
Since each person still has the right to question council officials and give their own defence this does not necessarily save the courts time.
It goes without saying that people should always ask for their cases to be heard separately.
Usually the local authority is asked to make its case and then those summoned can offer their defence.
The local authority has to prove to the court that the sum claimed is due and that it has not been paid.
Therefore the magistrate shouldn’t grant a liability order unless they are satisfied that:
The Council has passed a resolution fixing the Poll Tax.
Your name is entered in the “Community Charge Register” showing what type of Poll Tax you are liable to pay (the local authority can prove this either by producing a copy of the register certified by the registration officer; or by evidence given by a local authority officer who has inspected the register).
The Poll Tax has been demanded in accordance with the law i.e you have been served with a “demand notice” (a Poll Tax bill) and a further notice.
Service of the demand and reminder must be proved either by sworn oral evidence by a council official with personal knowledge of the relevant postings or who can actually produce a record of the posting or by a “certificate” signed by a duly authorised officer.
Each of the above presents us with the opportunity to give the council officials and their witnesses a rigorous cross-examination.
When all this has been accepted as proven the opportunity falls to the defendant to offer a defence.
Political arguments won’t wash, but they can still take up time.
There is a good chance of getting an adjournment if you have a rebate application pending or if you have applied for a review of the rebate decision.
Both cases are looked on with more sympathy if they were made before the summons was received.
More than half of those attending court have managed to get adjournments or withdrawals of liability orders because of outstanding rebates and reviews.
There were also brief mentions of pickets, the occupation of a bailiff’s office, a courtroom occupation, labor strikes, and marches.
