How you can resist funding the government →
a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns →
resist the census →
see also
British war resisters — organized as “Count Me Out” — are boycotting the census.
In tax resistance campaigns of yore, census resistance has usually come because the census was seen as a prelude to a tax.
In this case, the boycott has a different cause: the resisters are protesting against the government’s awarding of the contract to run the census to the arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin.
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.
The story of the birth of Jesus, as given in the gospels, begins with his pregnant mother and her husband on the move to Bethlehem in order to enroll in the census that Caesar Augustus had launched as part of his plan “that all the world should be taxed.”
A government doesn’t launch a census just because it’s curious, but usually, as with Augustus, as the prelude to a tax.
It’s the government’s way of “casing the joint” before the big heist.
And so some tax resistance campaigns have started by resisting a census.
Today I’ll review some examples.
Poll Tax resistance in Thatcher’s Britain
Refusal to register was one of the ways people resisted Thatcher’s Poll Tax.
And the government’s difficulties in tracking people as they moved from place to place, and from one council’s jurisdiction to another, made enforcement difficult.
Resisters also successfully refused to provide information about their employment that could be used to seize taxes from their paychecks.
According to one account:
[T]he councils still had one insurmountable headache.
They had to find out where people worked.
This was a real nightmare because other than asking the people concerned, they had no real way of getting the information they needed.
When a liability order was granted by the court, non-payers were sent a form which requested details of employment.
Failure to fill it out carried a fine of £100 and £400 if the non-payer provided false information.
But this didn’t act as a deterrent either, because, if people couldn’t pay the Poll Tax itself (and the court costs which were added), then it made little difference if the council added another £100. A survey carried out by the Audit Commission in showed that, nationally, only 15% of people who received the form actually sent it back.
Like electoral registration, it was widely ignored even though this was a criminal offence.
Household Tax resistance in Ireland today
The Household Tax resistance movement in Ireland is defined by refusal by households to register to pay the tax.
This is not a charge to fund your local community, it is a tax to fund private speculators, bondholders and the bailout.
Our incomes and services are being decimated to pay this private debt.
Now people have a chance to register their opposition by not registering for this tax.
By not registering, we can make this a referendum on the bailouts for the rich and the cuts for us.
When the registration deadline hit at , only about half of Irish households had registered.
Ruth Coppinger of the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes declared victory:
This is more than was achieved by Poll Tax non-payment which started off at 15% in the first year, , and which only reached 45% boycott in the year of its abolition.
Episcopalians in Scotland
The official church of Scotland had a habit through the centuries of taxing everyone in Scotland for the support of that church, whether they were members or not.
This tended to annoy those who belonged to other churches.
And this annoyance became especially loud whenever the “official” church got swapped from one denomination to another.
When the Presbyterians replaced the Episcopalians in the official chair in , one way the Episcopalians resisted was by refusing to pay the tax and refusing to participate in a church-run census.
William Maitland, in his History of Edinburgh, fretted over difficulties in estimating the population at this period of time, noting:
[T]he greatest Defect is owing to the Episcopalian Inhabitants, who, being of a different Communion from the established Church, are not subject to the Controul and Examination of its Ministers; wherefore, many of them refuse to give Accounts either of the Names or Numbers of Persons in their Families.
Queensland water tax strike
In Queensland, Australia, in , the government tried to sneak in a tax on farmers who used wells or water pumps to irrigate their lands.
The farmers rebelled.
Since the “tax” took the form of a stiff fee accompanying the mandatory registration of such wells or water pumps, it was natural that the tax resistance included mass refusal to register.
Local Producers’ Associations across Queensland gathered and voted to refuse registration.
A month after the tax went into effect, facing mass refusal, the government backed down and rescinded the tax… though without eliminating the requirement to register wells and water pumps.
Some Associations continued to counsel their members to refuse to register even after the tax resistance victory.
A Mr. Roome of the Woodmillar LPA put it this way:
A lot of farmers were under the impression that because of registration fee had been withdrawn, everything in the garden was lovely.
But the regulations were still there, and farmers who were under that impression would receive a rude awakening.
Only formal registration had to be made, but they would find that if they furnished the particulars asked for they would give the Government an opportunity to later on impose the charges.
The danger was still there, whereas if they refused to register the onus was on the Government to get the particulars, and prove that the farmers put down wells or sunk dams, etc. Once they gave the information they were at the mercy of the Government.
… The excuse by the Government was that they wanted to get a survey of the water facilities which was absolutely ridiculous.
The whole thing was a farce, and an excuse to impose a tax.
The only way was to refuse to register, which he hoped would be done by members of all branches, and also refuse to pay the tax.
A motion that the members of the Association refuse to register was passed.
Zakāt resistance in Malaysia
When the Malaysian government assumed control of the traditional Islamic religious tithe called the zakāt, made it mandatory, and fixed its rate based on the acreage and yields of farmers, this also meant that the government had to do a census of agricultural land and monitor the crop yields.
This led to widespread, varied, mostly quiet, but strikingly effective resistance.
James C. Scott, who studied the resistance, writes of one technique:
Some cultivators, particularly small-holders and tenants, simply refuse to register their cultivated acreage with the tithe agent.
Resistance to a pre-tax census in Fiji
A poll tax on indentured workers from India was initiated in Fiji in .
The Indians had no political representation on the island, were banned from the schools, and could only emigrate on a single ship voyage offered once per year: they were essentially considered disposable migrant labor.
The workers thought the tax, which amounted to the pay of 12 days labor, was a sort of bait-and-switch on the contracts that had brought them to Fiji, and vowed to resist.
As one account put it:
A start will be made in to register all those liable to pay the residential tax, and prison will be the fate of him who does not comply with the law.
Leading Indians in every district declare that they will willingly go to gaol before they register their names, and a general passive resistance is highly possible, with all its attendant strikes and bitter feeling.
a badge worn by members of the Women’s Tax Resistance League
The British women’s suffrage movement
The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom, more so than anywhere else, used tax resistance in its struggle.
“No taxation without representation,” was the cry.
Suffragists also resisted government attempts to get information from them, both because these attempts were part of the effort to tax them, and because the laws that governed such information-gathering were passed by a male-exclusive government.
In , Winifred Patch wrote:
I have recently received a paper from the Inland Revenue Office headed “Duties on Land Values.
Notice to Furnish Information,” asking for the names and addresses of any persons to whom I pay rent or for whom I may collect rents, a penalty not exceeding £50 being incurred if this information is willfully withheld.
… As I am denied the rights of citizenship I absolutely decline to facilitate in any way the carrying out of the provisions of Mr. Lloyd George’s Finance Bill, and am returning my paper with this written across it.
I am hoping, through the Women’s Tax Resistance League, of which I am a member, to obtain expert information which will enable me to make it impossible for the Government to exact the £50 penalty, and will leave them with no alternative but to imprison me in default.
Will other women join me in making this protest?
I feel that there must be many like myself who would gladly risk imprisonment for the cause, but who, for various reasons, find it very difficult, if not impossible, to take part in the more active protests which have hitherto brought women into conflict with the law.
I cannot help hoping that we have here another vantage ground from which to attack a Government which refuses us justice.
Teresa Billington-Greig took up Patch’s suggestion and rallied the troops:
The famous forms on which the owners and lease-holders of the country have to prepare the necessary statistics for the levying of the new [land] tax have been issued now in practically all parts of England, and they will be issued in Scotland within a few days.
Already these forms have been returned unfilled up, and with a curt comment as to the status of the women applied to, by some of our members in England.
They will be so returned by many Suffragists across the border.
Neither information nor money will be forthcoming in response to the Inland Revene Department’s demands.
As far as possible this piece of Government business will be impeded first by the determined refusal of information, and, second, by the withholding of the money claimed in taxes.
Such refusal to yield to tyranny is always desirable.
But at the present moment it carries an additional value in that it can be employed to improve the chances of the Conciliation Women’s Suffrage Bill.
From now until the fate of the Bill is decided, every woman to whom any Government application for information or for taxes is made should not only refuse to comply because of the unrepresented condition of her sex, but should add a rider to the effect that she will gladly supply information and provide the money claimed if the Women’s Suffrage Bill at present before Parliament becomes law this Session.
Margarete Wynne Nevinson put it this way:
Here I have one of Mr. Lloyd George’s wonderful forms, with its numerous questions, to answer which intelligently I should require, apparently, the training of a lawyer and surveyor, and a fund of universal knowledge which I do not possess.
I am asked to answer those questions, but am not considered fit to vote for a member of Parliament.
This Form is addressed to me because I have a little freehold property, but it starts off with “Sir.”
I am sending it back, pointing our that I must be addressed as “Madam,” and not “Sir,” and that as I have not vote, I do not see what this matter has to do with me.
If you think of it, it is rather an insult to all women property holders to be addressed as “Sir,” and not by their proper title of courtesy.
The State seems to take for granted that there can be no free women or women freeholders in the country, but that all the land must be owned by men.
, Charlotte Despard announced that this strategy of non-cooperation would be extended to the census proper.
One news account said:
The census would cost a great deal of money, said Mrs. Despard, and involve an enormous amount of labor.
So far as they were concerned, this census should not be taken.
“We shall prove,” said Mrs. Despard, “whether there is a people, or whether there can be a people without the women.
We shall call upon women householders and women lodgers all over the country to refuse absolutely all information when the census takers come round.”
Women, she went on, had been proud to belong to the nation, but they had been denied their citizenship.
Was it not logical, therefore, that they should say, “Very well; citizens we are not, and we shall not register ourselves as citizens?”
That was logical, as a protest should be, and it would be effective.
Speaking of the preparations for the census, Mrs. Despard asserted that the officials were trying to get cheap labor: little girls from the schools at six and seven shillings a week.
Mrs. Despard added that the members were going to obstruct other Government business and make other protests, and they would stop the census boycott only when they had the promise of the Prime Minister that a Woman’s Suffrage Bill would be introduced this session.
The Spectator, a conservative-leaning magazine from the U.K., devoted a column inch or two to the struggle against Thatcher’s poll tax back in the day.
Today, some excerpts.
The poll-tax activist [in Scotland] has been working recently on projects which will not concern his southern counterpart for many months.
Protestors in cars with CB radios have followed sheriff officers who are now trying to spot videos and microwaves which might be sold toward the tax, in the houses and tenements of defaulters.
In Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, where two men, one a local councillor, have been charged with obstructing sheriff officers in the course of their duties, children excited by the unusual liveliness of their streets have taken up a new game of Scumbuster against Sheriff.
Local authorities are now trying to collect the last of the year’s tax.
Their final figures will not show precisely how much support the Scottish National Party’s non-payment campaign has had until the summer at the earliest.
Meanwhile, supporters of the poll tax talk percentages, which are reasonably reassuring, and those against it speak in numbers, which are substantial.
The Scottish Information Office says that across the board 85–95 per cent have paid something towards poll tax.
Kenny MacAskill, the SNP’s poll-tax spokesman, estimates that between 500,000 and 750,000 of Scotland’s 3.9 million who are eligible to pay up have failed to do so.
Certainly by half a million summary warrants had been issued as the first stage towards the arrival of the sheriff officer on Mrs McKay’s doormat.
More are likely to be issued as authorities begin to move against those who had applied for rebates, or have more recently fallen into arrears.
…matters might not be so bad in England and Wales after all.
But there is plenty of danger too.
In the last year for which there are figures, , Westminster Council in London sent out 5,774 warrants to bailiffs under the rating system.
That figure will be much higher under poll tax, and the thought of television pictures, which are bound to come, of grannies who fall just above the rebate level weeping as hard men carry away their television sets in about a year’s time, may send some Conservative supporters back to bed just as they may have thought it was safe to emerge.
Worse, in England and Wales, unlike Scotland, defaulters may be sent to prison.
In , 264 were sent there for non-payment of rates.
In a year’s time there are likely to be many more, by no means all either reprobates or militants.
Some may well be as endearing as 89-year-old Mr Richard McMillan, whose tearful return of his OBE to Buckingham Palace made moving pictures last week, and they will be called Poll Tax Prisoners.
This and Scumbusters: coming soon to a street near you.
As we were digesting Scargill’s troubles, the hijacking of the poll-tax protest movement of Militant and Rentamob burst upon us.
Here the credit for making the most of an important political story must go to the Times, giving its departing editor, Charles Wilson, a rousing send-off.
Nothing could match the impact of the television pictures, often live, which brought home the full horror of vicious young thugs, often armed with weapons of one kind or another, deliberately assaulting the police, including WPC’s and trying to overthrow the constitutional process.
But the broadsheet can do a job instant television cannot — getting the background into sharp, detailed focus.
The Times was on to Militant on Wednesday with a front-page story, “How the disruption is organised”, describing the penetration of the so-called All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation, which emerged as a Militant front body.
The next day, despite having the Al Fayed-Harrods story to handle, it gave the Militant hijack extensive and fascinating coverage, naming the 13 men and women behind it, and listing too, a significant point, the 28 Labour MPs who have given backing to Militant’s campaign.
[R]iots matter in the political world more than they matter in, so to speak, real life.
In the theatre of politics, riots are the noises and alarums off, which add to the tension on stage.
Much of the violence in the West End of London last Saturday may have been “mindless”, as the ritual phrase has it.
But if any of the brick-throwers and Jaguar-igniters were aiming simply to heighten the atmosphere of political alarm over the poll tax, then their actions were rationally calculated to achieve their ends.
A riot, however spuriously attached to a political protest, contributes an aura of anger and desperation in the same way that mud-slinging contributes mud to a wall: some of it will always stick.
The immediate rewards of the riot are obvious: a spate of articles in the national newspapers (and, yes, the weekly magazines too) discussing protest movements, the principles of passive non-payment and active resistance, and above all the poll tax itself.
All this helps create an atmosphere of pressure and crisis.
[T]he extremists have almost certainly underestimated the power of moderate illegality — the tactic of purely passive non-payment — on a large scale.
The Socialist Workers’ Party (a staid and conventional lot in the eyes of the anarchist fringe) have argued in one of their pamphlets that Mr Kinnock should “call a massive law-defying campaign against the poll tax”.
This is not an irrational plan.
If half the population refused to pay, the system could not possibly cope.
From an article by Mark Palmer in the profile of / savaging of Tommy Sheridan, which leads off with the now notorious Tom Friedman-ish journalistic trope of a convenient quote from a cab driver:
“We have a name for people like him up here,” said the Glasgow taxi driver as we rounded the last corner on the way to the office of the All Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation.
“Wankers.”
The description proved to be one of the kinder comments I heard levelled at Tommy Sheridan, the 26-year-old Stirling University graduate, who founded the federation two years ago, shortly before being expelled from the Labour Party for his connections with the militant tendency.
Indeed, the contempt for him crosses party lines in a manner that very little else in Glasgow can.
Conservatives, what’s left of them north of the border, think him more dangerous than Arthur Scargill, while the top brass of Labour-held Strathclyde Regional Council have as much time for Sheridan as they do for Margaret Thatcher, who introduced the community charge in the first place.
“I have spent 20 years in active politics and have never seen anybody whose skills as a speaker are so circumscribed by his own sense of self-importance,” said James Dunnachie, the Labour MP for Glasgow Pollok.
But everyone I came across agreed that Tommy Sheridan is running a brilliant campaign.
Effective, high-profile, orderly.
“We are making the poll tax unworkable and uncollectible,” Sheridan assured me, “and we are the only ones prepared to fight.
Everyone else has left the battlefield.”
The telephone rang.
It was BBC Scotland anxious for Sheridan’s reaction to claims that he and his colleagues have been harassing children of sheriff officers, Scotland’s equivalent of bailiffs.
He had already spoken to four national newspaper reporters that morning, which is about normal.
He gives three press conferences a week, has speaking engagements six nights a week and on Saturday afternoons, and finds time to turn out for his local football team.
Articulate, unfailingly polite, dedicated and alarmingly handsome, Tommy Sheridan is the Anti-Poll Tax Federation.
Without him there would be no protest movement.
It was Sheridan who organised the Trafalgar Square rally , and has now set up more than 50 branches of the federation in England.
His latest wheeze is a march from Glasgow to London , culminating in a mass rally on Clapham Common.
I expected a monster but found nothing other than a sincere young man with noble, unworkable ideals, whose school report might read, “If guided correctly, should go far.”
Sheridan has no idea where he is going but intends to apply to rejoin the Labour Party in four years” time when his ban is up.
The party would do well to let him back in, though Dunnachie promises, “I will never allow it.”
“I am a socialist not a Stalinist,” said Sheridan.
“I have always spoken about the Soviet Union and its lack of democracy and have always believed that a strong economic system is essential in distributing wealth.
But I know I have a burning anger inside me.”
Sheridan’s socialism, nurtured in part by his parents (his mother was an official in the Transport and General Workers’ Union, his father a shop steward), is rooted in his observation of the way people around him live.
“The 83-year-old man in the flat above me has been waiting four years for a hip replacement operation.
Sometimes the pain is so awful he has to crawl up the stairs on all fours.
And my uncle, who was blind, applied for a council house and was offered a 14th-storey flat in a high-rise.”
Observing his neighbours is also why he doesn’t smoke and will never drink (“I hate the effect alcohol has on working-class life”); why he prefers the Daily Telegraph to the Daily Mirror (“The Telegraph isn’t afraid to come out in favour of capitalism, while Mr Maxwell is a capitalist masquerading as a socialist”) and why he thinks Derek Hatton is not worth discussing.
Sheridan joined his local Labour Party at 17. His first campaign was for more street lighting in Glasgow’s depressed housing estates.
At Stirling, where he graduated with a 2.1 in politics and economics, he was secretary of the Labour Club and campus picket organiser for the miners.
After university, he worked briefly for Strathclyde Council, tracking down pensioners in danger of hypothermia.
The Guardian has described him as “the missionary tendency”.
Financing the campaign is not easy.
Running costs for the shop-front office alone are £500 a month.
Support comes from several sources, including Dave Nellist, MP for Coventry South-East, who has a £10 a week standing order.
Three weeks ago, Sheridan and ten colleagues held a seven-day fast in George Square.
They ended up hungry but £2,000 the richer in donations.
It’s hard to imagine Derek Hatton going without his grub for seven days.
Sheridan’s campaign may indeed be brilliant but is it helping those who need help most?
It can’t be doing much for Thomas McGee, who mans the office three days a week.
McGee, 24, married with two children, hasn’t worked for four years.
He refused to pay poll tax in and failed even to register in .
As a wanted man his chances of ever landing a job are slim.
I suggested to Sheridan that McGee’s plight grows ever more hopeless with each day the campaign continues.
“It’s a pity and I would encourage him to register and apply for a rebate, but the real crime is that he should be asked to pay the same poll tax as the Duke of Roxburghe.
And we genuinely believe that if we keep up the pressure Mrs Thatcher will be left with no alternative to repealing the tax.”
Certainly the degree of non-payment is impressive.
The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities estimates there are approximately 850,000 debtors in Scotland, or one in five of the poll tax-paying population.
Threats of warrant sales, the process by which sheriff officers sell off non-payers’ household goods, are expected to reduce slightly the regional councils’ shortfall in revenue, but the eventual level of non-payment in Scotland will be at least 10 per cent, double the level for which most councils had budgeted.
And the Chancellor has already admitted that non-payment of the tax, combined with higher public spending, is threatening the Government’s budget surplus.
[A]n estimated 1.8 million Britons had “disappeared” .
When one thinks of the excitement over the 10 or 20,000 Argentinians said to have disappeared in the days of the junta, it seems rather remiss not to enquire after the missing 1.8 million, who compose more than 3 per cent of the population.
It was the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys which noticed them missing when it came to count the returns of census.
Local authorities, according to Rosie Waterhouse who wrote the Independent on Sunday’s lead story on Britain’s desparecidos, are certain that many of these missing people deliberately avoided filling in the census form because they did not wish to pay poll tax.
So now they have disappeared entirely from public records.
The latest news on the tax resistance front:
Calls for people to refuse to pay taxes in resistance to Trumpism are coming fast.
For example:
A story is buzzing around in red and blue circles that California is threatening to stop paying federal taxes in response to the Trump administration’s threats to withhold funding from “sanctuary cities.”
The only substance to the story, as far as I have been able to determine, is an off-the-cuff remark by Willie Brown, formerly mayor of San Francisco and formerly speaker of the California state Assembly, to this effect: “California could very well become an organized non-payer.
They could recommend non-compliance with the federal tax code.”
But nonetheless, this quasi-story has been generating a lot of buzz, along with the predictable ignorant outrage in the dittosphere.
NWTRCC is urging war tax resisters to go public and sign their names to a pledge that will be used for publicity and advertising for the cause.
Here’s some follow-up on German war tax resister Gertrud Nehls:
The Forest Fields & Hyson Green Anti-Poll Tax Campaign put out a newsletter called Poll-Axe!
It was among the regional anti-poll tax groups, and described itself this way in the newsletter’s inaugural issue:
Our policy, evolved by consensus of our active members, is to build a non-payment campaign, to urge non-implementation of the Poll-Tax, and to delay the registration process.
However, we aim to embrace all forms of opposition to the Poll Tax and welcome new ideas and different views.
We are a broad-based local campaign consisting of people of various political persuasions.
Their newsletter contains a lot of good details about the tactics they put into play to defeat the poll tax.
Another article in that first issue described a visit from a campaigner from Scotland who described the anti-poll tax campaign there.
(The government rolled out the poll tax in Scotland one year before trying it elsewhere in Britain, so this allowed both sides of the conflict to refine tactics.)
Excerpt:
Despite threats of imprisonment to non-payers, there has been no such evidence of this happening in Scotland.
People claiming benefits are wiser to simply not pay the Poll Tax as the fine is less than the payments themselves (the Government is only allowed to confiscate £1.75 a week from your benefit and that starts from when they catch up with you!).
Whole estates in Scotland are simply refusing to pay and Poll Tax collectors and bailiffs have been chased away by angry residents.
A million people have not paid their Poll Tax.
A later issue noted that the Forest Fields & Hyson Green group had decided to “twin” with their counterparts in the Prestonfields & District Anti-Poll Tax Group in Edinburgh in a sort of “sister cities” relationship.
Other articles described (somewhat vaguely) outreach to NALGO, the union representing the government desk employees who would be responsible for implementing the poll tax.
The anti-poll tax campaigners hoped to drum up some resistance from within the bureaucracy.
Issue #2 gave this advice for people on delaying poll tax registration:
Registration: What to Do Next?
If you haven’t sent back your registration form yet, you will have had a letter from the council threatening you with a £50 fine.
So what should you do now?
We advise you to ignore it.
They [cannot fine you unless they prove that] you got their letters.
They can only prove this
if they were hand delivered to you personally, or
if they were sent by recorded delivery, or
if you tell them.
They will probably send a poll tax snooper to your house.
Don’t tell the snooper — or anyone else from the council — that you have had poll tax forms.
You must not admit that you’ve had anything from them about the poll tax, or they can fine you £50.
When the snooper calls, it’s best to pretend there’s nobody in.
If this isn’t possible, get rid of them quickly.
They’ll try to get you to fill in a form on the doorstep.
Try not to do this.
Tell them you’re about to go out, have a bath, feed the baby — any excuse will do.
But you must take a form from them.
Once you’ve done this you must reply within 21 days.
This isn’t the only option.
We have a leaflet setting out other ways to delay registration — get one from our stall every Saturday at Hyson Green crossroads.
Most important of all, don’t sit at home worrying about it.
If you’re worried about it — fill the form in and send it back.
Delaying registration is only a small part of our protest.
The main thing will be to refuse payment when the first bills arrive next April.
If you need any advice, contact us.
A later article expanded on this advice: “they can’t force you to fill in a form there and then.
You have to take a registration form from them, or you might be fined.
They’ll probably try to arrange a time to collect it: Pick a time when you know that nobody will be at home.” That article also recommended:
Tell your friends and neighbours that snoopers are in the area
Follow them around — this will worry them, and might stop them harassing people on their own doorsteps
Remember that the snoopers are nervous because they know they’re unpopular
The same article noted “we’ve heard that snoopers all over Nottingham are not bothering to knock on doors where an anti-poll tax poster is in the window.
They say it isn’t worth the bother.”
And they reiterated that non-registration was just a delaying tactic, and not worth fighting to the bitter end: “It’s not worth getting fined over refusing to register… Refusing to register is a criminal offense (unlike refusing to pay), and it won’t stop the poll tax because they’ll only get your name from one of their computers.
Our aim is to make registration as difficult as we can without getting fined.”
An Edinburgh Evening News article reproduced in the second newsletter concerned the occupation of a sheriff office in Leith.
Excerpts:
About 40 of them crammed into the sheriff officers premises in Constitution Street, locked the doors and singing [sic] anti-poll tax songs and staging a mock auction of equipment and furnishings.
Staff fled from the public counter.
One of the organisers, Bob Goupillot…, said the aim was to show people they need not be intimidated into paying the poll tax.
“If sheriff officers think they can threaten people by saying they are going to sell off their belongings, they will find we can retaliate by harassing them in a similar way,” he added.
Among the placard and banner-carrying demonstrators was university lecturer John Holloway… who said sheriff officers told him they were going to sell off his property after he refused to register for poll tax.
“They came to my door about eight weeks ago and carried out a poinding on my stereo,” he added.
“I went to my local anti-poll tax group and together with the Lothian Federation of Anti-Poll Tax Groups we warned them there would be massive resistance if they tried to carry out a warrant sale.
I have heard nothing since.
“It is important we let the public know they should not be intimidated into paying this unjust tax, which redistributes money from the poor to the rich.”
One issue of the newsletter introduced a paperwork monkeywrenching campaign it called “Operation ‘Tell Sid’ ”:
We’re going to make the poll tax unworkable, and we’ve thought of some fun ways of doing it.
Here’s the first:
To collect the poll tax, they need to know where we all live.
If the register of people who should pay isn’t accurate, they’ve got problems.
The more inaccurate it is, the more problems they’ve got.
So…
We’ve obtained a lengthy list which members will be given, and is available at meetings and at our stall.
On it are the names and personal details of some local people who will gain from the poll tax: judges, company directors, freemasons, and other undesirables.
Get a copy of the list and pick out a name.
Then, next time you’ve got a spare ten minutes, write a letter pretending to be this person.
Send it to Sidney Stares — he’s our Community Charge (poll tax) Registration Officer.
Here’s what you should Tell Sid:
The person’s name and current address
Their date of birth
That they are moving house
Their new address: this can be an empty house, a non-existent address, or something vague like “abroad” or “London”
The date they moved or are moving
Once you’ve sent a few letters like this one and got bored, you can start to play a slightly different game.
Invent a name — or use somebody who’s famous: a real person, a character from your favourite soap — it doesn’t matter.
Be this person.
Write and Tell Sid that you have just moved into the Nottingham area.
Pick an address from the list, and Tell Sid that’s where you are living.
It’s as simple as that.
By itself, this won’t stop the poll tax — but every little helps, so get writing now.
A report from the Scottish sister-city campaigners, in the issue, noted that enforcement threats there had thusfar proven empty:
There are two reasons why no warrant sales have taken place yet.
First of all, there are only a handful of sheriff officers in Lothian but over 70,000 non-payers.
Second, each time sheriff officers turn up at someone’s house (and they’ve only attempted it twice so far in the whole of Edinburgh), they are met by a crowd of angry anti-poll tax campaigners who stop them from getting in!
Lothian council are also trying to get poll tax from people by taking it straight from their bank accounts.
They don’t need the person’s permission to do this, but there are some rules.
The account has to be in credit, they aren’t allowed to make anyone overdrawn, and they can only seize any money that’s in the account on the day they freeze it.
Officially, bank staff have to co-operate with this system — it’s the law.
Unofficially, they’re helping people to avoid payment by letting them run their accounts on a permanent overdraft, without making any charges.
Non-payers are being given help by their banks to juggle money from one account to another.
If the council applies to freeze the account of someone who hasn’t plaid their poll tax, then on any one day it will only have a few pounds in it at most — and that’s all they can take.
And in many cases, people have had phone calls from their bank managers, telling them that an arrestment order has arrived and suggesting that they come in for a chat to sort something out!
The issue reported that enforcement was proving just as difficult outside of Scotland:
Attempts to recover poll tax debts have failed.
In eighteen months not one warrant sale — the Scottish equivalent of bailiffs — has been carried out.
In South Wales, residents have blockaded whole villages to keep the bailiffs out.
In Northampton, their office was fire-bombed only three days after their first failed attempt to seize poll tax arrears.
Closer to home, the bailiffs sent in by Rushcliffe Council in West Bridgford failed to recover any poll tax at all, and the council have now written asking non-payers to “make them an offer…[”]!
In Beeston, Broxtowe Council served bailiffs notices on people — but when the bailiffs returned they failed to get into anyone’s house.
They picked a day when we had two sets of court hearings to cover — one of them 20 miles away in Bingham.
Yet we still managed to mount a watch outside the bailiffs headquarters on Hucknall Road.
When the bailiffs left there at 9.15 a.m. messages went out all over the city, and a Scumbusters squad was out on the streets of Beeston within minutes.
We followed them for a few hours — they were ducking in and out of car parks and estates trying to “lose” us — then they ran home with their tails between their legs.
This comes from an “Special Issue”.
By this time, the government had decided to give up on the poll tax, but it was still in effect at a reduced rate until they figured out a replacement.
This on the one hand was a tremendous victory, but on the other took some of the wind out of the sails of the opposition, which worried that if it declared victory and slacked off on refusal the government might sneak the poll tax back under a new name and would continue to try to take reprisals against determined resisters:
Bailiffs
and how to beat them!
The first thing to remember about bailiffs is that they aren’t likely to visit you.
There are only a handful of them, and 60,000 of us — so the chances of them coming to your door are pretty slim.
The second thing to remember is that if you follow these simple rules, they can’t touch you:
Never let them into your house
Keep ground floor doors and windows locked
Phone us as soon as you hear from them
Bailiffs are just like vampires: invite them in once and they can come back at any time, using force if they have to.
But if you never let them get past your front door, they can’t ever touch you!
The council are also using Recovery Officers to try and get us to pay the poll tax.
These do the same job as bailiffs, but don’t have the same powers.
If someone comes to your door, it’s more likely to be a Recovery Officer than a bailiff — but you can only find out by talking to them, which isn’t a good idea because they try and trick people.
The best thing to do is politely tell them that you’re busy and close the door in their face.
Then phone us as soon as you can.
If you have a room in a shared house, make sure that other people living there know to keep the front door locked.
If the bailiffs get past the front door, they are allowed to smash down other doors to help them carry out their dirty work.
Put a notice on the inside of the front door, to remind the other people you share with.
Sometimes, they push a letter through your door threatening to come back in a week or so and steal your things.
It’s almost always just a bluff, and they go away and annoy someone else instead.
But sometimes they leave a date and time that they’ll be coming back.
If you get a letter like this, let us know.
Tell us when they’re coming, and we’ll arrange a street party to welcome them.
They’ll be sorry they ever showed their faces.
Bailiffs cannot break into our homes or use the police to get into our property.
They can enter our property if a door is unlocked or if one of our windows is open.
If you live in a property which has an outer door and one or more inner doors you must insure that the outer door is locked at all times.
If this outer door is unlocked the bailiffs can use force to open the second, inner door.
Bailiffs may try and persuade us to let them in by saying they just want to talk and that they don’t intend taking anything.
We shouldn’t be fooled by this — once in they can value our things and then come back another time and legally take them by force.
So we have to be on our guard at all times with the best advice being:
Don’t let them in!
Another thing we could get into the habit of doing is closing our curtains when we go out.
This will prevent the bailiffs looking through our windows to value our things.
A page in the issue highlighted the work of the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign, and encouraged readers to support imprisoned resisters by writing letters to them (it gave a list of several prisoners along with their mailing addresses), visiting them, and helping to fund their prison canteen accounts.