Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Britain / U.K. (see also: Ireland, Scotland, Wales) → Poll Tax Rebellion, 1987–91 → Tommy Sheridan

I’ve long been neglecting to cover here one of the largest and most effective tax resistance campaigns of recent times: the poll tax rebellion in Thatcher’s Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I’ve got a copy of Danny Burns’s book on the Poll Tax Rebellion that’s been slowly climbing towards the top of my to-read list, so I hope to correct this fault before long.

Meanwhile, from The Glasgow Herald, 31 October 1989:

Tommy Sheridan, secretary of Strathclyde Anti-Poll Tax Federation, burns reminder forms in George Square

Poll tax notices go up in smoke

By Benedict Broghan

Undaunted by Esther Rantzen’s charity show, the poll tax non-payment campaign continued its high profile attacks yesterday with a public burning of Strathclyde Regional Council’s final reminder notices in Glasgow’s George Square.

At least 75 of the notices were burned by members of the Strathclyde Anti-Poll Tax Federation. They were led by Glasgow district councillor Mr. Chic Stevenson and the federation’s secretary and Labour outcast Mr. Tommy Sheridan.

Mr. Stevenson, who represents Queenslie, said: “I have a duty to those thousands who either can’t or won’t pay Thatcher’s tax. Thatcher will only take notice if enough of us refuse to pay her immoral tax. There are one million people who have refused to pay the poll tax. At this point, some may have doubts as to what to do next.

“People should burn their notices and keep up the fight. In Strathclyde alone there are 236,000 non-payers.”

The demonstration, attended by about 20 people, took place against the background of Miss Rantzen’s pipe-band and balloon ChildLine charity’s Scottish launch.

Mr. Sheridan, shouting to be heard over Miss Rantzen’s speech, said: “These reminder notices are only intended to frighten people. There will not be mass wage arrestments. There will not be mass warrant sales. The trades union movement will stop them. And this federation will stop them.”

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.

First, from an article by Sandra Barwick, published on this date 25 years ago:

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 February 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, 1987–8, 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 1988, 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.

Next, from an article by Paul Johnson in the same issue:

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.

From a 6 April 1990 article by Noel Malcolm.

[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 3 August 1990 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 last March, and has now set up more than 50 branches of the federation in England. His latest wheeze is a march from Glasgow to London next month, 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 14^th-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 1988/9 and failed even to register in 1989/90. 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.

Finally, from an article by Auberon Waugh in the 18 September 1992 edition:

[A]n estimated 1.8 million Britons had “disappeared” since 1980.

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 last year’s 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 1981 census form because they did not wish to pay poll tax. So now they have disappeared entirely from public records.

Some links that have floated through my facemask in recent days:

• Thousands of IRS Employees Are Currently Home With Pay, But Not Working is the sort of headline that brings a smile to my face. The gist of the accompanying article is that most of the IRS workforce has been sent home to avoid infecting one another at the office, but only a minority of the employees are equipped to work from home. The rest continue to collect paychecks, but have nothing to do.
• People are travelling less, commuting less, and shipping less. As a result, people are burning less motor vehicle fuel, and as a result large drops in gasoline excise tax revenue are expected.
• The hashtag #RebeliónFiscal is trending on the Twitter, as small business owners in Argentina plot a tax strike. The business owners are upset that the government has offered them no tax relief as business activity has gone into an epidemic-induced slump. They’re joined by antiauthoritarian activists and by the general public, who are throwing coordinated cacerolazos (noisy pot-and-pan banging protests) from the windows of their apartments as they remain sequestered.
• The thirty-year anniversary of the Poll Tax rebellion is being met by a new book on the movement and a recap of what the tax strikers accomplished by movement organizer Tommy Sheridan.
• Ruth Benn previews the upcoming Global Campaign on Military Spending and our out-of-the-ordinary tax filing (and tax protest) season this year (at NWTRCC’s blog).
• Protest has to take on a different look during a time of “social distancing” Ruth Benn examines “Protest in the Time of Coronavirus” at NWTRCC’s blog. Excerpt:

  Now, while mostly at home, we find plenty of things to do, but running out to a big demonstration is not one of them. This got me thinking about war tax resistance as a perfect protest for the isolated. That led me to think of the many individual acts of resistance in antiwar history and thus to Ammon Hennacy and his “one man revolution.”

• There’s a new edition of NWTRCC’s newsletter out, with the latest news from the U.S. war tax resistance movement.
• War tax resisters Lincoln Rice and Ruth Benn were on Northern Spirit Radio to discuss “the methods, mechanics, motivations, & consequences of refusing to pay for war.”
• The war against traffic ticket cameras continues in Europe, even as some areas are suspending their use of the cameras.

Today I continue my scan through some of the material at The Sparrows’ Nest Library’s archive of Poll Tax resistance ephemera.

After the poll tax riots, the milquetoast Labour party condemned the protesters of course, and even elements within the established tax resistance group All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation tried to distance themselves — Tommy Sheridan, for example, promising to rat out any rioters he could identify to the authorities.

This left the grassroots to organize support for people arrested at the protests, which they did, in the form of the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign. Among the goals and tactics of this group and its affiliates:

• Be led by and accountable to the defendants themselves (independent of established anti-poll tax organizations and parties), and support all of the defendants unconditionally (e.g. not try to weed out “bad” defendants)
• Collect and share evidence that could be useful in court (e.g. film and photographs)
• Pay travel and court costs that would otherwise discourage defendants from putting up a defense
• Educate defendants about their rights and about what to expect in court
• Find witnesses willing to give statements about what they saw at the demonstrations at which arrests were made
• Organize pickets of prisons and courthouses
• Organize legal support and education at ongoing protests, and photograph & videotape those protests to create evidence to use in defense against anticipated prosecutions
• Fight for an amnesty for poll tax refusers and prisoners
• Coordinate support for jailed or imprisoned resisters (funding their canteen accounts, encouraging letter-writing, facilitating family visits) — a distinct “Prisoners Support Group” was established to concentrate on this aspect of the work
• Advise those who were pursuing legal action against the police for false arrest, battery, and so forth

Here is an example, from the January 1991 issue of Stand Firm (the TSDC newsletter). It concerns a 20 October 1990 protest and how the campaign had become much more prepared to respond legally and to get their story out in the press:

The TSDC organised a legal back-up and monitoring system to coordinate and support the marches and pickets. Its purpose was to provide legal information before the march, legal support in case of arrests (and subsequent back-up), and most importantly, 60 volunteers to carry this out and monitor police tactics. To do this the volunteers used still and video cameras, extensive note-taking, witness statements, and a network of communication via cell-phones, megaphones, a 48-hour coordination office, solicitors, and doctors.

Following October 20^th two press conferences were held by TSDC to present a coherent and truthful account of the day’s events, in the light of the hundreds of witness statements, video film, and legal volunteer reports. The first was held the next day, with a large press attendance. TSDC gave a detailed chronology of what happened, the tactics used by the police, eye-witness accounts by participants including those injured. The second press conference presented a preliminary report and showed a video-film of the prison picket, which was subsequently shown on television news.

This new approach to the media and press did much to counter the obvious lies, propaganda, and media crap which we saw after March 31^st, and put the Met. Police on the defensive.

A later issue, covering a later protest, shows that they were continuing to add to their support tactics at that stage:

[W]e did national mailouts of briefing packs, phone rounds, attending all London and national meetings (including all stewards [protest monitors] meetings) and so on. We recruited and briefed about 150 legal volunteers to cover the march, including camera crews and a coordination office — these, along with the sixty or more contingents who had come with legal volunteers, ensured that the police were watched and the movement prepared. Over 20,000 bust cards were distributed.

We feel that this successfully inhibited the police and helped to prevent arrests.

And:

The TSDC role on the day was to provide a full legal back-up operation in case of any problems. This consisted of up to 300 legal observers to note arrests and monitor police activity, backed up by a fully staffed legal co-ordination centre linked by mobile phones to the observers to instantly collate and interpret incoming information from the street, and provide sympathetic solicitors and support for anyone arrested.

This involved a huge amount of pre-planning and the whole point was to ensure that never again would demonstrators be randomly arrested, dragged through the magistrates courts, and found guilty because no witnesses were found who could contradict the lies of the police.

The aim was also to subject the police to continuous surveillance in order to greatly inhibit any police violence (from individuals, groups, and the force as a whole). In this we were successful.

The campaign also organized a “National Solidarity Conference Against Police Attacks” to share experiences and tactical wisdom among a variety of “people, groups, and movements who’ve experienced modern police methods and who’ve had to fight for their rights” including “Black struggles… Labour movement… Irish solidarity movement… Anti-Poll Tax campaign… [and the] Lesbian & Gay Community.”

The newsletters also noted international support for people imprisoned in the Poll Tax resistance struggle, including protests at the British embassies in Norway, Poland, and France (the last of which was briefly occupied by protesters).

The newsletter of the TSDC poll tax prisoners support group printed letters from imprisoned resisters and protesters, gave tips for people on how to support prisoners (along with mailing addresses for those inside), and organized protest and support. One creative tactic was mentioned in this coverage of a 13 April 1991 demonstration outside a jail where several poll tax prisoners were held:

The one and a half hour picket was pretty rowdy; we had a megaphone and we heard that a lot of prisoners could hear what was said.

There was loud shouting, banners were raised, small flyers were thrown into the prison courtyard and blew everywhere, and a big helium balloon was raised above the jail for 20 minutes with a “Free The Hostages” banner hanging from it.

Another issue reported on marches and pickets going not only to the jails but also to the homes and businesses of councillors who were administering the poll tax.