Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Britain / U.K. (see also: Ireland, Scotland, Wales) →
Poll Tax Rebellion, 1987–91
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.
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
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.”
By Frances Horsburgh, Local Government Correspondent
Scotland’s second largest local authority, Lothian region, is this week issuing 76,756 summary warrants over non payment of the poll tax.
These higher than expected figures represent 12.8% of the 600,000 people on the register.
This is the first batch of Lothian warrants which does not include the 160,000 people entitled to rebates.
Those named on the warrants who will now be pursued by sheriff’s officers over their total debt to the region of £25.5m are three months or more in arrears with their poll tax payments.
While Lothian’s Labour leaders described poll tax collection as “an administrative nightmare” of the Government’s own making, Opposition Tories attacked some members of the Labour group for “encouraging” non payment by their example.
There was all party agreement that the level of non payment was much more severe than expected.
However, the Lothian Federation of Anti Poll Tax Groups said it was “ecstatic” at the level of non payment.
After hearing the figures, a meeting of the region’s finance committee eventually passed a Labour motion by seven votes to four stressing that Opposition parties had been warning the Government for the last three years that collection of the poll tax would be an administrative nightmare and non payment levels would be high.
Lothian’s deputy finance chairman, Councilor David Begg, told the committee it was important to distinguish between summary warrants and warrant sales.
The Labour group still hoped there would be no warrant sales in Lothian over poll tax non payment.
There were a large number of people in the new totals who could not afford to pay.
He claimed the Government’s chickens were coming home to roost as collection continued to run into difficulties and he accused Tory Ministers of making poll tax policy “on the hoof”.
Both Tory finance spokesman Councillor James Gilchrist and Tory Group leader Councillor Brian Meek recalled that a number of Lothian Labour councillors had declared they would not pay the tax and they accused them of encouraging others to follow suit.
Councillor Meek claimed that the level of non payment meant council services, staff wages, and essential spending were under threat because of the shortfall in income being received.
Councillor Gilchrist also attacked the recent warning by the Scottish clearing banks that they would not be able to handle hundreds of thousands of arrestments of accounts.
It was hard to take advice from people who had thrown away billions of pounds in Third World debts, he said.
Councillor Begg said it was the law of the land that the banks had to carry out searches of people’s accounts.
Lothian region previously sent out almost 100,000 final notices warning people they had forfeited their right to pay by instalment.
Those named on the warrants have not paid the sum owing or have not contacted the council to make an arrangement to pay.
After the meeting Mr Andy Clachers, vice chairman of the Federation of Lothian Anti-Poll Tax Groups, said he was “ecstatic” about the non payment figures.
They had seen the power of the people sweep away governments within Eastern Europe and were now seeing the power of the people in Scotland pushing the poll tax “to the brink of collapse”, he claimed.
Strathclyde region expects to issue summary warrants “in the not too distant future”, according to a finance spokesman .
The council is believed to have delayed applying for warrants while officials try to check which non payers will qualify for transitional relief under the Government’s new scheme.
If the warrants are not issued in the next couple of weeks it is believed a political decision could be taken to wait until after Christmas.
Strathclyde issued 236,000 final notices at the end of which represented 16.4% of those due to pay the poll tax.
Grampian region was the first to issue summary warrants earlier this month.
The total of 17,300 represented about 5% of those due to pay.
Fife region obtained 12,616 warrants two weeks ago representing 4.5% and in the Borders 3,600 warrants were issued last week, also representing 4.5%.
Officials in the Borders are “optimistic” about the progress of collection.
Dumfries and Galloway region obtained summary warrants last week and they were due to reach defaulters morning.
It is issuing 3000 warrants, which represents approximately 3% of those due to pay.
Highland region’s finance committee has decided to hold off pursuing summary warrants in the meantime.
A spokeswoman for Central region said it had issued 9649 final reminders, which represented 5% of those due to pay, but the council has not yet gone to court for summary warrants.
Tayside region has still to send out final warnings.
“We are not at the stage of issuing summary warrants as our final notices will not go out until next week,” said a spokeswoman.
Those who are named on the warrants must pay the full amount they owe in addition to a 10% surcharge.
If they do not pay they will face debt recovery procedures which include arrestment of bank accounts and wages or possibly ultimately a poinding and warrant sale.
Meanwhile, Argyll and Bute District Council announced it was seeking an urgent meeting with the Secretary of State over a £736,000 reduction in its Government grant which council officials say would result in an increase of 50% or £21 a head in the district poll tax on a standstill budget.
Councillor Robert Reid, chairman of the policy and resources committee, said: “I am utterly horrified at the situation.
We do not run an extravagant authority and the numbers feel that the present method of calculating grant places a disproportionately high burden on the people of Argyll and Bute.”
Finance officials explained that it would not be accurate to compare the present position on non-payment of the poll tax with rates arrears.
This was because under the previous system a large percentage of people paid their rates with their council house rent, so the regional council never had to take action against them for rates arrears.
If they fell into arrears with either rates or rent they were pursued by the district council.
The officials explained that about 200,000 of the 600,000 now due to pay the poll tax in Lothian fell into this category and paid rates and rents to the relevant district council
A confrontation between officials and anti-poll tax protesters supporting a Labour Euro-MP facing debt recovery measures was averted .
Demonstrators threatened to form a human blockade outside the home at Irvine of Mr Alex Smith, MEP for Scotland South, who has refused to pay a £50 penalty imposed for not registering for the community charge.
However, before the protesters arrived, two sheriff’s officers, who called at Mr Smith’s home, left without trying to force entry after he refused to let them in.
A campaign aimed at blocking the Government’s plans to introduce the community charge was launched yesterday on the eve of the Labour Party conference.
Supporters of the Scottish Campaign Against the Poll Tax (Stop It) believe they have found a loophole which will allow taxpayers to protest legally and at the same time cause a paperwork nightmare for the local councils which have to introduce the new system.
Stop It plans to distribute up to one million leaflets advising people to send back the forms they will be asked to fill in for a poll tax register, with a request for more information.
The return to sender plan has been welcomed by Labour leader Neil Kinnock who described the idea as “different and positive.”
At the campaign launch in Perth, Shadow Scottish Secretary Donald Dewar said the complexity of registration and collection threatened privacy and individual liberty.
The Government itself had provided the opportunity for a successful protest campaign, said Mr Dewar.
However, Environment Secretary Mr Nicholas Ridley said last night that if people failed to provide the relevant information within 21 days they would be in breach of the law.
“This is the effect of what the Labour Party are telling them to do.
“We have come to a sad pass when the Leader of the Opposition encourages people to act unlawfully.”
Next month registration officers will start sending out forms to individuals believed to be the “responsible person” in a household with a duty to supply information for the poll tax register.
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,” said Mr Dewar.
Labour MP Brian Wilson, chairman of 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.
He claimed that many Tories were coming to believe that the poll tax would be “the rock on which Mrs Thatcher finally founders.”
The new tax, a flat rate for every adult replacing domestic rates, is due to be introduced in Scotland .
Mr Eric Milligan, vice-president of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, said Cosla backed the campaign, although he was aware that it could cause a bureaucratic nightmare for registration officers and local government workers.
He said: “Scottish local government is almost unanimous in its opposition to the poll tax.
It stretches right across the political spectrum and it reaches communities that do not think of themselves as political.”
There are a number of motions on the poll tax for debate in Perth this weekend, although Mr Dewar said he would be very surprised if the conference endorsed a policy of non-payment.
According to a poll broadcast last night on Scottish Television, one in three Scots is prepared to break the law by refusing to pay the community charge.
The System Three poll was carried out and involved a sample of 948 adults throughout Scotland.
Mr Michael Connarty, chairman of Scottish Labour’s local government committee, said the party had to be prepared to give “full blooded support” to people who refuse to pay the poll tax.
, Margaret Thatcher’s government instituted the dreaded “poll tax” in England.
It was widely-loathed and widely-resisted, in a campaign that not only ended the tax but probably Thatcher’s government as well.
The folks at kindandgenerous productions bring us a poem by Adrian Johnson (billed as the poet laureate of Birmingham) composed to commemorate the tax resistance struggle:
Still, no poll tax, eh?
Wat Tyler lost his head for it
a prime minister lost her job for it
thousands went to court against it
Trafalgar Square heaved with life and love and protest to stop it
civil courts got right shirty, filled with anger, ideas and spirit
for what’s right and fair and will power — to just not pay it
bailiff’s got over time, short shrift and rarely could collect it
MP’s sniffed the air and mumbled — far too late — ‘Now we’ve done it.”
Leaflets, banners and street protest said what they could do with it
friendships made and courage raised, together we could fix it,
stuff it, beat it, sod it
that flagship idea that spawned a mutinous flotilla
got scuttled by anger and laughter — stood together
mother, son and daughter
they knew what was right, wanted something better
Twenty years later, you’d hardly believe it
those passionate millions that stood against it
wouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t’ave’ad paid it
the tax that came in just one size for the duke in his mansion
and dustman in his terrace
that shook us into action and life — and though overlooked by history
we can remember…
now and then, our story
remember, the laughter, friendship and life
standing up for something better
and still, no poll tax, here.
Civil disobedience is currently in the air for the euphemistically-named Community Charge (or “Poll Tax”) seems to favour the rich at the expense of the poor.
Some have announced they will not pay an unjust tax and many Christians affirm that they feel bound in conscience to refuse payment.
Opponents are aghast, seeing such behaviour as subversive of the rule of law.
Yet there is a Christian precedent.
In the Evangelical Nonconformists of England declared en masse that they would not pay the portion of their rates that went towards elementary education.
They had long nursed an educational grievance.
they had been compelled to send their children to school, but in many areas — especially in the countryside — the only school was run by the Church of England.
Children of Nonconformist parents were taught from the Book of Common Prayer in an Anglican atmosphere.
The only alternative was to withdraw the children under a conscience clause from religious instruction and to expose them to ostracism.
Religious “indoctrination”
Nonconformists were eager to see a Liberal government impose public school control over all elementary schools so that religious discrimination should cease.
Instead, a Conservative government entrenched the Anglican schools within the national education system.
Previously the schools had been aided from taxation, but now they were to be financed by local rates, which were customarily designed for specific purposes.
Nonconformists concluded that one purpose of this was to indoctrinate the young in the teachings of a Church from which their parents conscientiously dissented.
The Church of England possessed a growing Anglo-Catholic party whose view of the way of salvation hardly differed from that of the Roman Catholic Church.
Chapel children, it seemed, were to have their souls imperilled at their parents’ expense.
The cry “Rome on the rates!” was raised and a passive [sic] movement sprang up.
Some Nonconformists, especially among the Wesleyians and Presbyterians, thought rate refusal scandalous.
Their fellow Free Churchmen were declining to obey the law at the same time as benefitting from the rule of law.
In a democracy there was the possibility of reversing government policy by returning the Liberals at the next election.
So why then the need to resort to extra-constitutional methods?
The bulk of Nonconformists, however, took up the cause with enthusiasm.
There were sermons on Bible Passive Resistance drawing encouragement from the example of Shadrach, Meshach and Adednego in the book of Daniel.
Leeds Free Church Council went to prayer and then, by 89 votes to one, resolved in favor of rate refusal.
John Bunyan was quoted to show there were two ways of obeying the law: I may do as the law directs or else, if the law infringes conscience, “I am willing to lie down and suffer what they shall do to me.”
Nonconformity was roused to resistance.
Pantomimic martyrdom
The first rate refusal occurred in Spring .
The procedure was that after an automatic summons and a court hearing, sufficient goods were distrained to pay the amount owed to the local authority.
Items confiscated in Coventry included bicycles, a microscope, a gold watch, a half-plate camera and (from a minister) an Alphabetical Arrangement of the Words in the Hebrew Talmud, translated into German.
The goods had to be put up for sale at auction.
Normally a friend of the owner would buy the property back on his behalf.
But the process could become a ritual.
John Clifford, the Baptist minister who led the whole protest and subsequently appeared in court 41 times up to the First World War, set aside a few silver trowels give [sic] him at chapel stone-layings for regular distraint.
The procedure often approximated “pantomimic martyrdom,” as it was known at the time.
Yet the experience could be far worse.
Some protesters insisted that nobody should buy their property at the auction.
Then there was no alternative to imprisonment, usually for seven days but sometimes for up to three months.
For men of Christian character and unimpeachable respectability it could be a trying time.
Sleep was fitful, food awful and a sense of isolation acute.
In the three years of the movement up to there were 70,880 summonses, 2568 auctions and 176 imprisonments.
The grievance was given ample publicity.
Significant legacy
With the election of a Liberal government in , the momentum of protest slackened.
It was expected the Liberals would sweep the offending legislation away.
However, resistance by the House of Lords frustrated all efforts at reform.
Rates continued to contribute to Anglican and Roman Catholic schools for as long as rates were levied.
Passive resistance faded away without achieving its aim.
Nevertheless it bequeathed a significant legacy.
Mahatma Gandhi, then a young Indian lawyer in South Africa, read reports of Nonconformist efforts and recognized the potential of civil disobedience as an instrument for mobilizing a mass movement.
Gandhi’s thinking, in turn, was a powerful influence over Martin Luther King, who led the campaign for black civil rights in America.
Passive resistance exercised on conscientious grounds was to have a noble future.
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.
Tax resistance campaigns can increase their visibility by adopting particular
uniforms, badges, ribbons, or other emblems to identify resisters and those
working in concert with the campaign. Today I will summarize some examples of
this.
Gandhi’s satyagraha in India
An important part of the Indian independence struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi
was the wearing of khādī (homespun cloth). This had three
purposes:
To encourage the development of Indian self-reliance and industry as the
economic foundation of Indian independence.
To hurt the British government by boycotting and thereby reducing the
profits from exports of British fabric to India.
To serve as an emblem to identify and express the commitment of Indian
patriots.
Gandhi wrote:
[T]he most effective and visible cooperation which all [Indian National]
Congressmen and the mute millions can show is by not interfering with the
course civil disobedience may take and by themselves spinning and using
khādī to the exclusion of all other cloth. If it is allowed
that there is a meaning in people wearing primroses on
Primrose Day, surely
there is much more in a people using a particular kind of cloth and giving a
particular type of labour to the cause they hold dear. From their compliance
with the khādī test I shall infer that they have shed
untouchability, and that they have nothing but brotherly feeling towards all
without distinction of race, colour, or creed. Those who will do this are as
much Satyagrahis as those who will be singled out for
civil disobedience.
Gandhi wearing a “Gandhi cap”
Gandhi himself put in many hours at the spinning wheel, and demanded this of
his followers as well.
“Gandhi caps” made from
khādī became almost a uniform of the resistance. One news
dispatch from around the time of the Dharasana salt raid noted:
The correspondent said the growth of the Gandhi movement was shown by the
increased number of persons wearing the Gandhi caps. In the cities, he said,
a majority of the people wear them; they also are beginning to be worn in
villages in Punjab while even in aristocratic Simla one person in six of the
population in the bazaars have donned caps, which is the symbol of the
nationalist campaign.
Homespun cloth in the American revolution
But Gandhi’s campaign wasn’t the first blow against the British Empire that
was struck in part by homespun cloth and conspicuous consumption of
locally-manufactured goods. This was also an important part of the American
Revolution.
Here is an example reported in a
edition of the Massachusetts Gazette:
On Wednesday evening the honorable speaker and gentlemen of the House of
Burgesses gave a ball at the capitol… and it is with the greatest pleasure we
inform our readers… [of] the patriotic spirit… [that] was most agreeably
manifested in the dress of the ladies on that occasion, who, to the number of
near one hundred, appeared in homespun gowns; a lively and striking instance
of their acquiescence and concurrence in whatever may be the true and
essential interest of their country.
“Spinning bees” at which patriotic Americans worked together to card, spin,
weave, and sew, so as to avoid having to import clothing from England, were
ways that everybody could demonstrate their revolutionary spirit and
participate in the resistance. Resisters also made a point of eschewing
imported tea in favor of locally-produced substitutes (such as dried raspberry
leaves).
One patriotic poem of the time advised “young ladies”:
Wear none but your own country linen;
Of economy boast, let your pride be the most
To show clothes of your own make and spinning.
What if homespun they say is not quite so gay
As brocades, yet be not in a passion,
For when once it is known this is much worn in town,
One and all will cry out— ’Tis the fashion!
And, as one, all agree, that you’ll not married be
To such as will wear London factory,
But at first sight refuse, tell ’em such you will choose
As encourage our own manufactory.
No more ribbons wear, nor in rich silks appear;
Love your country much better than fine things;
Begin without passion, ’twill soon be the fashion
To grace your smooth locks with a twine string.
Massachusetts patriots vowed in :
…that we will not, at funerals, use any gloves except those made here, or
purchase any article of mourning on such occasion, but what shall be
absolutely necessary; and we consent to abandon the use, so far as may be,
not only of all the articles mentioned in the Boston resolves, but of all
foreign teas, which are clearly superfluous, our own fields abounding in
herbs more healthful, and which we doubt not, may, by use, be found agreeable…
Rebecca Riots
The Rebecca Riots in Wales in
were notorious for the distinctive garb donned by the
resistance groups who would gather to tear down tollgates.
The leader of the party was usually a man dressed up in women’s clothing and
a large bonnet, sometimes wearing a long horse-hair wig or carrying a parasol,
who was given the name “Rebecca.” Rebecca’s followers also were men wearing
women’s clothes, or at least white blouses over their clothes, and sometimes
bonnets or other high-crowned hats, occasionally with fern fronds, feathers,
or other decorations on them. They would paint their faces black or yellow,
and sometimes drape their horses in white sheets.
In this case, the reasoning behind the costuming was not so much to express
public pride than for other purposes. For instance:
To disguise the participants so that the government would be less able to
take reprisals against them.
To resonate with ancient folk forms of grassroots vigilantism and protest
that had a similar character (cross-dressing, face painting, a carnival
atmosphere).
To intimidate toll gate keepers with their strangeness and reputation.
To create a figurehead for the movement that could be adopted and then
set aside by multiple people, so as to make the movement’s leadership
harder to target for reprisals.
To make the resistance more festive and carnivalesque and thereby
encourage participation.
To make it easier to identify fellow-resisters in the confusion of
late-night raids on dark country roads.
Badges awarded by the Women’s Tax Resistance League
The badge representing Holloway Prison that was awarded to women’s suffrage
activists who had been imprisoned.
Women’s suffrage activists in the United Kingdom awarded badges to resisters
who had been imprisoned for their resistance. Here is a description of one
such badge given to Kate Harvey:
The badge is cast in the form of a shield on which is depicted the entrance
to Holloway Prison. On the reverse is a card inscribed in a faint hand:
“Given to Mrs K Harvey By Women’s Suffrage After She Had Been In Prison For
Tax Resistance.”
These badges were the equivalent of medals for meritorious service. An
American woman who visited her counterparts across the waters observed:
It was a queer sensation in those days to look upon sweet and ladylike young
women… and to know that they had actually been prisoners. It was not long
before they were looked upon as something sacred, as those who had made
special sacrifices for the cause, and they wore badges to show that they had
been prisoners and in every place were given the post of honor until their
numbers mounted up to the hundreds.
Relics of the Glastonbury cows
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”).
Emblems made from hairs of the cows’ tails, woven into the shape of flowers,
and tied with ribbons emblazoned with the slogan “Taxation Without
Representation,” became popular adornments for supporters of the Smiths’ tax
resistance.
“I refuse to fund this war” stickers
In , an American anti-war group held a
“Stop Funding the War in Iraq” rally near the offices of a Congressional
leader.
A war tax resistance group was there to hand out stickers for people to wear
that read “I refuse to fund this war!” I was there and noted:
I figured a few people would take them and wear them without thinking much
about it, a few people would refuse to take them without thinking much about
it, and the remainder would have to think about whether they should start
refusing if they hadn’t already.
As it turned out, just about everyone we offered the stickers to was eager to
wear one, though it’s hard to tell which of these will put their money where
their mouths are. Hopefully a few, anyway, had that light bulb go on, and
then looked around and wondered “have all these other people wearing these
stickers started resisting their taxes?”
French cockades and militia uniforms in the Fries Rebellion
The Fries Rebellion in the United States took place about a decade after the
enacting of the United States Constitution, and shortly after the successful
French Revolution.
The United States government was under the presidency of John Adams, who
represented the more authoritarian, aristocratic, pro-English faction; the
faction out of power was more populist, democratic, and pro-French.
Tax resisters who participated in the Fries Rebellion sometimes signaled
their loyalty (and frightened the Adams government) by wearing French
tricolor cockades in their hats to demonstrate their affinity with the
democratic revolutionaries across the pond, and/or by wearing their old
American revolutionary militia uniforms to show their belief that their
current rebellion was more in harmony with the spirit of the American
Revolution than were the policies of the federal government.
Masks at the Carnival of Viareggio
The Carnival of Viareggio is today a parade and bacchanal, but it began with
a tax protest in which “a number of local citizens, as a sign of protest…
decided to put on masks in order to show their refusal of high taxes they were
forced to pay.”
Australian miners wear a red ribbon
Australian miners, who in were resisting
a license tax, held a “monster meeting” at which they passed a number of
resolutions, including these:
[A]s it is necessary that the diggers should know their friends, every miner
agrees to wear as a pledge of good faith, and in support of the cause, a
piece of red ribbon on his hat, not to be removed until the license tax is
abolished.
That this meeting… desire to publicly express their esteem for the memory of
the brave men who have fallen in battle [during “the late out-break”], and
that to shew their respect every digger and their friends do wear tomorrow
(Sunday) a band of black crape on his hat…
Taking pride in resistance
Many of these are examples of resisters showing pride in their
resistance. This can be a way of short-circuiting a traditional government
gambit used against tax evaders: to publish their names as a way of calling
them out as bankrupts or deadbeats. If the government tries to shame tax
resisters as irresponsible tax evaders, but the resisters have already
willingly made their resistance public, this government tactic loses its
force.
When local council governments in the United Kingdom tried to use this tactic
against Poll Tax resisters in the Thatcher years, the newspapers who published
the lists of “shame” found themselves on the receiving end of letters to the
editor from resisters who were outraged that they had not made the
list — insisting that their names be included too!
Here are some similar examples of people taking pride in their resistance or
in things incident to resistance:
When the Women’s Freedom League (a British suffrage group which refused to
pay taxes on the salaries of its employees), was threatened with a legal
writ by the government, it decided to auction the writ as a
fundraiser.
Greek tax resisters in Penteli (near Athens), who have been refusing to
pay the new taxes attached to their utility bills during the recent “won’t
pay” movement, hung their urgent “past due” notices from a Christmas tree
in the town square as ornaments.
When somebody asked Quaker Nathaniel Morgan whether he and his father had
“got anything” in the course of their war tax resistance (by which he
meant, did his Quaker meeting reimburse them for their losses when their
goods were distrained and sold), Morgan replied: “Yes, peace of mind,
which was worth all.”
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!)
Whenever the authorities arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned, or seized property
from Quaker war tax resisters, whatever Meeting that Quaker belonged to was
sure to make note of it in their book of “Sufferings.” These ordeals “for
conscience sake” were marks of honor and proofs of faith and these books were
in turn the evidence of martyrdom that sanctified the Meeting.
“Friends were always careful to put their sufferings on record,” wrote Stephen
B. Weeks, in Southern Quakers and Slavery. “Whatever
else the Quaker might suffer, he could not bear for the shade of oblivion to
come over the record of his testimonies.”
It was easier for a Quaker to exhibit fortitude in the face of government
reprisal if he or she knew that this would be remembered respectfully.
Monthly Meetings press their cases
It was a common practice for Monthly Meetings to pass their records of
sufferings along to be recorded also at the Quarterly Meeting level, and
then finally at the Yearly Meeting.
After the American Revolution, some American Monthly Meetings used this to
press for more respect for war tax resistance in the Yearly Meeting.
Officially, only Quakers whose tax resistance was due to militia exemption
taxes and other taxes that were explicitly and exclusively destined for war
spending were to have their sufferings recorded. But some Monthly Meetings
recorded sufferings for Quakers who were resisting general taxes, the bulk
of which went to pay off war debt.
In , David Cooper wrote of the Rhode Island
Yearly Meeting:
By a previous rule, such who paid any tax wholly for the support of war
should be dealt with as offenders, but Friends were allowed to pay mixed
taxes a part whereof was for civil purposes and part for war, nor were
sufferings of those who declined to pay these taxes received or recorded.
This subject now occasioned much debate, which resulted in a minute
directing such sufferings to be recorded as their testimony against
war.
In another case around the same time, the monthly meeting in Evesham, New
Jersey tried to forward the sufferings of its members who had refused to pay
war taxes, but their Quarterly Meeting in Salem balked at recording them and
forwarding them further. This led to a great deal of debate in the Quarterly
Meeting and kept war tax resistance on the front burner there — and also in
the Yearly Meeting, which appointed a committee of 36 Friends who unanimously
recommended that these sufferings be accepted and recorded.
Badges awarded by the Women’s Tax Resistance League
As I mentioned
the British
women’s suffrage movement awarded badges to women who had been imprisoned
for the cause, which is a different way of making note of and commemorating
such things.
Poll Tax resisters in the United Kingdom
When local council governments in the United Kingdom tried to shame tax
resisters by publishing their names in the newspapers during the Poll Tax
rebellion of the Thatcher era, the newspapers who published the lists of
“shame” found themselves on the receiving end of letters to the editor from
resisters who were outraged that they had not made the list — and demanding
that their names be included too!
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.
If a tax resistance campaign, or any civil disobedience campaign, anticipates that resisters may be imprisoned, it can give those resisters one less thing to worry about by organizing to help the families of those behind bars.
Gandhi in South Africa
Gandhi usually stressed that satyagrahis should be self-reliant and not expect much in the way of organizational assistance, but when he was planning a tax strike in South Africa in he thought that supporting imprisoned strikers’ families was a priority:
Finally the refusal to pay the tax!
Then, undoubtedly, the Congress should undertake to feed the wives and families of those who may be imprisoned.
The men would undoubtedly go to gaol, if there is a body of earnest workers. … The thing cannot be taken up haphazard.
If the men were asked to go to gaol today, I do not think you would find anybody taking up the suggestion, but if the preliminary steps as described above, are taken, by the time a final reply is received the men will have been thoroughly prepared to face the music.
Some of these families of resisters were put up temporarily at “Tolstoy farm” and donations from campaign supporters were used to provide for them.
Peacemakers at the Ohio cell organized a land trust to remove property from the market place and established the Peacemaker Sharing Fund, a mutual aid plan designed to insure aid to dependents of imprisoned Peacemakers and to help finance group projects.
During the Vietnam war, the sharing fund became the main vehicle for donations to meet the needs of war resisters’ families.
The Rosenburg Fund for Children
In the United States, The Rosenburg Fund for Children is designed “to provide for the educational and emotional needs of children whose parents have suffered because of their progressive activities and who, therefore, are no longer able to provide fully for their children.”
U.K. Poll Tax resistance
The Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign provided some funds to help facilitate visits to imprisoned resisters from their families.
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.
A challenge that many successful tax resistance campaigns have confronted has to do with divisions in the movement.
Sometimes these are deliberate divide-and-conquer tactics by those who oppose the campaign.
Other times, these are just the result of fractures in an unstable coalition, where most of the dividing pressure comes from within the campaign.
It can be important to the success of such a campaign that it maintain and demonstrate solidarity in the face of such challenges.
Here are some examples of how a variety of tax resistance campaigns have tried to cope.
German constitutionalists
In Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show that they had limited means.
Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic and counseled people to disregard it:
The intention of the Ministry is only too clear.
It wants to divide the democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter of the support of the former.
But this plan will fail; the people realizes that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.
Rebeccaites
The Rebeccaite movement in Wales was very successful in its bold campaign of destroying toll booths.
But its diffuse, non-hierarchical, anonymous structure made it easy for people to hijack it for their own ends, and it wasn’t long before people and groups calling themselves “Rebecca” began issuing threats and enacting vigilante justice in a variety of causes, or sometimes in what seemed like merely personal grievances.
For example, having come to the help of the farmers by reducing the tolls they were charged when bringing their goods to market, a meeting of Rebeccaites decided they were justified in now demanding that these newly-liberated farmers and merchants lower the prices of their goods.
Butter and beer would now be cheaper in Wales, and the Rebeccaites would make it so by force if necessary.
Things like this made the message of the movement confused, made it less sympathetic to potential supporters, and helped the authorities to recruit spies and people willing to testify against the rioters among those who otherwise might have been their allies.
Irish Land League
The Irish, suffering from famine and under the thumb of government-backed English absentee landlords, began a rent strike under the leadership of the Irish Land League.
The English encouraged the Irish to respond to their sad lot by emigrating to America and elsewhere.
They would have been happy to depopulate the island and make it England’s livestock grazing pasture, and they were eager to diminish by attrition the political power of the native population.
But, as Charles Stewart Parnell put it:
The Land League saw through this design, and defeated it by their advice to the people to resist being compelled to emigrate.
It told them to refuse to pay extortionate rents — that is, rents they could not pay and at the same time feed their families; it told them to refuse to leave their homes unless forcibly ejected, so that winter might not find them without a shelter to their heads; and it told them to refuse to rent farms from which other tenants had been evicted.
British women’s suffrage movement
At the time the Women’s Tax Resistance League and allied organizations were trying to win the vote for women, most men couldn’t vote in Britain either.
The vote at the time was largely restricted to propertied men, though there were ongoing campaigns for universal male suffrage.
By trying to get women to be treated equally as voters under the law, the women’s movement of the time was, thereby, fighting merely for the voting rights of propertied women, not for women in general.
Dora Montefiore reflected on this, and the divisions it threatened to provoke, when she reviewed her time in the movement in her autobiography, From a Victorian to a Modern:
The members of the I.L.P., of which there was a good branch in Hammersmith, were very helpful, both as speakers and organisers during these meetings, but the Members of the Social Democratic Federation, of which I was a member, were very scornful because they said we should have been asking at that moment for Adult Suffrage and not Votes for Women; but although I have always been a staunch adult suffragist, I felt that at that moment the question of the enfranchisement of women was paramount, as we had to educate the public in our demands and in the reasons for our demands, and as we found that with many people the words “Adult Suffrage” connoted only manhood suffrage, our urgent duty was at that moment to gain Press publicity up and down the country and to popularise the idea of the political enfranchisement of women.
I explained in all my speeches and writings that though it looked as if I were only asking for Suffrage for Women on a property qualification, I was doing this because the mass of non-qualified women could not demonstrate in the same way, and I was to that extent their spokeswoman.
… The working women from the East End came, time and again, to demonstrate in front of my barricaded house and understood this point and never swerved in their allegiance to our organisation
Poll Tax rebellion in the U.K.
In Danny Burns’s reminiscences of the Poll Tax Rebellion, he reflects that there were constant tensions in the campaign between the locally-organized grassroots groups that were the real engine of the revolt, and the professional left/labor radical groups and politicians who kept trying to put themselves at the front of the parade.
When a number of people were arrested in a police riot during an anti Poll Tax demonstration at Trafalgar Square, some of the movement leadership distanced themselves from those who had been arrested in the riot — wanting to distinguish nonviolent tax resisters from those charged with resisting arrest or other such charges, and talking about holding “an internal inquiry” to “root out the troublemakers.”
But when the defendants organized their own collective defense committee, the leaders of the All-Britain Federation tried to usurp them by launching their own defense fund and soliciting donations (the attempt failed).
Anti-war, anti-tax coalition building in U.S.
There have been some attempts at coalition building between the left and right in the United States, where the folks at the top keep the folks at the bottom facing off against each other that way so their pockets face outwards and are easier to pick.
One example of such coalition building in the tax resistance movement was a “tea party” held in by the right-leaning group called the National Taxpayers Union, at which left-libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess, and leftish war tax resisters like Bradford Lyttle spoke.
The following year, leftist scholar and war tax resister Noam Chomsky, and conservative publisher Robert Kephart spoke at a National Taxpayers Union event.
Tax resistance is a time-honored tactic of nonviolent resistance, but it has
also been used by movements or individuals that had little interest in holding
to nonviolence. History gives us plenty of examples of people violently
resisting taxation.
Today I’ll give some examples of attacks on tax offices, many of which were
violent or included intimidation by threats of violence.
Bomb threats and “mysterious white powder”-type incidents
Since I’ve started this blog, I’ve kept half an eye on the news for examples
of IRS
offices being evacuated by explicit bomb threats or suspicious packages. Here
are some examples:
: “The
FBI
is investigating after a mysterious white powder was sent to the
IRS
mail room in Fresno. The discovery forced the mail room to shut down for
about three-and-a-half-hours
afternoon.”
: “A hazardous materials
scare forced a huge evacuation Tuesday of the
IRS
center in southeast Fresno. A mailroom employee thought he was opening a
regular letter from a taxpayer. But when he opened it, a white powder
spilled all over him.”
: “A letter containing a white
powder and a note mentioning anthrax forced federal authorities to shut
down the mailroom of the Kansas City IRS headquarters.… ‘We do not think
this is going to be anthrax or any other biological agent, but we have to
treat this to the Nth degree,’ Herndon said, adding that a field test
found the substance likely to be talcum powder.”
: “Officials have given the
‘all clear’ after a letter containing a suspicious powder was received in
the mailroom at the
IRS
office in the John Duncan Federal Office Building in Knoxville.”
: “Someone apparently trying
to make a political statement caused a brief stir Tuesday at the Boulder
office of U.S.
Rep. Jared Polis. …
The Boulder Fire Department Hazardous Materials Team responded and opened
the envelope. They found a tea bag inside, with a note reading, ‘We the
People, .’ ”
: “A package of foot powder
mailed from a prison ZIP code caused
250 workers to be evacuated Thursday from [the building containing the
IRS
offices] in the Flair Park area of El Monte.”
: “Michelle Lowry… who processes
forms for the
IRS
in Austin, confronts that venom regularly. People slip razor blades and
pushpins into the same envelopes as their W-2 forms. They send nasty notes
with their crumpled documents. Last year during the height of the Tea
Party movement, hundreds of taxpayers included — what else? — tea bags
with their returns. And then there’s the weird stuff. ‘Sometimes you’ll
see stuff that looks like blood on them,’ said Lowry, who has worked as a
seasonal employee for five years. ‘We wear gloves.’ … She’s been through
evacuations caused by suspicious items in the mail, such as white powder.
(It turned out to be packing material.)”
: “A suspicious substance
discovered Monday at an Internal Revenue Service building is not
hazardous, a
U.S. Postal
Inspection Service official said. A portion of an office building that
houses an Internal Revenue Service mail processing center was evacuated
after an unknown substance was found about
11:15 a.m.” “ ‘There was an envelope
that appeared to have seeds inside,’ Buttars said. ‘What it was is not
known yet.’ ”
: “Hundreds of people had to
evacuate, and dozens of downtown businesses were disrupted, all because of
a suspicious package found near the
IRS
building — the contents of which were soon found to be harmless.”
: “Fox 4 reported that this was
the second day in a row that workers had found a suspicious package. On
Sunday, a powdery substance was found in an envelope (it wasn’t anything
threatening).”
: “The FBI
is now investigating a discovery at Ogden’s James V. Hansen Federal
Building that caused a scare, and the evacuation of more than 200
employees.”
: “An inspector at the Fresno
IRS
noticed a package in the mail room with a suspicious odor. … The Fresno
PD Bomb
squad was called in and the contents inside the package were an unknown
type of feces.”
: “Workers at a downtown
Oklahoma City
IRS
building and people inside the Colcord Hotel were allowed to return after
police investigated a suspicious package that was found Monday
morning.”
Note that in many of these cases, there was no deliberate threat involved, but
merely an over-cautious reaction based on previous threats. For example: The
tactic of including a tea bag with your tax paperwork as a form of protest
alluding to the Boston Tea Party has been a periodic American craze for over
sixty years, but nowadays any tea-bag-sized lumps in envelopes are an occasion
for a very disruptive evacuation and visit from the
hazmat team.
And then there’s this:
: “Angry New Zealand farmers are
reportedly sending parcels of cattle manure to cabinet ministers in a
campaign against a so-called “flatulence tax” on their animals. New
Zealand Post said it was treating the campaign “as seriously as
cyanide”…”
Actual bombings and other attacks
In addition to these mailed threats and suspicious packages, most of which
turn out to be bluffs, there have been cases of indisputably real attacks on
tax offices. For example:
In , a letter bomb exploded
in the hands of the director general of Equitalia, a quasi-private
company that handles taxes in Italy. The following month, three bombs
went off outside Equitalia’s offices in Naples. In
another branch was
struck with molotov cocktails. “The phrases ‘Thieves’ and ‘Death to
Equitalia’ were sprayed onto outside walls.”
A couple of years back, a fellow named Joe Stack loaded up his small plane
with fuel and flew it into the offices of the
IRS,
torching the building and killing an
IRS
employee (in addition to himself). National Treasury Employees Union
president Colleen Kelley said that after Joe Stack’s kamikaze attack,
“there were calls where taxpayers said they were thinking of ‘taking
flying lessons’ in the context of an audit or a collection. There are 70
that have been reported.”
During the Poll Tax rebellion, “In Cambridgeshire two petrol bombs were
thrown at the Poll Tax Headquarters and Anti-Poll Tax slogans were sprayed
on the side of the building…”
A patrol moves around ruins of the income tax office in Jerusalem after a
bomb wrecked the building.
, Jewish independence fighters
bombed an income tax office in Palestine, killing a constable, and
injuring five others. “All employes had been evacuated from the building
following a telephone warning 10 minutes before the blast. Police said
three Jews, one dressed as an Arab, pushed a bomb-laden, Arab-type
delivery cart into the building and fled, after clubbing a Jewish
policeman and snatching a rifle from an Arab guard. Police tried to drag
the cart from the building, but the rope parted. They said they then
detonated the bomb with rifle fire, but ‘miscalculated the charge.’ ”
In , the Railway Protection Movement in
Sichuan destroyed tax offices there.
In St. Claire county,
Missouri, in , “a gang of armed men rode into the county seat of Osceola and held tax officials at gunpoint while its members stole all the official tax records. … The gang destroyed the tax records, and that meant that the county had no way of taxing anyone.” A year and a half later: “Around midnight on , an armed gang forced Deputy Treasurer K.B. Wooncott to take its members to the county offices. The gang seized the railroad tax book and escaped into the night.”
During the rioting that followed the British parliament’s failure to pass
the Reform Bill in , the mob burned the
Custom-house and Excise-office, along with many other government
buildings.
In Hippolyte Taine’s history of the French Revolution, he includes many
examples of attacks on tax offices:
“the crowd, rushing off to the barriers, to the gates of Sainte-Claire
and Perrache, and to the Guillotière bridge, burn or demolish the
bureaux, destroy the registers, sack the lodgings of the clerks, carry
off the money and pillage the wine on hand in the depôt.”
“At Limoux, under the pretext of searching for grain, they enter the
houses of the comptroller and tax contractors, carry off their
registers, and throw them into the water along with the furniture of
their clerks.”
“at Aupt and at Luc nothing remains of the weighing-house but the four
walls; at Marseilles the house of the slaughter-house contractor, at
Brignolles that of the director of the leather excise, are sacked: the
determination is ‘to purge the land of excise-men.’ ”
“…the windows of the excise office are smashed, and the public notices
are torn down…”
“During the months of , the tax offices are burnt in almost every town in the
kingdom.”
“Without waiting, however, for any legal measures, they take the
authority on themselves, rush to the toll-houses and drive out the
clerks…”
“…the pillagers who, on the
, set fire to the tax offices…”
Taine also notes that “in Issoudun after , against the combined imposts[, s]even or
eight thousand vine-dressers burnt the archives and tax-offices and dragged
an employé through the streets, shouting out at each street-lamp, ‘Let him be
hung!’ ”
In Naples in , a tax revolt expressed
itself with attacks on tax offices: “On one beautiful summer night the custom-house in the great market-place flew up into the air. A quantity of powder had been conveyed into it by unknown hands, and in the morning nothing remained but the blackened ruins.” “the populace proceeded from fruit to stones, put to flight the tax-gatherers and sbirri, crowded into the custom-house, destroyed the table and chairs, set fire to the ruins as well as the account-books, so that soon a bright flame rose up amidst the loud rejoicings of the bystanders.” The archbishop, under pressure from the crowd, “ordered them aloud, and in the presence of all, to pull down the custom-houses”
Nonviolent blockades and occupations
Nonviolent tactics have also been directed at disrupting tax offices.
I mentioned
the “Free Keene”
activists in New Hampshire who were arrested for entering an
IRS
office and trying to convince the employees there to resign their positions.
Here are some other examples:
Anti-war demonstrators used handcuffs to lock the doors of an
IRS
building in Rochester, New York, for about a half hour in
.
Poll Tax resisters in Glasgow occupied a tax office, and, as the staff
retreated, took their places at the walk-up windows. One of the occupiers,
John Cooper, remembers: “I just sat down at the desk and said through the
glass, ‘Can I help you?’ I says, ‘It’s okay; you don’t need to pay any
more, it’s abolished!’ and the guy says, ‘Are you sure?’ I says, ‘I’m
positive. You know what I’d do with this money: go and spend it, have a
good time.’ He says, ‘You’re having me on.’ I could see the guy was still
uncertain, so there was a bunch of pads for phone messages — I ripped one
of them off and said, ‘If there’s any bother just send that in to
us.’ ”
Another group of anti-war activists, including representatives from the
War Resisters League and NWTRCC,
performed a sit-down blockade at
IRS
headquarters for about an hour in .
There is a semi-organized movement in Chicago to make parking meters unusable through vandalism, including smashing them, disassembling them, making them unreadable with spray-paint, stuffing them with pennies, jamming them with glue or expanding foam, or removing them entirely.
Disabling speed-trap cameras has become almost a popular sport in the United States.
I’ve seen video of people dressed up in Santa suits and temporarily disabling cameras by wrapping them in colorful gift boxes.
Others have used everything from “sticky notes, Silly String, and even a pick-axe” to stop the cameras from taxing speeders.
In Palmer Park, Maryland, recently, the authorities had to install a new set of surveillance cameras to keep an eye on their speed cameras because they were getting vandalized so frequently.
Toll-booths
Greek resisters occupy a highway toll plaza in .
During of the Rebecca Riots in Wales, there were over a hundred attacks on toll-houses, toll-gates, and toll-bars.
“During this period, all the gates and bars in the Whitland, Tivyside, and Brechfa Trusts were destroyed.
Two gates only out of the twenty-one survived in the Three Commotts Trust, whilst between seventy and eighty gates out of about one hundred and twenty were destroyed in Carmarthenshire.
Only nine were left standing out of twenty-two in Cardiganshire.”
Here is one account:
The secret was well kept, no sign of the time and place of the meditated descent was allowed to transpire.
All was still and undisturbed in the vicinity of the doomed toll-gate, until a wild concert of horns and guns in the dead of night and the clatter of horses’ hoofs, announced to the startled toll-keeper his “occupation gone.”
With soldier-like promptitude and decision, the work was commenced; no idle parleying, no irrelevant desire of plunder or revenge divided their attention or embroiled their proceedings.
They came to destroy the turnpike and they did it as fast as saws, and pickaxes, and strong arms could accomplish the task.
No elfish troop at their pranks of mischief ever worked so deftly beneath the moonlight; stroke after stroke was plied unceasingly, until in a space which might be reckoned by minutes from the time when the first wild notes of their rebel music had heralded the attack, the stalwart oak posts were sawn asunder at their base, the strong gate was in billets, and the substantial little dwelling, in which not half an hour before the collector and his family were quietly slumbering, had become a shapeless pile of stones or brick-bats at the wayside.
When the Scleddy turnpike-gate was attacked, they “broke the gates, posts, walls, and toll-boards into pieces so small that in the morning there was not a piece of the timber larger than would make matches”
Toll-booth destruction was also part of the riots in Naples in : “the toll-booths throughout the town were demolished; the mob went from one gate to another.
Everywhere the toll-gatherers had escaped — nobody thought of making any resistance…”
Toll-booth attacks are also a trademark of the current “won’t pay” movement in Greece.
Resisters there have mobbed highway toll plazas, raising the bars and waving cars through.
Miscellany
Danny Burns reports that during the Poll Tax rebellion in Thatcher’s Britain, “In Lothian, it was widely reported that Anti-Poll Tax activists had managed to put a bug into the computer, which randomly wiped out every sixth record on the register.
The virus story was never proven.
However, a month before it was mentioned in the newspapers, its effects were accurately described to two Anti-Poll Tax activists by two computer hackers one of whom had worked for Lothian Regional Council and had been sacked.”
There are some examples in Hippolyte Taine’s history of the French Revolution:
“At Limoux, under the pretext of searching for grain, they enter the houses of the comptroller and tax contractors, carry off their registers, and throw them into the water along with the furniture of their clerks.”
In Anjou, the tax clerks’ horses are seized and sold at auction.
“In Touraine, ‘as the publication of the tax-rolls takes place, riots break out against the municipal authorities; they are forced to surrender the rolls they have drawn up, and their papers are torn up.’ ”
“In Creuse, at Clugnac, the moment the clerk begins to read the document, the women spring upon him, seize the tax-roll, and ‘tear it up with countless imprecations;’ ”
When the IRS seized tax resister Mary Cain’s newspaper, and put a chain and padlock on the front door, “Mrs. Cain sawed off the lock and chain and mailed them to the Internal Revenue Department with a defiant note.”
Whiskey Rebels were known to steal the records of tax collectors.
During the resistance in Missouri against taxes to pay off owners of corruptly-issued railroad bonds, “a gang of armed men rode into the county seat of Osceola and held tax officials at gunpoint while its members stole all the official tax records.”
Today I’ll give some further examples of terrorism and intimidation directed at tax collectors — this time by means of attacks on their homes and property.
Bailiffs, the officials responsible for seizing goods from Poll Tax rebels in Thatcher’s Britain, were targeted in this way.
In one case, the home of a bailiff company’s chief was surrounded by protesters, who, finding that the target of their protest was not at home, “had a look at his double garage — the door was open.
… Well, there wasn’t a car inside, but there was a mountain bike, fishing tackle, clothes, bottles of wine, garden equipment.
In fact, the place was chock-a-block.
A mock auction was held in front of the press.
Anyway, his possessions ended up strewn all over the garden, and slogans were daubed across the back of his wall: ‘Fuck off bailiff, we’ll be back!’
The police arrived about five minutes after we had gone.
We heard that Mr. Roach [the bailiff company chief] was escorted home later that night in a police car.
It’s good to give people like that a taste of their own medicine.”
“a party of armed men in disguise made an attack in the night upon the house of a collector of revenue who resided in Fayette County, but he happening to be from home, they contented themselves with breaking open his house, threatening, terrifying, and abusing his family.”
This tactic was used frequently during the Rebecca Riots in Wales, for example:
“A plantation belonging to Timothy Powell, Esq., of Pencoed (a magistrate active against Rebecca), was fired… and four acres were burnt.”
A crowd of some 7–800 Rebeccaites surrounded the home of tithe collector Rees Goring Thomas and fired guns through the windows at the terrified occupants.
“[P]arts of the walls were so thickly marked with shots and slugs that scarcely a square inch was free from them, while the windows and curtain were thickly perforated… There were in all fifty-two panes of glass broken in five windows.
… While these outrages were carried on at the house, several of the mob forced open the door, and entered the beautiful walled garden adjoining the house, where they committed devastations of a most disgraceful character.
Nearly all the apple trees and wall-fruit trees of different kinds, were entirely destroyed, being cut to pieces or torn up from the roots.
The various plants and herbs with which the garden abounded were all destroyed, and a row of commodious greenhouses, extending from one side of the garden to the other, was attacked, and a large quantity of glass broken with stones.”
That same crowd then attacked the home of a game warden, firing a blank directly into the face of his wife.
“They then broke the clock, a very good one, an old pier-glass which had been handed down for several generations, the chairs, table, and all the little furniture the poor people possessed.
They also carried away the gamekeeper’s gun, and 10s. or 12s. worth of powder and shot, and previous to leaving took from the drawers all the clothes of the family, which were torn, trodden upon, and partly burnt.
They then left the place, after firing several times.
Several of the painted doors, leading from the road to the plantation, were destroyed by the Rebeccaites.”
During the French Revolution, in Baignes, the home of the director of the excise “is devastated and his papers and effects are burned; they put a knife to the throat of his son, a child six years of age, saying, ‘Thou must perish that there may be no more of thy race.’ ”
In , French tithe resisters “wearing disguises sacked the granary of the tithe collector, and no witnesses could be found to testify against them.”
In Naples, in , “the populace began to attack the houses of those whom they knew had, by farming tolls or in any other way, become rich at the expense of the people.
… [T]he houses were emptied: first that of the cashier of taxes, Alphonso Vagliano.
Beautiful household furniture, plate, pictures, everything that could be found was dragged into the streets, thrown together in a heap and burnt; and when one of the people wanted to conceal a jewel, he was violently upbraided by the rest,” because the point was terroristic vandalism, not looting.
“All the rich and noble persons who were concerned in the farming of tolls, as well as all members of the government, saw their houses demolished.
… Above forty palaces and houses were consumed by the flames on , or were razed to the ground…”
During the French Gabelle Riots of mobs roamed the streets setting fire to tax collectors’ houses.”
Today I’ll continue our look at the violent side of tax resistance campaigns by giving some examples of assaults and intimidation directed at collaborators with the tax system:
In Paris during the French Revolution, legal proceedings against people who destroyed the tax offices were abandoned when neither the officers in charge of the investigation or the National Assembly itself had the courage to stand up to popular indignation and threats.
Witnesses who were called to testify against the Fries Rebels “were generally very reluctant to give information, being afraid the insurgents would do them some injury.”
In the Whiskey Rebellion, “William Richmond, who had given information against some of the rioters… had his barn burnt, with all the grain and hay which it contained…”
During the Rebecca Riots, two or three hundred Rebeccaites met at an inn in Pontyberem and, during the course of the meeting, forced the innkeeper to swear not to admit the toll collector at the inn.
In another example: “the dead body of Thomas Thomas… was found in a river near Brechfa!
This man had been very much opposed to the Rebecca movement, and… had been to Carmarthen to make a complaint to the authorities against some Rebeccaites; on his return home that night he found his house, etc., on fire.
Bearing this in mind, together with other circumstantial evidence, it is plain that he had some bitter enemies in the neighbourhood, and it was generally believed that he had been waylaid and murdered.”
Thomas had on another occasion testified against his servant and had him jailed, and for this the Rebeccaites ransacked his house, destroying what they could.
During the Tithe War in Ireland, resisters did what they could to prevent people from cooperating with attempt to seize and auction off resisters’ goods:
[I]t almost invariably happened that either the assembled spectators were afraid to bid, lest they should incur the vengeance of the peasantry, or else they stammered out such a low offer, that, when knocked down, the expenses of the sale would be found to exceed it.
The same observation applies to the crops.
Not one man in a hundred had the hardihood to declare himself the purchaser.
Sometimes the parson, disgusted at the backwardness of bidders, and trying to remove it, would order the cattle twelve or twenty miles away in order to their being a second time put up for auction.
But the locomotive progress of the beasts was always closely tracked, and means were taken to prevent either driver or beast receiving shelter or sustenance throughout the march.
One clergyman had to import some sixty workers to help him take his tithes “in kind” from the farmers in his parish, “from distant counties, and at high wages, who yet were incapable of obtaining more than a small portion of tithes, being interrupted by a rabble — chiefly women — though men were lurking in the background to support them.”
In colonial North Carolina during the Stamp Act agitation, “The stamp masters were seized and forced to swear they would have nothing to do with the stamps, and it being known when the vessel bringing the stamps would come up to Wilmington, Colonels Ashe and Waddell, having called out the militia from Brunswick and the adjoining counties to the number of some 700 men, seized the vessel and held her until her commander promised not to permit the stamps to be taken from her.”
During the Reform Bill uprising in the , “Threats had been employed to prevent auctioneers from selling distrained goods; and an auctioneer in Bath had been obliged, in consequence of intimidation, to issue a handbill, in which he gave public notice, that he would not receive for sale any goods distrained for the non-payment of King’s Taxes.”
Irish Household Tax resisters recently mobbed Ireland’s Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, surrounding his car and chanting “fucking scumbag” Another politician who witnessed the event said: “In my view, there was an element of thuggery to it.
Some of the protestors prevented him from getting out of the car park.”
When Ondárroa tried to hire an outside debt collection company to go after resisters; “Upon learning of the assignment of this work to the Bilbaoan firm Gesmunpal, the nationalist left spread slogans via Internet in favor of ‘civil disobedience,’ as well as calls and letters against the company.
Gesmunpal resigned.”
During the Annuity Tax resistance movement in Edinburgh, a newspaper was sued for publicizing the names of the people who rented carts to the government for hauling away distrained goods — the grounds of the suit being that such publicity would be damaging to the business of the carters.
The Poll Tax resistance movement in Thatcher’s Britain included attacks and threats directed at collaborators with the tax, for example:
“Attacks and threats have been made against Bristol newsagents and shops where people can pay the Poll Tax.
Windows have been smashed and graffiti daubed over businesses which have become agents for the Bristol-based company ‘Penalty Points.’
The firm installs special tills with its agents to collect the community charge on behalf of local authorities for a fee.
Mr. Ross Hendry, a spokesman for the company… said ‘because of the attacks, one newsagent in Patchway has now declined taking an agency after a brick was thrown through his window.
He said another newsagent in Bishoport Avenue, Hartclife had the words ‘Poll Tax scab’ and ‘you’re the first’ scrawled in white paint across his window.
A Circle K store in Cardiff where the revolutionary scheme was launched on with 48 agents, had its door locks jammed with superglue.”
some of the posters with threatening messages aimed at bailiffs and other poll tax collaborators
Intimidation of bailiffs (people authorized to seize and sell property for tax arrears) was widespread: “Housing schemes and estates were plastered with posters.
One showing a vicious dog, read ‘Bailiffs?
Make my day!’
Another showing a picture of Malcolm X holding a machine gun 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.’
These images were extremely popular… People were used to seeing images of themselves in the role of victim.
Now wherever they looked there were images of their adversaries in this role.”
“Wherever the council registration officers went they were harassed.
In Glasgow violent threats drove canvasser Robert Stevenson to quit his job.
He was physically threatened twice in four weeks and continually harassed:
I’d just put the form through the door when this guy across in the garden opposite started shouting.
He was sitting in the garden with about four others and they were all giving me dirty looks.
He said that if I came back to collect the form I would need a tank for protection.
I was in no doubt that they were serious.
I didn’t finish my last street.
I just chucked it.
“…another canvasser… was ‘harassed by a gang.’
In this case, it was reported that:
Four or five youths cornered him in a close in Gairbraid Avenue and subjected him to abuse.
A Strathclyde police spokesman revealed: “They said it was a ‘No Poll Tax Area’ and told the worker to get out, which he did.”
“Following these reports, the Poll Tax registration officer admitted that ‘there had been at least four other incidents involving canvassers’ and… canvassers had been threatened (leaflets were grabbed from their hands).
Already over two members of his staff had resigned because of fears about their personal safety.”
Mayors and municipal councils resigned en masse to support the French wine-growers’ tax strike of , and, according to one account, “there have been threats to burn the property of those mayors failing to resign.”
“Mr. Trueman, a Poll Tax snooper whose job was to call on people and badger them into filling the registration forms, [was] unable to cope with the abuse…
Mrs. Trueman found the corpse of her husband as she came back from shopping.
Fred Trueman, 52, an employee of Bristol City, had hanged himself.
“No-one can imagine what terrible pressure he had to work under,” she claimed.
“He was sworn at and threatened; he couldn’t stand it any more.”
Today I’ll continue our look at the violent side of tax resistance campaigns by giving some examples of attacks on police and soldiers when they attempt to enforce tax laws or to take reprisals against resisters.
, a crowd of people on the Greek island of Hydra attacked local police after they detained a restauranteur for tax evasion:
[T]he inspectors wanted to transport the restaurant owner to Athens, an hour’s ride away by fast boat.
They were set upon by a local crowd, which also attacked the boat’s crew.
The police, along with the restaurant owner, had to retreat to the island’s police station, which was besieged until riot police arrived .
Locals cut off the station’s electricity and water supplies.
a police bus on fire in Zhili, China
In , protesters in China “overturned police cars and blocked roads over plans to more strictly enforce payment of taxes.”
In another mob of tax protesters in China destroyed ten police vehicles including an armored car.
There were battles between police and protesters during the Poll Tax rebellion in the Thatcher years.
In Bristol, the crowd charged the police and rescued arrested demonstrators.
“One police officer was kicked unconscious when he tried to make an arrest.
Six more were dragged out of their van.”
In London, “As the police baton-charged the crowd… they were resisted by a hail of bricks, bottles, and stones.”
Police brutality turned a peaceful demonstration into a riot in Trafalgar Square.
“Mounted riot police baton-charged the crowd.
The crowd, angered by this violent provocation, retaliated by throwing sticks, banner poles, bottles — anything they could find.
Young people, armed only with placards, fought hand to hand with police.
… As the missiles began to rain down the police retreated:
…Pedestrian isles were being torn up and real serious lumps of concrete being thrown at the romper-suited police.
I found myself with rock in hand.
The first I threw was aimed at a group of police.
I watched it bounce off a shield.
My second rock was more specifically aimed at their front line.
Again, it was well-deflected.
I saw a rock strike a policeman’s visor and he didn’t even blink.
The police were shielding themselves from the missiles raining down, but they were vulnerable to rocks aimed at their legs and midriffs.
The police were taking a battering.
Every now and then a policeman would crumple to his knees and the crowd would roar.”
More than 100 police officers would be treated for injuries sustained during the riot.
A spokesman for the police said, “I have never seen such sustained and savage violence used directly against the police.”
During the Poujadist tax rebellion in France in , “unabashed Poujade vigilantes went right on chasing tax collectors down the roads, mobbing police and defying troops assigned to escort them.”
At the tail end of the Dharsana Salt Raid, some Indian nationalist sympathizers, disregarding Gandhi’s guidelines and “abandoning, it was said, all pretenses at non-violence, stoned guards and police.
Five police and three excisemen were injured by the pebbles.
Six police who went to the rescue of some hardly pressed excisemen were themselves surrounded by the mob and obliged to retire.”
In Spain in , when guardsmen tried to disperse protesters angry at the arrest of a tax resisting cattleman, the crowd fought back — “two persons were killed and five wounded.
Among the latter is a Sergeant of the Civil Guard.”
After the Russian duma-in-exile issued a tax resistance manifesto, the government said that if people refused to pay taxes, it would send in troops who would show no mercy.
“Without waiting for soldiers to put the threat of the government into execustion the peasants have inaugurated a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the troops already in the province.
… Within the last few days a number of military sentinels have been shot down in ambush or attacked by the peasants.”
In , the military were called in to Guerrero, Mexico, to put down a tax rebellion.
Instead, the rebels defeated the troops and took General Ranjel prisoner.
“Half-breeds” (people of mixed European immigrant and Native American parentage) in the Dakota Territory refused to pay taxes in .
When the Sheriff tried to collect, “the half-breeds assembled from all directions, and pressing about the Sheriff and his one man they forced him to surrender his well-earned pittance of taxes … and say they will resist to the last man.
Sheriff Flynn has been notified that he will be shot on sight if he again makes a similar attempt.”
“When a deputy sheriff went to make seizures” against Irish settlers in Canada who were resisting taxes in , “the residents threatened to string him to the nearest tree.
Finally, they compelled him to eat the writs he had, and then gave him a limited time to get out of the township.”
A sheriff trying to enforce the “foreign miners tax” in California “in attempting to compel the foreigners to yield, was killed by them, and one or two of his posse wounded.”
The Rebecca Rioters in Wales targeted the constables who tried to stop or investigate the riots, or to conduct tax seizures:
Two or three hundred Rebeccaites met at a Pontyberem village, and while there “made some special constables promise not to serve, and took away their staves.”
“They then attacked the house of the blacksmith, who had previously said he would face fifteen of the best Rebecca boys, and who also had been sworn in as a special constable; according to his own statements he was a man devoid of fear.
The smith — fearless man of Vulcan — had, however, departed; but smash! went in his door and windows, and his deserted smithy was practically destroyed.”
“At the outset of these proceedings the toll-man ‘Dick’ contrived, by running over ditch and dell, to warn a parish constable, one Evan Thomas, otherwise ‘The Porthyrhyd Lion,’ of his own mishap, as well as the peril to which he thought him exposed, Evan being somewhat unpopular in the neighbourhood.
On receiving this hint, away bolted ‘Ianto,’ scampering over the ditches and fields until he found a cow-house where he lay concealed in anxious suspense the remainder of the night.
Notwithstanding the retreat of ‘Ianto,’ about seventy of the tribe visited his domicile, smashed in his windows and doors, destroyed his shelf and dresser, and all his crockery, as well as the spokes of a new cart, put a cheese on the fire, cut down some of the trees in the garden, and then simultaneously raised the cry, ‘Alas! poor Ianto!’
… Evan the constable… if found, was to have his ears cut off.”
“These riotous proceedings caused considerable excitement and alarm… The different persons in the neighbourhood who were sworn in as special constables… gave up their staves, with the determination of refusing on any future occasions to interfere with the movements of Rebecca or the protection of the toll-house.”
“John Evans and John Lewis, two Sheriff’s officers from Carmarthen, were sent… to make a distress on the goods and chattels of William Philipp… They were attacked by about twenty-five of the ’Beccas, and beaten in a dreadful manner.… John Evans was compelled to go on his knees before them, and put the distresses and authority to distrain in the fire.
He was then made to take his oath on the Bible, which one of them put in his hands, that he would never again enter the premises to make another distress.
He was compelled to make use of the following words: ‘As the Lord liveth, and my soul liveth, I will never come here to make any distress again.’
After taking the oath, he was set free, and the two bailiffs returned to town.”
William Chambers, who led a police unit that wounded and arrested some Rebeccaites, was targeted multiple times.
On one occasion, a stack of his corn was burned, on another, a stack of straw met the torch.
Later his farm and outbuildings were all engulfed in flames.
A horse of his that had been rescued from another of his farms as it burned down was later shot.
This panel from the Carrickshock memorial depicts an attack on British troops during the Irish Tithe War.
During the Tithe War in Ireland, British troops killed 18 resisters who were trying to reclaim distrained livestock.
In return, the resisters killed 18 troops in an ambush:
A number of writs against defaulters were issued by the Court of Exchequer, and intrusted to the care of process-servers, who, guarded by a strong force, proceeded on their mission with secrecy and despatch.
Bonfires along the surrounding hills, however, and shrill whistles through the dell, soon convinced them that the people were not unprepared for hostile visitors.
But the yeomanry pushed boldly on: their bayonets were sharp, their ball-cartridge inexhaustible, their hearts dauntless.
Suddenly an immense mass of peasantry, armed with scythes and pitchforks, poured down upon them — a terrible struggle ensured, and in a few moments eighteen police, including the commanding-officer, lay dead.
The remainder fled, marking the course of their retreat by their blood… In the mêlée, Captain Leyne, a Waterloo veteran, narrowly escaped.
A coroner’s jury pronounced “Wilful murder.”
Large Government rewards were offered, but failed to produce a single conviction.
In Issoudun, France in , a general who was sent to try to quell a tax rebellion there “entered the town only through a capitulation; the moment he reached the Hôtel-de-Ville a man of the Faubourg de Rome put his pruning-hook around his neck, exclaiming, ‘No more clerks where there is nothing to do!’ ”
During the Fries Rebellion in the early United States, “it came to the knowledge of the authorities that several of the magistrates themselves were disaffected, and others were prevented doing their duty through fear of injury.”
During the French Revolution, when the people of Peronne and Ham got wind that an order had been issued to rebuild destroyed toll-houses, they destroyed the soldiers’ barracks.
In another case: “M. de Sauzay, commandant of the ‘Royal Roussillon,’ who was bold enough to save the [tax] clerks, is menaced, and for this misdeed he barely escapes being hung himself.
When the municipal body is called upon to interpose and employ force, it replies that ‘for so small a matter, it is not worth while to compromise the lives of the citizens,’ and the regular troops sent to the Hôtel-de-Ville are ordered by the people not to go except with the butt-ends of their muskets in the air.”
Tax resistance groups have used surveys to gauge public support for a possible campaign and to reassure potential resisters that they will not be alone.
Some have also tried the gambit of asking people to commit to resist if and only if a certain critical mass of people also makes such a commitment.
Today I’ll give some examples.
Surveys to gauge support or to “push poll”
The Secretary of the Federation of Dublin Anti Water Charge Campaigns remembers that the government initially challenged anti-tax activists by saying that they were an unrepresentative, radical fringe, and that most people supported the tax:
Our immediate response was to challenge his contention and to propose a survey of the area to find out what people really thought, and a further public meeting to report the findings.
Within 15 minutes we had a dozen volunteers to carry out the survey and these went on to form the nucleus of what became one of the most active campaign groups in the federation.
The follow-up meeting 3 weeks later heard that something like 85% of the local residents opposed the tax.
The fact of carrying out this survey gave everybody the confidence that the silent majority were with us, and for those who carried out the survey, they realised that it wasn’t such a difficult thing to knock on their neighbours’ doors and talk to them and it gave them the confidence to go on to become key campaign activists.
It’s something I would recommend that campaigners try — doing a survey such as this or even collecting a petition in an area, knocking on doors and talking to people about the issue gives those people who we are hoping will become campaign activists a sense of ownership of the local campaign as well as demonstrating quite clearly the strength of feeling on the issue.
People need to feel that it’s their campaign — not one either owned by or controlled by any political organisation or party.
In the anti-Poll Tax movement in Thatcher’s Britain, a Bristol organizer, remembers that in his neighborhood 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.
The results were interesting.
Only 20% said that they would definitely pay.
The same number said that they would definitely not, but more significantly, 55% said that they wouldn’t pay if a lot of other people in the area weren’t paying either.
So even at this early stage we knew that non-payment was going to be massive.
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.
In the American war tax resistance group NWTRCC surveyed resisters, former resisters, and anti-war activists who had never resisted taxes, to find out about their attitudes toward war tax resistance.
They used some of the information, for instance a question for the never-resisted group about their reasons for not resisting, to help them refine their outreach message.
Almost two-thirds of those never-resisters answered “yes” to the question:
Would you consider participating in a one-year commitment to refuse a portion of your federal income taxes and redirect your taxes to a humanitarian cause if thousands joined you publicly?
This encouraging response led the group to launch what it called the “ War Tax Boycott.”
Although the Boycott itself did not generate the hoped-for “thousands,” the group found it to be a useful outreach platform, and has continued to use it in subsequent years.
Women’s suffrage activists in Wisconsin in said they “will take a census of the women taxpayers, [and] the list of names will be published and used as a basis of a ‘protest to the Legislature against taxation without representation.’ ”
Ask people to vow to resist once a critical mass of people take the vow
The women’s suffrage activists from Wisconsin I mention above also said that “when 10,000 names have been secured to a pledge, the women will refuse to pay taxes, and the questions involved will be taken to the courts.”
Another version of the pledge put the number at 5,000:
We, the tax paying women of Wisconsin, hereby agree to do what we can by protest and argument to emphasize the fact that taxation without representation is tyranny as much for American women today as it was for American colonists in .
And we also pledge ourselves that when 5,000 or more women in Wisconsin shall have similarly enrolled we will simultaneously take action by whatever method may seem best in accordance with official advice from the Wisconsin Suffrage Association to the end that public attention may be thoroughly and effectively called to the injustice and injury done to women by taxing them without giving them any voice as to how their money should be employed.
The American anti-war activist group Code Pink launched a campaign called “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” in , saying:
When there are 100,000 of us who have the courage to pledge no more money for war, we will join in an act of mass civil disobedience and refuse to pay the portion of our taxes that represents the % we spend on the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nina Utne explained:
There is safety in numbers.
The idea is to get people to sign a pledge that they will engage in civil disobedience by withholding a percentage of their taxes, but only if a critical mass of 100,000 signers is reached by .
The campaign’s ambitions were a little too high, as it turns out, but they did get over 2,000 pledges, and started many conversations about war tax resistance.
Miners at the “New Rush” in Kimberly, South Africa in signed a pledge of tax resistance, mutual protection, and boycott of non-resisters that included a minimum-signers trigger:
This pledge is to become operative, and shall be enforced, when signed by 400 men.
… This pledge is a serious matter.
If it is passed to-night it will only be a Resolution; but as soon as it is signed by 400 men, which will most likely be on Monday next, it will be the law of the people which must be abided by and ruthlessly enforced.
Here are a couple more dispatches from the Poll Tax rebellion in Britain a few decades back.
First, this from the Catholic Herald of :
Catholic MP John Battle revealed to the Catholic Herald this week he is set to embark on a campaign of “creative resistance” against the poll tax, which could involve refusing to pay.
Mr Battle, the Labour MP for Leeds West, said he would support local people who refused to pay the tax in their efforts, and would join with them in refusing to pay the tax voluntarily if they asked him to.
Mr Battle’s stand against the poll tax follows last week’s declaration by Jesuit head Michael Campbell-Johnson that politicians should side with the poor (Catholic Herald, ).
“In the end, the government can get the money out of you by deducting it from your income but there’s a lot of scope to resist this law”, he said.
Mr Battle elaborated on his plans at a “Poll tax — no way!” meeting on , organised by the Independent Labour Party.
“There is a lot of space to fight this tax from the ground upwards”, he said.
Mr Battle spoke too at the meeting about the Housing Bill which is set to become an act within weeks.
“This should also be resisted.
The government can simply take over whole sections of cities from local authority control, and we’re just not going to accept it.
Tenants are going to refuse to co-operate with government officials”, he said.
“Like with the poll tax, the law can be made to look an ass.
There’s still a long way to go before they start taking the money for the poll tax — it was blasted through the House of Lords by wheeling in peers, despite the opposition in the House of Commons.
It’s unfair and it’s certainly not a fait accompli that it will be enforced”, he stressed.
Mr Battle was applauded for his stand by fellow Catholic MP Denis Canavan, the Labour MP for Falkirk West, who has already been fined £50 for refusing to register for the poll tax.
The tax is due to be introduced in Scotland in , a year before it is implemented in England and Wales.
“We’ve tried every means to stop it, but the only way to defeat it is if enough people like John Battle stand up and refuse to pay”, he told the Catholic Herald.
Mr Canavan has refused to pay the fine he has received, and said the money will have to be taken from him against his will.
However, Mr Battle suggested that a firm undertaking not to pay the tax was not necessary at the stage.
“What I don’t think I should do as a public official is to encourage people to get into a situation where I’m all right but they’re not”, he said.
He believes the bureaucracy involved in the bill will provide ample opportunity for resistance.
“There is a line in the bill at the moment, for instance, which concerns registering for payment of the tax.
It says ‘if no-one lives at this address, please fill in that no-one lives here’.
It’s ridiculous”, he said.
John Battle’s campaign has drawn criticism from other Labour MPs, however.
Catholic Keith Vaz, Labour MP for Leicester East, voiced his concern to the Catholic Herald.
“The only way to beat this poll tax is by a united campaign which must come from a decision taken by the Party at a national level.
Without that large scale sort of action, people are not really in a position to take individual action”, he said.
Vaz turned out not to be right about that.
The Party floundered around, trying to milk the controversy, while individuals organized at the grassroots level in a civil disobedience campaign independent from Party leadership that proved to be successful in defeating the tax.
A Halifax priest has said he will go to jail rather than pay the poll tax in a public stance which mirrors the mounting national opposition to the planned reform of local government finance.
Fr Peter Sheridan of St Bernard’s Presbytery in Boothtown, Halifax, is one of the first poll tax protestors to be fined for his opposition to the tax.
Calderdale Council fined him £50 for refusing to complete a community charge registration form.
He now faces a further £200 fine and ultimately a possible jail sentence.
“It’s an unfair and unjust tax and will place a burden on millions of people who can ill afford to pay it,” said Fr Sheridan.
“This is like a reversal of the Robin Hood trend where the poor are being robbed to help the rich.
It’s ridiculous.”
Having worked with the Catholic Housing Aid Society (CHAS), Fr Sheridan stressed that “this tax will cause homelessness, and will weigh heavily on the already vulnerable in our society including the elderly, the handicapped and the poor.”
Having talked to the local media and the national radio, Fr Sheridan is hopeful that other religious will follow his example in refusing to pay.
“This is a totally unChristian tax, and the government has most certainly failed the people of Britain here,” he said.
“As yet the Church in England has not taken a public stance against this tax”, said Sr Deirdre Duffy, of the St Joseph of Peace Order who is active in the social justice field.
“However, at a grassroots level there are many like Fr Peter Sheridan who are opposed to this tax which will cause many to suffer,” Sr Duffy said.
The poll tax will tax poor and rich alike at a consistent level, with no means test, and will most certainly contribute to the rising poverty and homelessness in Britain, Sr Duffy said.
“There is also a considerable amount of confusion among religious about what orders will have to pay the tax,” she said.
“There are some orders who have property and will be liable for a noncommunity tax, which works out higher than a poll tax, and many orders are exempt but they have not received exemption forms,” Sr Duffy said.
The Christian churches in Scotland have been united in their stance against the Poll Tax, taking part in many public demonstrations against its imposition in Scotland.
“Catholic social teaching stresses that those who are better off should be responsible for those who are less well off,” said Sr Kilpatrick of the Peace and Justice Commission in Glasgow.
“We have been opposed to this tax from the start”.
There has been great opposition to the tax in Scotland not only because it discriminates against the poor, but also because it was introduced into Scotland first, and “it was using Scotland as a ‘guinea-pig’ trial for this tax, and is coming from a government which is not supported in Scotland,” said Sr Kilpatrick.
“We are also opposed to the centralisation of this tax, which militates against the autonomy of the local authorities who are being bypassed and will not control the allocation of the local tax money,” Sr Kilpatrick said.
The churches in Scotland have opposed the poll tax on economical, political and cultural grounds in Scotland “and we are determined to keep up our stance against it,” she said.
“Hopefully we can now join with those who are protesting in Britain so that we can protect those who will directly suffer as a result of this unfair tax,” said Sr Kilpatrick.
Often in tax resistance campaigns, not everybody is able to be a tax resister, for instance because not everybody is responsible for the tax being resisted, or because the point of the resistance is that some of the people being taxed ought not to be (and so only that class of people is resisting).
In such cases it can be useful to inspire those who cannot themselves resist the tax to show solidarity for the movement in other ways, and it can also help to provide or suggest roles that non-resisting sympathizers can play in the campaign.
Today I’ll mention some examples.
The Rebecca Rioters knew how to make their tollgate destruction popular among people who couldn’t (or even wouldn’t) participate directly.
For example:
One night, Rebeccaites destroyed the Rhos Gate, the Rhydyfuwch Gate, and the gate on the Llangoedmore road near Cardigan.
“ was market day in Cardigan, and every one who drove in was exempted from paying the usual toll, except those who came over the coach-road.
The people, looking at things from that point of view, were filled with Rebeccaite enthusiasm.
On that day nothing was heard at public-houses but proposals of good health and long life to Rebecca.”
On another occasion, they pointedly left intact the gates on “the Queen’s high road” but destroyed those on roads that the various parishes were required to maintain.
“This rendered Rebecca not unpopular amongst some farmers and others, many of whom paid the fine, rather than be sworn in as special constables.”
The Rebeccaites also sometimes resorted to threats to induce reluctant people to participate.
In one example:
All male inhabitants being householders of the hundred, were to meet , at the “Plough and Harrow,” Newchurch parish, to march in procession to Carmarthen — to defy the Mayor and magistrates, and to destroy the gate on their return.
Rich and poor were to be compelled to attend, and in case of illness a substitute must be found.
All owners of horses were to ride.
All persons absent without a sufficient excuse or substitute were to have their houses and barns destroyed by fire.
and in another:
[I]n order to ensure a full attendance of her followers, the church doors in the neighbourhood of Elvet were covered with notices in the dead of night, signed by “’Becca,” commanding all males above the age of sixteen and under seventy to appear at the “Plough and Harrow” on under pain of having their houses burnt and their lives sacrificed.
The time and place of meeting were also published by word of mouth at most of the Dissenting meeting-houses throughout the hundred, and wherever a disinclination was known to exist on the part of any person to join in the procession and to take part in the intended proceedings, he was privately admonished if he wished to protect his property from the firebrand of the midnight incendiary, and to excuse himself from personal injury, that he had better join the procession — “or else.”
This species of intimidation had the effect of drawing together immense numbers to the place of rendezvous.
despite the threats:
[Their cheers] were lustily responded to by groups of spectators who had by this time completely filled Guildhall Square, so that the Rebeccaites could hardly pass through.
At one point they explicitly threatened an attorney to make him join them on one of their destructive sprees, “so that if any proceedings were subsequently taken, he as local solicitor might be made a party to them.”
They sometimes also forced the toll house operators to take part in the destruction of their own toll houses.
When Palestinian Jews practiced tax resistance against the British occupation government in the at least one Jew back in London stopped paying his income tax as well.
In , in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.
Some men who were sympathetic to the tax resistance of the Women’s Tax Resistance League found that they could participate in the campaign by exploiting a legal technicality that made them responsible for paying their wives’ income taxes.
If their wives refused to pay, and they were unable to pay and had no property to seize, they might be imprisoned for tax refusal — and some were.
American revolutionaries who were using boycotts and other means to try to cut off the support of taxed and British-monopoly products found allies back in the home country in the form of manufacturers and exporters who begged Parliament to rescind the taxes so as to bring the boycotts to an end.
War tax resister Vickie Aldrich recently got some pro bono legal assistance from law students in her battle with the IRS.
When residents of Beit Sahour launched a tax strike against the Israeli occupation, Israel put the town under seige.
Christian groups around the world attempted to bring humanitarian aid to the city, or even to visit (including the heads of the Greek Orthodox and Armenian Orthodox churches), but were turned away by the Israeli military.
The success of the anti-Poll Tax movement in Thatcher’s Britain relied on mass popular support.
The Anti-Poll Tax Unions “had to make people feel wanted and included and give everyone a sense that they had a role,” said movement chronicler Danny Burns.
“In order to sustain a long and protracted struggle, it was necessary for as many people as possible to feel responsible for some aspect of the movement, however small.
In the fight against the bailiffs and sheriff officers, the kids hanging around the streets passed on the word as soon as they saw a suspicious-looking character.
Parents and pensioners who were not out at work organised telephone trees and were ready to be at each others’ houses at short notice.”
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.
Sometimes the decisive turn in a tax resistance campaign has come when the resisters have coalesced into a formal group with the authority to organize and coordinate resistance actions.
Today I’ll give some examples of this.
The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia formed in the to fight taxes associated with a recently-enacted Road Act, and, once organized, the League was successful in its fight.
Organizer Jonathan Norman remarked to a meeting of the League in : “They had before them an example of what might be achieved by union.
In everything they had been victorious; the dray-tax. which from time to time was threatened to be enforced, was ultimately abandoned altogether.
The various memorials from the different hundreds, backed by the memorial of the united delegates, had caused the Government to introduce an amended Act, which promised almost everything they desired.”
When Charles Ⅹ and his ministers threatened to bypass the elected legislature and start taxing and spending on their own initiative in , French liberals declared that since such actions violated the constitution, the people were under no obligation to pay for them with their taxes.
Taxed landholders in Brittany formed the “Breton Association” to coordinate their resistance.
This Association had a two-fold object.
They proposed, in the first place, to refuse to pay any illegal tax, and in the second place to raise by contribution a common fund for indemnifying any subscriber, whose property or person might suffer by reason of his refusal.
The members subscribed each ten francs.
In the event of any tax being imposed without the consent of the Chambers, or with the consent of a Chamber of Deputies created by any illegal alteration of the existing law, payment of the tax was to be refused, and the money subscribed was to be employed in defending and indemnifying the persons who should so refuse, and to prosecute all who might be concerned in the imposing, or the levying of such illegal taxes.
The association enacted a trigger mechanism for an organized tax strike and a process for collecting and distributing a mutual insurance fund.
In this way they were able to present a credible threat to the planned royal usurpation — so much so that the newspapers that dared to print the Association’s charter were prosecuted and their editors imprisoned.
This only served to fuel the movement: “The associations spread over the greater part of the kingdom; they embraced more than half the Chamber of Deputies, and a very considerable number of peers.”
The Rebeccaites formed Farmers Unions which met in secret to discuss the same sort of grievances that, in disguise, Rebecca and her sisters would address vigilante-style, and which corresponded with each other in a regional network.
One farmer said: “This Union among us is a very excellent thing if all join.
When they elect members of Parliament they do just as they please, and we have no voice, but here we have.
There is no way of putting things to rights till we get up this Union, and then we can do as we please and think best.
If we had had this Union many years ago we should be better off than we are now!”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League formed in when about twenty women from existing suffrage groups came together in London “with the single-minded aim of starting ‘an entirely independent society quite separate from any existing suffrage society with the object of spreading the principles of tax resistance.’ ” League organizer Margaret Kineton Parkes explained that it “included Suffragists from every camp, Conservative, Liberal, Socialist, as well as non-party, and was making every effort to get a large number of influential women to refuse to pay taxes” because “[t]he isolated refusal to pay was ineffective and only caused trouble to the refuser; but a large and unexpected number would cause considerable trouble to the Government and would bring the question at issue home to them.”
Elias Rishmawi was among those who organized tax resistance in Beit Sahour during the first intifada.
He remembers how important it was to have formed a network of committees so as to distribute communication and decision-making in anticipation of Israeli military disruption by means of curfews and arrests of the resistance leadership.
Direct action-oriented pacifists in the United States came together in to form Peacemakers.
“[T]his is not an attempt to organize another pacifist membership organization, which one joins by signing a statement or paying a membership fee,” they announced.
By the group had about 2,000 members, about 150 of which were resisting taxes.
A second group, War Tax Resistance, promoted the tactic within the anti-Vietnam War activist community.
In , the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee formed to help a variety of groups that included war tax resistance as part of their work to coordinate and share resources and expertise.
During the Great Depression in the United States, taxpayers’ leagues, some of which organized property tax strikes, proliferated in the thousands.
Such groups “spring up like mushrooms,” one critic complained, “every time you go out in the morning, you find more of them.”
These leagues attacked the taxes on multiple fronts — not only organizing tax strikes but also coordinating legal suits and pressuring political figures.
A proposed sales tax boycott in Ottawa in
was boosted by the group Human Action to Limit Taxes.
“As individuals we are lost,” one resister said.
“But as a group we would have some impact.”
In the Birmingham Political Union of the Middle and Lower Classes formed.
It would play a strong role — and would advocate tax resistance — in the battle to pass the Reform Act of .
But it also began as a war tax resistance group, asking its members to sign the following oath:
That in the event of the present ministers so misconducting the affairs of the country as to make it probable we shall be involved in a Continental war [with Belgium], we will consider the propriety of checking so mischievous an event by withholding the means as far as may lay in our power, and will then consider whether or not refusing to pay direct taxes may not be advisable.
Similarly, the Catalonian “National Union” began life as a committee to direct a tax resistance action in and grew into the organizing party for an ambitious reform movement: “its demands included the entire reorganization of the vital forces of the nation: fiscal and administrative reform, the amelioration of the judicial system, the introduction of an effective system of compulsory education, the improvement of the provincial governments.”
A variety of local groups, with independent organizations, were key to the victory of the Anti-Poll Tax movement.
In Danny Burns’s book on the Poll Tax Rebellion, he stresses how important it was for the success of the campaign that people formed and ran their own small-scale, neighborhood resistance groups, rather than ceding control of the movement to the various established left-wing partisan and labor-union groups who wanted to use the movement to their own ends but were also afraid to identify themselves too closely with the law-breaking resisters.
Prior to the Anti-Poll Tax campaign, many people’s only experience of politics was a traditional Labour Party or trade union meeting — the sort of meeting where the top table takes up 90% of the discussion; where the only items discussed are those decided by the executive committee; where half the meeting time is spent discussing procedural motions or the order of words in a resolution; where political factions throw rhetoric across the room in angry and unproductive exchanges.
Essentially, boring meetings which stretch long into the night.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been to these meetings just once and never returned.
To engage people in a mass campaign, the Anti-Poll Tax Unions had to challenge this culture of organisation.
They had to make people feel wanted and included and give everyone a sense that they had a role.… This immediate form of organisation also meant that people weren’t patronised by those who had political experience.
In the local groups, people didn’t need permission to act, they just had to get on the phone to their neighbours and get something going.
People stay involved in political campaigns if they can contribute in the way that they feel is most effective.
Very often this is not by sitting in boring meetings.
…most of the successful Anti-Poll Tax Unions operated on a principle of parallel development.
Rather than trying to assert majority control or spend hours reaching consensus, people were allowed to get on with what they thought was most important.
Everything could be done in the name of the Anti-Poll Tax Union, which existed to coordinate activity against the Poll Tax, not to specify its exact nature.
However, he also notes:
…it was sometimes in the places where the Anti-Poll Tax Unions were weakest that resistance was strongest.
For example, St. Pauls was almost the only area in Bristol which couldn’t sustain an Anti-Poll Tax group.
Local people didn’t feel the need to set up new groups because, as in many inner city areas, they already had strong networks of solidarity, and there was already a high level of general hostility to officials of any sort.
… By the end of , three times as many people had turned up to court to contest their cases from St. Pauls than any other area.
White supremacists in Louisiana met in
to form “The People’s Association to Resist Unconstitutional Taxation” to coordinate their resistance to state and city taxes enacted by the reconstruction government there, and to provide legal support for resisters.
Property owners of Silver Lake Assembly met in to decide how to respond to a property tax they felt was being illegally put over on them by a government with no authority to do so.
They decided to respond as a group, “and perfected an organization for the purpose,” issuing a resolution saying that they “individually and collectively will resist the payment of the so-called taxes.”
One way tax resisters can foil the plans of the tax collectors is to send up the alarm when they’re on the way.
Here are some examples:
In rural Germany between the wars, a tax strike broke out, and when tax collectors came to distrain cattle from the resisters:
they blew the fire horn, and on the road they lit a fire of straw, the age-old sign that help is needed.
Peasants ran from all sides towards the smoke.
“Horning” was a legal term of art describing the process under which tax debtors could be imprisoned for defying the King (because it was normally prohibited at the time to imprison someone merely for being a debtor in default).
During the Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance, one victim of this process declared “Horning! horning!
— by the powers! if they bring a horning against me, I’ll bring a horning against them.”:
When the King’s messenger-at-arms, as tipstaves are called in Scotland, brought his horning to the Cowgate, the Irishman, previously provided with a tremendous bullock’s horn, blew a blast “so loud and dread,” that it might have brought down the Castle wall; and a faction mustered as quickly as if it had sounded in the suburbs of Kilkenny.
The messenger-at-arms took leave as rapidly as possible, and without making the charge of horning at this time.
Poujadist tax rebels in France in
used this tactic: “Some priests ring church bells to warn of the arrival of the revenuers,” according to a Life magazine article on the movement.
A Montreal Gazette reporter said of Poujade’s Union for the Defence of Shopkeepers and Craftsmen:
The loudspeaker is its symbol and it all started in earnest one bright morning 18 months ago when a loudspeaker mounted on a truck brought awful tidings to the pleasant little town of St. Cere near Toulouse in south-west France.
“Attention,” it blared.
“Attention.
The tax inspector is in town.”
There was a rumbling sound as the steel curtains with which French shops are shuttered at night were rolled down all over St. Cere.
…
The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books.
Nowhere did he get an answer.
When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat from St. Cere.
The triumph of St. Cere lit the fires of rebellion in the hearts of tax-ridden shopkeepers all over France.
Poujade was suddenly a national figure and he lost no time in organizing his Union to spread the message of the loudspeakers and the steel curtains.
More recently, in Greece, when tax official Nikos Maitos took a team of inspectors to the island of Naxos to hunt for tax evaders, “a local radio station broadcast his license plate number to warn residents.”
During the Bardoli satyagraha, tax collectors and other government enforcers were tracked by the resisters, who warned villagers when they were on the way.
Resister Govardhandas Chokhavala said, “We have provided our volunteers with drums and conches, and the moment they sight a Government servant, the drum or the conch gives the alarm.
That is work which is after the heart of these youngsters.”
Some other notes from The Story of Bardoli read:
[E]very village had its volunteers ready with their bugles or drums which Were pressed into aid as soon as they caught sight of the Talati and Patel out on their japti [attachment] depredations
The youngsters on duty announced [the Collector’s] arrival by a hearty beating of their drums. and all the doors were closed.
[T]he other [new legal] notification which was over the signature of the District Superintendent of Police prohibited the beating of drums, playing music, or blowing conches or horns on or near public roads or public places or Government buildings.
Some of them had to post themselves at and keep a strict watch over the various approaches to the village, and no sooner was a japti party sighted or the whank of a car heard, than they were to be on their alert, and the warning of the fact to be given to the village people.
Some of them had always like sleuth hounds to be on the trail of the Government officials.
Their business was to scent their plans and warn the village people against their machinations.
Some boys were arrested, tried, and imprisoned for nothing more than keeping a watchful eye on a government building from across the street.
Tax resisters in Alwar, India in used this system: “The paths are blocked by huge boulders and at intervals along the hills remote from the towns are watchers with giant tom-toms which are heard for five miles, giving warning of the approach of troops or the revenue collectors.”
The horn became the symbol of the Rebeccaite uprising in Wales, because of incidents like this one:
The constables then went towards Talog; but when on their way there they heard the sound of a horn, and immediately between two and three hundred persons assembled together, with their faces blackened, some dressed in women’s caps, and others with their coats turned so as to be completely disguised — armed with scythes, crowbars and all manner of destructive weapons which they could lay their hands on.
After cheering the constables, they defied them to do their duty.
The latter had no alternative but to return to town without executing their warrants.
The women were seen running in all directions to alarm their neighbours; and some hundreds were concealed behind the hedges, intending to appear if their services were required.
The entire district seemed to be aroused, and awaiting the arrival of the constables, who were going to levy on the goods of John Harris of Talog Mill for the amount of the fine and costs imposed upon him by the magistrates.
There could not have been less than two hundred persons assembled to resist the execution of process, and vast numbers were flocking from all quarters, in response to the blowing of a horn, the signal of the Rebeccaites to repair thither.
Various mounted messengers were scouring the country and sounding the trumpet of alarm.
A sign declares a neighborhood a “poll tax free zone” and warns bailiffs away from entering.
During the poll tax rebellion in Thatcher’s Britain, resisters tracked and shadowed bailiffs, and declared certain areas to be bailiff “no-go” zones, with watchouts established to raise the alarm if any approached.
They first modeled this approach on tactics used in South African townships during the anti-apartheid resistance there, and then improvised from there:
Throughout Britain, city-wide bailiff busting groups were formed.
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.
Camden, in London, followed their example in :
We have organised a rota so that we know who and when people are available to do whatever shift.
We have organised a “knock up system” giving people different responsibilities for knocking up each part of the estate when the bailiffs are spotted.
Telephone trees have also been established.
We have approached a couple of mini-cab firms who have agreed to be bailiff spotters.…
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 you’re trying to expand the ranks of tax resisters in your campaign, you need good educational tools.
People are often reluctant to resist either because they aren’t sure how to go about it, or because they only have a vague idea of the likely consequences (and so are likely to exaggerate their frightfulness).
When NWTRCC conducted a survey of non-resisting anti-war activists , the most popular answer to the question “Which resources would help you decide to participate [in a tax resistance campaign]?” was: “clear idea of likely consequences” and the two top responses to the question about “the most important reason you have not done war tax resistance” were “fear legal consequences” and “need more information.”
People like to stick with the familiar, and if you ask them to take a jump into the unknown, they will imagine the worst as a way to justify their reticence.
If you can be clear, thorough, and credible in demonstrating how to resist and what the consequences are likely to be, you can eliminate the biggest obstacle to the growth of your campaign.
This is easier said than done, however.
It can be difficult to be clear and thorough if you are going up against a tax agency that is arbitrary or that changes its rules suddenly, and it can take time to establish credibility.
Today I’ll give a few examples of how tax resistance campaigns have dispelled ignorance about tax resistance.
Ethel Ayers Purdie ran what she called the “Women Taxpayer’s Agency” and counseled British women’s suffrage activists both on how to best resist their taxes on no-taxation-without-representation grounds, and on how they could exploit legal quirks to avoid taxes (for instance, archaic laws that made husbands wholly legally liable for their wives’ taxes).
She also published a pamphlet about that particular legal quirk, which concluded:
Many married women, including leading actresses, doctors, titled women, business women, and various others having property, businesses, investments, &c., or being in receipt of salaries, have succeeded in demonstrating their non-taxability, and thereby involved the Revenue in a total loss of the tax illegally charged on them.
Members of the Women’s Tax Resistance League regularly gave lectures on their tactic of choice at suffragist meetings, and thereby recruited new resisters.
The American war tax resistance group NWTRCC publishes a number of specialized how-to pamphlets that cover various techniques of tax resistance (such as refusing to file, filing and refusing to pay, living on a non-taxable income) and strategies for coping with possible consequences (such as government collection efforts).
They also have a nationwide network of people who offer one-on-one counseling sessions for potential resisters or for current resisters who are running into snags.
Local groups in the network periodically run workshops at which people can come to learn about the variety of war tax resistance methods and ask questions of people who have experience with them.
The current tax resistance movement in Spain, which has its roots in the war tax resistance movement there but which has expanded to a broader anti-government pro-autonomy critique, recently published half a million copies of a tabloid that included its call to resist alongside some practical instruction on how to go about resisting both the pay-as-you-earn income tax and the value-added tax.
American constitutionalist, “show-me-the-law”-style tax protest often spreads by means of workshops run by self-styled experts who have discovered or invented new (and increasingly baroque) legal arguments that prove that most people are not legally liable to pay the federal income tax.
Although these arguments don’t typically stand up in court, they are sufficiently credible to the lay audience that they can convince many people to begin resisting.
For example, in , an epidemic of tax protest swept General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, as thousands of employees there told GM to stop withholding income tax from their salaries after they attended seminars or listened to lectures on tape from the tax protester group “We The People ACT.”
a flier used to educate people about their rights concerning property seizures by bailiffs
Resisters to Thatcher’s Poll Tax gained confidence thanks to the efforts of the Poll Tax Legal Group which, among other things, “produced over 30 accessible legal bulletins on the Poll Tax and a book called To Pay or Not To Pay.”
To combat the threat of property seizure — often the threat itself was enough to intimidate people into stopping their resistance — the movement made efforts to educate the public about the seizure process and about ways to frustrate it:
[T]he first task of Anti-Poll Tax Unions was to inform people about what the bailiffs could and couldn’t do.
In Scotland, people were advised not to tell the sheriffs where they worked, not to tell them which banks they used, and not, under any circumstances, to let them into their houses.
They were also told to inform the local group as soon as the sheriffs threatened anything.
The Anti-Poll Tax Unions advised people to move possessions to local friends’ houses before the date of the poinding and offered to help with the moving.
People were told to leave their cars well away from their homes.
They were informed that a wrongful poinding could be appealed against and, in many cases, this was done successfully.
People were also told how to avoid bailiff action by signing away their possessions to people who lived outside of the area or, preferably, to their children.
There are now young children who technically own all of their parents’ possessions.
Some local law centres went onto the offensive against the bailiffs, providing information to the public, which totally undermined their actions.
One morning in , the bailiffs delivered over 4,000 intimidation notices to people throughout Bristol.
By 7:30 a.m. the law centre had heard about this and contacted all local radio stations.
By 8:00 p.m. the news bulletins which went out every fifteen minutes, reported:
Today bailiffs have delivered notices for payment to over 4,000 people in Bristol.
A spokesperson from the law centre said that they were illegal and should be ignored.
So most people ignored them.
The Bardoli satyagraha depended on regular distribution of news bulletins from campaign headquarters to the scattered villages of the province, to make sure everyone was on the same page about strategy, and to counteract government propaganda and rumor.
These also came to be powerful propaganda tools to affect Indian opinion outside of the resisting region:
A campaign like this could not be carried on without a publicity department.
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.
A publicity office was therefore opened with Sjt. Jugatram Dave at its head.
With an artist’s pen and with a knowledge of the whole taluka [district] at his fingertips, he took to this work like a duck to water.
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 agriculturists all over the taluka: For four or five days cyclostyled [mimeograph-like] copies were issued, but arrangement was soon made to get them printed daily at Surat, and a start was made with 5,000 copies.
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.
Social boycott can also be a potent tactic to use against tax collectors or collaborators with the tax collection process.
Here are some examples:
Adolf Hausrath writes about how social boycott was used to discourage tax collectors in Roman-occupied Judaea:
The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their moral indignation.
In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and half Gentile.… among the Jews the words “tax-gatherersand sinners,”“tax-gatherers and Gentiles,”“tax-gatherers and harlots,” “tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were accepted as theocratically identical in meaning.
Thrust out from all social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of the Jewish world.
With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose, and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated.
Their testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals.
It was forbidden to sit at table with them or eat of their bread.
But their money-chests especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic regulation.
To exchange their money or receive alms from them might easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and necessitate many purifications.
From these relations of the tax-officials to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the refuse of Judaism undertook the office.
The current Greek “won’t pay” movement included a joint statement from several outraged groups that called for a social boycott of legislators who went along with the tax-and-austerity plans: “do not talk to them, do not listen, do not socialize, do not invite, do not serve them, do not put gasoline in their cars…”
A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before the American revolution.
John Adams wrote:
At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes, the stamp man for that colony.
The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland, have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains, in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to “have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.”
So triumphant is the spirit of liberty everywhere.
Sam Adams led those opposed to the tea tax to declare “That whoever shall directly or indirectly countenance this attempt [to send and collect duties on East India Company tea to America], or in any wise aid or abet in unloading, receiving, or vending the tea sent or to be sent out by the East India Company while it remains subject to the payment of a duty here is an enemy to America.” and to decide “that a committee be immediately chosen to wait on those gentlemen, who it is reported are appointed by the East India Company to receive and sell said tea, and to request them from a regard to their own characters and the peace and good order of this town and province immediately to resign their appointment.”
During the Whiskey Rebellion, the rebels passed a social boycott resolution that said in part:
…[W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept offices for the collection of the duty:
Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them; withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.
Islanders living off the coast of Galway County in Ireland refused to appoint tax collectors from among their number, and “where collectors are available on the mainland owners of boats have refused to facilitate their passage to the islands,” according to a newspaper account.
“On a few occasions the Civic Guards have persuaded the owners to lend their service and their boats, or their boats alone, for the guards to cross.
In such cases the guards have met with anything but a cordial reception.”
During the Dublin water charge strike:
Through contacts in the trade union movement we were able to discover the names of all the water inspectors and imagine their surprise the night before disconnections were due to begin when each of them received a hand-delivered letter appealing to them as trade union members not to cut people’s water off.
They decided not to respond positively to our polite request so the next morning when they left home under the cover of darkness, they each discovered a car-load of activists sitting outside their homes ready to follow them wherever they might go to try to do their dirty work.
One of them didn’t like it so much that after driving around and being followed for an hour he went to the local copshop to complain about being intimidated.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, tax collectors and collaborators were vigorously shunned.
Here are some excerpts from Mahadev Desai’s The Story of Bardoli:
There were meetings in talukas contiguous to Bardoli… calling upon people in their respective parts not to cooperate with the authorities engaged in putting down the Satyagraha… by helping in the attachment of property by engaging as labourers or sending carts on hire…
…the police proceeded to hire a taxi.
The driver, whose car had been engaged by the Satyagrahis, refused to break his engagement and place his bus at the disposal of the Collector.
His licence was demanded, it was not with him, but he showed his brass badge, which he was asked to surrender.
Another taxidriver whose car had been engaged by [campaign commander] Sjt. Vallabhbhai was deprived of his licence too.
Kadod… was trying to go one better than other villages by resolving to cut off supplies of provision, etc. to the attachment officer posted in the village.
Sjt. Vallabhbhai in a long and moving speech expounded the principles of Satyagraha, and told them that their resolution was not in keeping with principles and must be canceled: “In a struggle based essentially on truth and nonviolence we must not do anything in resentment or anger.
It is a sign of weakness.
…do not refuse them the ordinary amenities of life.
They must get whatever they want at market rates.”
It would appear, that three carts were commandeered. for removing the kit and luggage belonging to the Deputy Collector from the Bardoli thana [district] to Valod.
The man to whom the carts belonged came to realise his mistake and went to the thana in company with Sjt. Ravishankar to call back his men.
One of the cartmen, as soon as he saw his master, said, they were not at all willing to go but they were helpless.
Sjt. Ravishankar pleaded with the Mamlatdar that if the men were not willing they should not be forced.
He was ordered to leave the thana which he did; and the cartman leaving the cart followed him.
The other cartmen also ultimately left leaving the carts in the thana compound.
Moderate reformist K.M. Munshi wrote to the government after visiting Bardoli:
Your japti officer has to travel miles before he can get a shave.
Your officer’s car which got stuck would have remained in the mud but for Mr. Vallabhbhai, officially styled “agitator living on Bardoli.”
Garda to whom lands worth thousands have been sold for a nominal amount does not get even a scavenger for his house.
The Collector gets no conveyance on the railway station unless one is given by Mr. Vallabhbhai’s sanction.
The threat of social boycott also played out at other points in the Indian independence struggle, with one account noting for instance that “the native police, fearing social boycott if they pressed their own kinsmen too hard, in some cases sat idly by and watched proceedings,” during the Dharasana salt raid.
When the salt march reached the sea near Danmi, where Gandhi planned to harvest sea salt in violation of the taxed monopoly:
The police and labourers [who had been hired by the government to try to destroy all the natural salt deposits in the area] are boycotted by the villagers in the neighbourhood and have to journey to a village ten miles away to procure food.
During the Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance, social boycott was practiced against tax enforcers:
Of late months, no auctioneer would venture to the Cross to roup for stipend.
What human being has nerve enough to bear up against the scorn, hatred, and execration of his fellow-creatures, expressed in a cause he himself must feel just?
The cabman who brought the officers, seeing they were engaged in such a disagreeable duty, took his cab away, and they had some difficulty in procuring another…
During the government investigation of the Annuity Tax resistance campaign the following exchange took place:
Q: What was Mr. Whitten’s express reason for declining to act as auctioneer?
A: He was very much inconvenienced on that occasion, and he believed that his general business connection would suffer by undertaking these sales, and that he would lose the support of any customer who was of that party.
During the Fries Rebellion, social pressure made it difficult for the government to recruit collaborators:
[I]n every tavern [Jacob Eyerley] stopped at, the law was the subject of general conversation and denunciation, and great pains were taken to find the friends of government, in order to persuade them not to accept the office of assessor.
In consequence of this feeling there was great difficulty in finding suitable persons for these appointments.
When Thatcher’s poll tax was being introduced, the government tried to recruit convenience stores and newsstands to be tax collection points.
When the resistance got wind of this, they contacted the stores, letting them know they would be boycotted if they allowed themselves to be used in this way.
Several then refused to participate.
A threat of social boycott was used to deter potential buyers of property seized from Steuben County resisters of taxes meant to pay back purchasers of crooked railroad bonds:
The scene was upon the farm of William Atkins, where 200 of the solid yeomanry of the town had assembled to resist the sale… A Mr. Updyke, with broader hint, made these remarks: “I want to tell you folks that Mr. Atkins has paid all of his tax except this railroad tax; and we consider any man who will buy our property to help John Davis and Sam Alley as contemptible sharks.
We shall remember him for years, and will know where he lives.”
The tax collector finally rose and remarked that in view of the situation he would not attempt to proceed with the sale.
During a tax resistance campaign in the German countryside between the world wars:
The carters refused, even with police protection, to carry off the distrained cattle, for they knew that if they did they would never again be able to do business with the peasants.
One day three peasants even appeared in the slaughter yards at Hamburg and announced that unless the distrained cattle disappeared at once from the yard’s stalls the gentlemen in charge of the slaughterhouse could find somewhere else to buy their beasts in the future — they wouldn’t be getting any more from Schleswig-Holstein.
Tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns have at times made use of barricades, blockades, and occupations to keep tax collectors at bay.
Here are some examples:
There were a number of prominent “sieges” in the tax resistance campaign that accompanied the British women’s suffrage movement.
Dora Montefiore barred the arched doorway to her home against the bailiffs in and held out for six weeks before the bailiffs broke through,
…addressing the frequent crowds through the upper windows of the house.
WSPU meetings were held in front of the house daily, and resolutions were taken “that taxation without representation is tyranny.”
After six weeks, the Crown was legally authorized to break down the door in order to seize property in lieu of taxes, a process to which Montefiore submitted, saying, “It was useless to resist force majeure when it came to technical violence on the part of the authorities.”
The “Siege of Montefiore” was a publicity coup for the movement, and served as a useful rallying point for activists.
On the little terrace of the front garden hung during the whole time of the siege a red banner with the letters painted in white: “Women should vote for the laws they obey and the taxes they pay.”
Kate Harvey barricaded her home in and it took seven months for the authorities to crowbar their way in and seize her dining room furniture to auction for back taxes.
The following year they needed battering rams to break her barricade.
The Women’s Freedom League reported, of her first barricade:
Passers-by read the bold declaration that she refuses to be taxed by a Government that refuses her representation because she is a woman.
Her continued resistance has aroused keen interest in the London and Provincial Press, and afforded excellent “copy” for numerous illustrated papers.
and of the second:
An ingenious plan of protection had been devised and carried out, and the King’s officers wrestled with the fortifications for two hours before an entry was effected by means of a battering-ram!
A newspaper article gives more details:
Finally, after a heavy beam was used as a battering ram, the door went in with a crash.
The door, however, led only to a narrow passage, where a still more obstinate door barred the way.
A crowbar, battering ram, and a small jemmy were here brought into use, but even with those it was nearly half an hour before the door, almost splintered, gave way.
Later, the hall was entered, where the tax collector was met by Mrs. Harvey and Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard.
Here was little furniture visible, and it was not until a locksmith had forced the door of the dining room that the bailiff was able to place his levy upon goods.
The amount of the tax, it is understood, is about £15.
When the tax collector and bailiff came to seize goods from Isabella Harrison,
Mrs. Harrison then gave instructions for the tradesmen’s entrance and windows to be locked and bolted, and herself opened the inner front door, closing it behind her and keeping her hand on the handle.
The Tax Collector, who was standing with the bailiff inside the outer front door, asked if he was addressing Mrs. Darent Harrison, and hoped she would allow him to execute his trying task and produced his paper.
Mrs. Harrison asked and was told the names of the local magistrates who had signed the warrant, and explained that her house could only be entered by force.
… The Tax Collector protested that he could not employ force against a woman — that was quite out of the question.
Mrs. Harrison then suggested that if he did not intend to stand there till he or she collapsed he must either employ force or call in the police to do so.
He scoffed at the idea of sending for the police, but finally sent the bailiff to see if he could find any.
But no police were to be found.
The bailiff was next sent to get his dinner, and when he returned he reported “still no police anywhere to be found.”
It was a complete impasse.
They had been facing one another for three hours, and the Tax Collector seemed equally determined to “do his duty” and not to be guilty of even a technical assault on an elderly woman.
It was only after being taunted with cowardice — with fear of the consequences of meeting moral with physical force — that he finally made an effort to get control of the handle of the door, and so with the assistance of the bailiff to force his way in.
On an earlier occasion, Harrison had barricaded herself inside her home.
Supporters brought her food and supplies by means of a basket she lowered from a window by a rope.
There is at least one report of similar barricades in the American women’s suffrage movement.
Lillie Devereaux Blake addressed a New York Women’s Suffrage Society meeting in , and
…narrated several anecdotes of vigorous ladies, who, in the security of their own castles, had defied all the approaches of the tax collector.
One lady, she said, was in the habit of barricading herself in her house whenever the tax collector made his appearance, getting into a top room of the house, and from that coign of vantage, delaying the minion of the Government with potations from her parlors.
[Laughter.]
In this case, Mrs. Blake said it was suspected that the collector had paid the taxes himself, rather than submit to the convincing streams of the lady’s eloquence.
[Laughter.]
The story of the seizure of the Kehler/Corner home was the subject of the documentary An Act of Conscience.
War tax resisters Randy Kehler and Betsy Corner refused to leave their home when it was seized by the U.S. government in , defying a federal court order.
When Kehler is arrested and imprisoned for contempt of court, a dozen affinity groups maintained a round-the-clock occupation of the home through .
During the Dublin water charge strike:
People were told how to block up their stopcocks to make it difficult for their water to be cut off.
Empty bean tins and a little bit of cement were the necessary ingredients.
In a group of French syndicalists and unemployed workers rallied at the home of “two of their comrades who refused to pay the income tax” and successfully deterred the police and bailiffs from appearing.
During the Fries Rebellion, officials tried to arrest Henry Shankwyler, but were foiled by a crowd of fifty supporters, who “went in advance of the officers, and, reaching the house before them,” intimidated the marshal into withdrawing without his prey.
“Some said if he were taken out of his house they would fight as long as they had a drop of blood in their bodies.
… Seeing that nothing further could be accomplished there, the officers took their leave.
As they left the house the people set up a shout and hurrahed for ‘Liberty.’ ”
Irish “Blue Shirts” held a rally in County Cork to protest government property seizures against tax resisters, and “[w]hile the conference was sitting, County Cork farmers felled trees in the roads, cut telephone wires and made other efforts to prevent further seizure of cattle for unpaid annuities.”
At one point “police fired upon a crowd attempting to prevent the forced sale of cattle seized for non-payment of taxes,” killing one.
Una Ridley, an English council tax resister, told a reporter in :
…how the couple had managed to foil efforts by bailiffs to remove property.
“So long as you make yourself secure, close all the downstairs windows and all the upstairs ones too, the bailiffs cannot make an entry,” she said.
In Samoa in , officials tried to arrest Tamasese, the head of the Mau movement, for tax refusal:
…a party of civil police attempted to arrest Tamasese at Apia, but were prevented by crowds of Mau supporters, who obstructed the police and managed to get him away in a car.
On , at Vaimoso village, another attempt was made by a party of civil police at his home.
On that occasion the police were covered by a party of 30 men from the cruisers.
Resistance was again made, and the police and the naval party, to avoid bloodshed, retired. further attempt to make an arrest was made at the home of Tamasese at Vaimoso on .
The party of six military police was stoned by women and others, and it retired.
Barricades were used successfully in the battle against Thatcher’s Poll Tax.
In one early case:
Over 300 people turned up outside [Jeannette McGuin’s] house.
Banners were hung out of the window saying “God Help the Sheriffs.”
The sheriffs didn’t show up and Jeannette McGuin never heard another word from them.
In some others:
[I]n Edinburgh over 300 people filled a central high street to prevent a poinding… 200 activists guarded flats in the Grass Market area… and 150 people guarded 11 flats in Stockbridge and Comely Bank.
In another:
Demonstrators threatened to form a human blockade outside the home at Irvine of Mr Alex Smith, MEP for Scotland South, who has refused to pay a £50 penalty imposed for not registering for the community charge.
However, before the protesters arrived, two sheriff’s officers, who called at Mr Smith’s home, left without trying to force entry after he refused to let them in.
Jackie Moyers of the Mayfield/Newtongrange Anti-Poll Tax Union reported:
The very first poinding which was supposed to have been taking place was in a small village called Pathead…
The back of eight o’clock everybody started coming up, they actually started running a relay service, a shuttle service with cars going to collect people, and I’d say by about half-past nine to ten o’clock we had 110 people standing in the garden.
It was a beautiful day, it was like everybody was sunbathing, having a day out; we stood about there, everybody singing songs, we had the records on, a couple of them had a wee drink, things like that, waiting on the sheriff officers coming…
The sheriff officers turned up, got on the phone and, lo and behold, a police car turned up… So the police came up and asked us if the sheriff officers could get in and I said, “Well, I’m telling you, under no circumstances whatsoever are we allowing any sheriff officers into anybody’s house to carry out a poinding.”
…So the sheriff officers turned around to the police, and says “I want him arrested, because he’s organising this,” and the police says, “well, we can’t do a thing.”
And everyone in the garden, I says to them, well, “They want me arrested.”
They says, “Well, if you’re getting arrested then all of us are getting arrested.”
And by this time, the local coalman had come up the road in his lorry, stopped his lorry and blocked the street.
The two guys at the back jumped off, and the coalman who was driving the lorry, they jumped over the fence and joined us.
The local council workers, who were doing the windows at the time, downed their tools and got in the garden and supported us.
It’s worse than jungle drums, because the local baker heard it, he came around with his baker’s van and started dishing out cakes to us.
The sheriff officers were getting quite panicky by this time.
The police got in their car and left the sheriff officers.
I told them again.
I said, “You’d better get going.
It’s a waste of your time.
We know you’re not going to get in, so there’s nothing else you can do.”
… They tried to get in for five or ten minutes and by this time the crowd were getting quite hostile, and I says, “I think you’d better go to your car while you’ve still got four wheels and you’re still able to walk.”
At Bishops Lydeard, people “divided up into small groups, and blockaded every road into the village.”
Barricades were constructed and every vehicle which tried to enter was stopped and asked its business.
… In the end, the bailiffs didn’t come near the place.
Poll tax resisters also sometimes occupied or blockaded the offices of sheriffs and bailiffs.
During the Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance, blockades were used to obstruct the movement of constables when they were seeking to arrest resisters, and barricades were used to prevent property seizure.
Here are excerpts from one government investigation of the Annuity Tax disturbances:
…I saw sledge hammers and other instruments there to open the premises and get at the goods, but after labouring for half an hour or more they could not effect an entrance.
Q: Was that because Mr. Dun used some of the metal in which he was a dealer to barricade his premises?
A: Yes; tons of metal were put up against the back door, and it was impossible for them to get in.
Mr. Dunn had barricaded the door of the room where the poinded effects were, so that an entrance could not be had… I found that the room where the poinded goods were was filled up to above the centre of the room with boxes filled with plates of iron of immense weight.
We were told that the poinded goods were lying beneath those, and that we might get at them as we could.
I sent for labourers, and had the whole of those boxes removed into the front shop until I got access, after great trouble, to the sheets of brass, which were the poinded articles.
These were then declared by the sheriff officers to be of a different description, and inferior to what they had previously poinded; they refused to take them; and the only articles they recognised were some coils of copper wire; those they took to the police office, and those were all that were obtained on that occasion.
During the Bardoli satyagraha, farmers famously barricaded their homes with their cattle inside to protect them from seizure.
When the attachment operations began, minute instructions were issued to meet every situation.
In the beginning only those who had received notices were to greet the attachment parties with closed doors.
Then whole villages were turned into blackholes, and people who could not put up with the terrible strain involved were humourously asked to undertake a pilgrimage.
When it was found that in spite of the greatest precautions, the Pathans managed to carry away carts, break into enclosures and unhinge closed doors, the Sardar [resistance commander] said: “Pull your carts to pieces.
Keep the body in one place, wheels in another, and shafts in a third place; make your hedges extra strong with thorns and bushes; and fortify the doors in such a way that they might not be able to open them except by breaking them open with axes.
Exhaust them thoroughly.”
In order to save their beloved cattle 80,000 men, women, children with these cattle have locked themselves up in small and insanitary houses for over three months.
As I passed through villages, silent, empty and deserted with sentinels posted at different ends, I saw women peeping through the barred windows to see whether it was the arrival of the japti [attachment] officer and on being reassured the doors being opened I was taken inside and I saw the darkness, the stench, the filth; and the men, women and children who had herded for months in the same room with their beloved cattle — miserable, lacerated, grown whitish by disease — and as I heard their determination to remain in that condition for months rather than abandon their cattle to the tender mercies of the japti officer I could not help thinking that the imagination which conceived the dire japti methods, the severity which had enforced them and the policy which had sanctioned them were difficult to be found outside the pages of a history of medieval times.
In Alwar, India, in , blockades were used against tax collectors:
Thousands of armed Hindu Moslem [sic] peasants of splendid physique with fighting spirit are concentrating in an area of 22 square miles to repel the State tax gatherers.
The roads by which the lorries have been bringing troops have been made impassable.
The paths are blocked by huge boulders…
“Early one morning in Karl North (Rochester, N.Y.) was alerted by neighbors that the IRS had seized his car and was about to have it towed for $11.29 in unpaid telephone tax.
Without time to grab his car key, Karl rushed out of the house and lay down under the car.
This disconcerted the IRS enough that when they stopped everything to call the police, he ran back into the house, got the key, rushed back out, and drove the car off.”
Landholders in Tasmania launched a tax strike in , and when the police came with distress warrants, “Householders padlocked their gateways, and mastiffs were chained at the approaches.”
The tax resisters at the “New Rush” in South Africa in assembled a force to prevent the jailing of one of their comrades who had refused to pay a fine.
The Hut Tax War in Sierra Leone began when a king named Bai Bureh assembled an armed group which successfully defended him against an expected attempt to arrest him for refusing to pay the Hut Tax — an attempt that a later government investigator labeled “aggression pure and simple on the part of the authorities.”
Other angry kings and people, inspired by Bai Bureh’s successful action, rallied to his side.
In , drivers parked their cars in the middle of the streets in downtown Paris, blocking all traffic for 45 minutes at mid-day to protest a fuel tax.
Property seizures were also used by the British women’s suffrage movement as opportunities to hold protest rallies or for propaganda.
Here are some examples from the news of the time:
“Miss Muller, far from relenting to save her property, publicly advertised the date of the seizure, and invited the women of England to come and witness the disgraceful spectacle of a woman being robbed by the minions of the law because she dared to ask for a voice in the disposition of her taxation.
The invitation was accepted by hundreds of well-dressed but excited and indignant women, who crowded into Cadogan Square and nearly mobbed the bailiffs while they were removing the lares and penates from the Muller residence.
An indignation meeting was afterward held in Miss Muller’s drawing-rooms and many bitter and vehement denunciations of the tyranny and injustice of the law were indulged in.”
“Miss Raleigh naturally made use of the occasion for propaganda purposes, conversing with the tax collector for some time on the subject of Woman Suffrage, and presenting him with Suffrage literature, which he accepted.”
“A very successful protest was made at Finchley on in connection with the seizure of property belonging to Miss [Sarah] Benett, late hon. treasurer of the W.F.L. By courtesy of the auctioneer, Miss Bennet, was allowed to explain her reason for resisting payment of taxes.
A very successful open-air meeting was held afterwards.”
A very frequently-used tactic of tax resistance campaigns is to take public oaths or sign public pledges of resistance.
This signals to potential resisters that they will not be alone, and is a show of defiance to the authorities.
I’ve collected dozens of examples, which I’ll summarize here:
When Gandhi launched his first satyagraha-based campaign in South Africa in , a member of the meeting asked everyone present to take a solemn oath of opposition.
Gandhi remarked:
There is no one in this meeting who can be classed as an infant or as wanting in understanding.
You are all well advanced in age and have seen the world; many of you are delegates and have discharged responsibilities in a greater or lesser measure.
No one present, therefore, can ever hope to excuse himself by saying that he did not know what he was about when he took the oath.
I know that pledges and vows are, and should be, taken on rare occasions.
A man who takes a vow every now and then is sure to stumble.
But if I can imagine a crisis in the history of the Indian community of South Africa when it would be in the fitness of things to take pledges, that crisis is surely now.
… Resolutions of this nature cannot be passed by a majority vote.
Only those who take a pledge can be bound by it.
This pledge must not be taken with a view to produce an effect on outsiders.
No one should trouble to consider what impression it might have upon the local Government, the Imperial Government, or the Government of India.
Every one must only search his own heart, and if the inner voice assures him that he has the requisite strength to carry him through, then only should he pledge himself and then only would his pledge bear fruit.
His entire speech, which reflects on vows and the responsibility of vow makers, is worth reading in this context.
In , “98 per cent of the merchants at Stuttgart and… 60 out of 60 merchants at DeWitt,” Arkansas, signed pledges to refuse to collect a new sales tax from their customers or to pay it to the government.
Also in , in Verdun (then a suburb of Montreal), 164 shopkeepers, including the mayor, signed a pledge to refuse to collect or pay a Montreal city sales tax.
, merchants in Gadsen, Alabama followed suit: gathering and voting unanimously to refuse to collect or pay a sales tax.
In Ghana, in , the Akuashongs met and “swore not to… pay any tax, even if the government should fight with them, and to make war with any party breaking the agreement.”
In several French newspapers printed the text of a pledge in which French liberals vowed to resist any taxes that the monarchy instituted without going through constitutional channels.
The newspapers were themselves prosecuted for this.
However, in court, they pointed out that the King himself, before he took the throne, had signed a tax resistance pledge of his own, along with three other members of the nobility, as a protest against republican infringements on their privileges.
In Castine, Maine, in , the pledge took the form of a vote: the town voted 125 to 65 at a specially-convened town meeting, to refuse to collect a school funding tax in defiance of a superior court order to do so.
In , some 5,000 businessmen in Belfast vowed to “keep back payment of all taxes which they can control, so long as any attempt to put into operation the provisions of the Home Rule Bill is persevered in.”
In the Women’s Tax Resistance League, members signed “pledge cards” that indicated which taxes they would be resisting if the government persisted in denying women the vote.
The Reform Act agitation really hit its stride in when a huge rally, 150,000 people strong, vowed as a group to stop paying taxes until the Act’s passage.
One account of the meeting read:
He declared before God, that, if all constitutional modes of obtaining the success of the reform measure failed, he should and would, be the first man to refuse the payment of taxes, except by a levy upon his goods [tremendous cheering, which lasted some minutes].
I now call upon all who hear me, and who are prepared to join me in this step, to hold up your hands [an immense forest of hands was immediately elevated, accompanied by vehement cheering].
I now call upon you who are not prepared to adopt this course, to hold up your hands and signify your dissent [not a single hand appearing, loud shouts and cheers were repeated].
In South Africa’s “New Rush” in , a number of miners signed a pledge reading, in part, “I promise on my honour and in presence of the people that I shall not from this day forward — until released from this obligation by the officers of the League — pay any taxes or impositions whatsoever to the Government, id est, for the support and maintenance of the Government of this territory; and that I shall buy from, sell to, or deal with only such men as have also taken this pledge or obligation; and that I shall to the utmost of my power, with purse and person, protect any and every officer and member of the League against coercion or consequences of what nature soever arising out of the action necessitated by this pledge.
At least 1,000 taxpayers in Elmira, New York, signed a declaration in saying that “The undersigned taxpayers… believing the county, city, and school tax rates as levied are too high, hereby refuse to pay until the budget has been thoroughly examined by the committee of the Taxpayers’ league.
We also refuse to pay penalties until such revision has been made and a lower tax adopted.”
500 taxpayers in Cadillac, Michigan, signed a petition in in which they vowed to refuse to pay taxes for two years unless the local government cut its budget by 20%.
In , 36 New Jersey residents signed their name to a petition to the home country in which they declared that they would refuse to pay any further taxes so long as a Roman Catholic was in charge of tax assessment.
At a “monster meeting” at Castlemaine in Australia in , a group of miners unanimously adopted a resolution to refuse to take out licenses.
Taxpayers in Zeehan, Tasmania, met in an open-air meeting in and passed a resolution stating that they “hereby express our solemn determination to passively resist the payment of the unjust income tax imposed by the late Government.”
A Queensland, Australia stealth tax on rural irrigation improvements, was resisted by the farmers there in , who, organized in groups called “Local Producers’ Associations,” passed motions vowing to resist.
For example, the Association in Rockhampton “unanimously decided that all members pledge themselves to offer passive resistance to the operation of the Act by refusing to make the required applications or to furnish any returns, or to make any payments as demanded by the Act.
Further, it was decided to invite all other LPAs and kindred bodies to adopt a similar attitude.”
, about twenty households near Paddock Wood, England, “signed a declaration to withhold [tax] payments” to protest the lack of government action against vagabonds camping in their neighborhood.
When the Russian Duma-in-exile issued the Vyborg manifesto in , calling on Russians to refuse to pay taxes to the Czarist autocracy, a number of villages responded by voting whether or not to heed the call and then taking the results of the vote as a pledge they were bound to abide by.
In , 149 members of a Catholic War Veterans post vowed to refuse to pay their real estate taxes unless the government dismissed a Communist Party member from his post as an advisor to the Borough President of Manhattan.
At a meeting of the Charleston Board of Trade in South Carolina in , the white supremacist group unanimously passed a series of resolutions declaring that they considered debts incurred by the reconstruction government to be illegitimate and that they would resist the payment of taxes meant to pay them off.
At a mass meeting of white supremacists in Louisiana in , they passed a resolution vowing that “we will pay no more taxes to State or city.”
Some resisters of Thatcher’s poll tax made their resistance dramatically public by burning their “final reminder notices” at demonstrations.
This tactic has been prominent in the American war tax resistance movement.
For example:
In the American pacifist group Peacemakers released a statement, signed by 59 members, in which “the undersigned state hereby that we are not going to pay our federal taxes.”
In , some 370 people signed a public oath saying “We will refuse to pay our federal income taxes voluntarily.”
In , more than five hundred writers and editors added their names to a war tax resistance pledge that appeared as a newspaper advertisement.
The names included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Grace Paley, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, Betty Friedan, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Also in , a letter was circulated largely among academics, and signed by more than a dozen professors, among others, organized as the “No Tax for War Committee” in which the signatories pledged to “withhold all or part of the taxes due” and urged the recipients to join their public pledge.
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.”
It may sound like a long shot, but have you considered trying to make friends with the tax collector?
It’s a strategy that’s so crazy it just might work!
Here are some examples of where tax resisters or their allies have tried it:
The Peacemakers were eventually successful in winning back war tax resisters Ernest and Marion Bromley’s home, which had been seized for back taxes.
In a retrospective, they claimed:
The Peacemakers were resolute that their confrontation with the government would be on their terms. Believing that the legal system is an instrument of oppression and exists to protect the state and the property of the powerful, they refused to take their case into the courts.
Instead they worked to make the truth known through personal meetings with IRS officials, through continuous leafletting, through appealing to their supporters country-wide to demand justice.… They put enormous energy into building relationships with IRS officials that would allow for honest dialogue.
And always, they challenged and responded to the bureaucracy in a highly personal manner.
Initially it appeared that IRS’ reversal had been an act of faith in the Peacemakers; that it had been touched by the group’s philosophy of truth and their consistent methods.
It wasn’t that complete a victory.
The Commissioner had been sufficiently impressed by these people to where he called for a special investigation — which verified the Peacemakers’ statement.
Dorothy Day wrote of this:
Chuck Matthei had told me the story of his interviews with the head of the Internal Revenue Service, the almost daily dialogue that went on between them, and the frank and “manly” admission, made finally by the IRS chief, that a mistake had been made, that the Peacemakers had Truth on their side.
I felt a great sense of joy and thanksgiving, a sense of hope too, that our officials in Washington D.C. could be approached in this way — with dignity and perseverance, with courtesy, with the recognition that we are all, each one of us, whether government official or radical (one who gets to the roots of things), children of God.
We do believe that we are all brothers and sisters.
We believe, too, that we can only show our love for God by our love for our brothers and sisters.
So we share our joy with you, our readers, and hope we all have a sense of renewed strength and energy to continue our opposition to all violence, to all wars.
Ernest and Marion Bromley pose in front of their home.
Quaker Thomas Watson was seized by the American army during the revolution, and condemned “to be stripped and ironed, and on the next afternoon to be publicly hanged” for refusing to take the continental currency that Congress was using to finance the war, his family was given little hope for him.
“You may go home,” one petitioner was told, “and rest assured your uncle will be hanged.”
But the wife of the prisoner had a warm friend in the landlady of the inn at Newtown; and when was woman’s kindness ever invoked for the relief of suffering, or woman’s tact required in vain?
She was advised not to apply in person for the release of her husband.
The landlady had learned Lord Sterling’s fondness for the creaturely comforts of life; and knew that wine had the effect to soften the severity of his temper.
To take advantage of this disposition, she invited him to a sumptuous dinner.
He did full justice to the delicacies of the table, and willingly partook of the generous old wine, which had been reserved for special occasions.
As the wine warmed the General’s good-nature and disposed him to kindlier feelings, she cautiously introduced the case of the condemned; pitied his condition, cold, and in irons; regarded his treatment as needlessly severe; and at length requested that his fetters might be removed and his clothes restored to him.
He could not resist this appeal of his hostess; and a note was sent to the guard in answer to her request.
The good woman continued her entreaties, and still plied the wine; when, at the proper moment, the wife was introduced.
She fell on her knees before him, burst into a flood of tears, and told him who she was, and, with all the earnestness, feeling, and eloquence of a loving wife pleading for the one she loved best on earth, begged him to spare her husband’s life.
Her entreaties were of a nature hard to be withstood.
He remained some time silent; then, raising her to her feet, he said, “Madam, you have conquered.
I must relent at the tears and supplications of so noble and so good a woman as you.
Your husband is saved.”
He immediately wrote a pardon for the prisoner, and ordered his discharge.
The happy pair now returned to their homes rejoicing.
Such friendly meetings do not always end well.
Quaker Henry Paxson found this out when he was visited by the tax collector some 300 years ago:
Paxson kindly treats [the tax collector] with best he had, and when he had filled his wem, and drank plentifully of good cider, he distrains the plates he had eaten on, and the tankard he so freely toped out of, but the wife begged the tankard, and bid him take something in lieu of it.
In , a delegation of Quakers met with the sheriff, his sub-lieutenants, a judge, magistrates, and a tax collector in their area of Pennsylvania.
They reported:
[We] had opportunity of laying before them the reasons and grounds of our refusal to comply with several requisitions, made for the support of, or that have near connection with, war; and to open our principles, and the consistency thereof with the doctrines of the Gospel, as set forth in the New Testament and pointed out by the prophets, and the inconsistency of Christians oppressing one another for conscience sake.
They generally appeared friendly, and to receive our visit kindly, some of them particularly so; and most of them acknowledged that the prophecies concerning the disuse of carnal weapons, pointed to the Gospel dispensation, and was much to be desired.
We had good satisfaction in the performance of this service, believing truth owned it, and that there is encouragement for Friends to use further endeavors of this kind.
The Rebecca Rioters could be cruel, or even deadly, to the keepers of the toll gates they were destroying.
More frequently, they would allow the keepers a few moments to collect their personal belongings and remove them from the building before they demolished it.
And on some occasions, the encounters were almost cordial:
The gate-keeper begged of them not to destroy the furniture, as it was his own; and his wife and child were in bed, but they might do as they liked with the gate and toll-house.
Rebecca went to the door, and ordered her [Rebecca’s] daughters not to touch anything but the gate and the roof of the toll-house, and not to break the ceiling for fear the rain would harm the woman and child in bed.
In their hurry, however, to unroof the house, one of them slipped between the rafters, and his foot got through the ceiling.
Rebecca expressed her sorrow at the accident, as it might cause inconvenience to the gate-keeper.
They behaved remarkably well to the gate-keeper, and frequently desired him and his wife not to be alarmed, as they would not injure them in the least; but at parting Rebecca desired him not to exact tolls at that gate any more.
There was no more persistent foe of the IRS than Vivien Kellems, but:
Miss Kellems stresses that she holds no animosity toward the officials who enforce the tax laws.
When IRS Commissioner Johnnie M. Walker took office earlier she sent him a note outlining their differences but congratulating him on his appointment.
“He sent back a nice thank you note,” she said.
During the tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage in Britain, good relationships between the resisters and the auctioneers who were enlisted to sell off their goods for taxes allowed them to better use these auctions as rally and propaganda opportunities.
On one occasion:
…the auctioneer opened the proceedings by declaring himself a convinced Suffragist, which attitude of mind he attributed largely to a constant contact with women householders in his capacity as tax collector.
When Kate Raleigh’s property was seized by the tax collector:
Miss Raleigh naturally made use of the occasion for propaganda purposes, conversing with the tax collector for some time on the subject of Woman Suffrage, and presenting him with Suffrage literature, which he accepted.
Before taking his leave he expressed himself as, on the whole, in favour of women’s claims to enfranchisement.
The movement against Thatcher’s Poll Tax initially tried to reach out to the councils who were responsible for setting the budgets that implemented the tax, and to the labor union representing the tax collectors who would be enforcing it, to ask them not to cooperate.
However, this met with very little success.
War tax resister Robin Harper met with a tax auditor and a “frivolous tax coordinator” at an IRS office in .
He described how it went:
I quickly assured them that an accurate accounting should of course be established, but that in no way could I alter my refusal to deliver my tax dollars into the U.S. military machine.
Earlier I had described how my Conscientious Objection was rooted in our Quaker Peace Testimony and how I had performed two years of civilian alternative service with a self-help housing project during the Korean War.
With his defensive posture evaporating, Mr. Means [the “frivolous tax coordinator”] told us that his father fought in the Korean War and came home tormented by post traumatic stress disorder.
Thereafter he would have nothing more to do with guns, “because he had seen what guns can do.”
That gave my supporter, who had lived through World War Two in Germany, an opening.
Drawing a parallel with my war tax refusal, she pointed out how German income taxes funded the governmental atrocities of the Third Reich.
…
At one point, when I was describing how the International Center has been installing solar water purification units in Central American villages, Mr. Means broadened our discussion, noting that the scarcity of safe water is becoming a global problem.
In my followup letter to our interview, I sent him a copy of an eye-opening article from the Resist newsletter discussing this issue in depth.
Near the end I took the opportunity to unfurl the large chart which chronicles my war tax redirection these past forty-one years and to describe how I was first propelled into war tax protest by U.S. nuclear atmospheric bomb testing in Nevada and the Pacific.
After more than three hours (and well past normal lunchtime), the two finally closed the interview with smiles and friendly handshakes.
Mr. Means even admitted that his title of “Frivolous Tax Coordinator” was really a substitute for “Tax Protester Coordinator,” an internal administrative category which Congress had abolished in recent Taxpayer Bill of Rights legislation.
Despite their training to be suspicious (all taxpayers are trying to get away with something), IRS folk, like all human beings, can be positively affected by openness, honesty and sincerity.
Transparency can often trump suspicion.
I have learned how we all hunger for caring, person-to-person exchanges.
Look how a one hour audit stretched into more than three hours, much of which involved genuine sharing far beyond the scope of the audit!
As our discussion rose above tax details, Mr. Means, the tax protester “sheriff,” was led to cast aside some of his official person and let his personal feelings and thoughts come through.
He also became increasingly interested in discerning what makes war tax refusers tick.
I am sure he came to understand that our witness is anything but “frivolous.”
One tactic that has been used from time to time by tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns is to attempt to make tax enforcement, or government reprisals against tax resisters, costly for the government — for example by clogging the jails or the court system.
If accomplished successfully, this can force the government into a checkmate, where if it fails to take action it loses, but if it takes action it loses.
But by forcing resisters to throw themselves onto the gears of the machine, this tactic can be costly to them as well, and so this tactic can turn into a game of chicken (or a war of attrition).
Here are a handful of examples:
John Brown Smith was a British citizen living in Massachusetts.
Not, as an alien, being entitled to vote, he decided to test the American “no taxation without representation” motto, and stopped paying his $2 poll tax.
In the town threw him in jail.
There he stayed… for almost a year!
The town had to pay about $1.75 a week just to feed him.
The question of martyrdom in this case hinges on the board bill, for which the Town of Belchertown is liable.
Some of the frugal tax-payers of Belchertown object to being assessed for their proportion of Smith’s weekly board bill.
They think that they are the real martyrs, since they maintain in idleness a man who will nto pay a poll-tax, the proceeds of which would scarcely suffice to pay the cost of maintaining him one week in Northampton Jail.
Some nobler spirits, however, express their willingness to pay their share of the cost of Smith’s prison fare until the crack of doom, if Smith should hold out so long, in order that the majesty of the law shall be vindicated.
Smith, on his part, exultingly declares that he is better housed and fed than a majority of the voters of Belchertown who are paying his board.
This aspect of the case detracts somewhat from the heroism of the martyr to the poll-tax.
Nevertheless, as Smith adds that he would rather spend the rest of his days in jail than give up the principle for which he is contending, we may concede that he is a real hero, unaffected by the mercenary considerations of his board bill.
Smith was eventually released when someone came forward to pay his tax and fines (a total of $5.62) for him (leaving the government about $75 behind on the deal).
J.J. Keon refused to pay his poll tax in Grafton, Illinois, in :
J.J. Keon, a Socialist of this city, is in the city jail, having the time of his life, so he says, because he is forcing the city to spend $125 to punish him for failure to pay a poll tax of $1.50… He says he finds nothing in the state constitution which makes a poll tax legal, so he insists that the city keep him in jail for six months, which is the longest term possible for his “offense.”
He believes that it will not alter his principle and that it may make the city tired of forcing its male population to pay a poll tax.
“You’re losing $4.50 a day [Keon’s usual salary] while you are in jail,” pleaded the mayor.
“In six months that will amount to more than $500.”
“Money is nothing to me when compared with a principle,” replied Keon.
“And let’s see what I am costing the city.
Meals, 150 days, at sixty cents a day, $108; night watchman, $5; chicken fence wire, $2; miscellaneous, $10. Total, $125. The entire poll taxes for the year are only $325.…”
You may remember the newspaper articles about Maurice McCrackin I posted , in which he refused to cooperate at his tax resistance trial — to the point even of having to be carried or wheeled into the courtroom.
headline from the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania Sunday Independent
Resisters to an unpopular wage tax in Pennsylvania in discovered that if they refused to pay the tax entirely, the government could quickly hit them with fines or jail time… but if they paid some minimal fraction of the taxes due, the government couldn’t move against them without doing a complicated assessment first to determine how much extra was owed.
This could be a long and dreary legal procedure for a school district or council, especially if there is more than one such delinquent.
Therefore, many residents are beating the wage tax levy by simply clunking a single coin on the tax collector’s desk.
Clogging the courts was an important tactic of the campaign to resist Thatcher’s Poll Tax.
Danny Burns writes:
Bristol City Council issues summonses to 120,000 people, Leeds summoned 110,000 and the numbers in almost all other big cities were comparable.
In order to get through this number of cases, councils had to hope that defendants wouldn’t turn up.…
The strategy of the Anti-Poll Tax Unions was to make sure that as many people as possible came to court.
In law everyone had a right to have their case heard individually.
The calculation was that even if only a small percentage of people had their cases heard, the courts would be blocked for years.
Initially, neither the councils nor the courts took the judicial procedure seriously because they didn’t expect anyone to turn up… South Tyndale Council summoned 3,500 to appear on two afternoons.
A total of five hours was allocated to hear all these cases — an average of four secons per hearing.
When people heard this they were furious, because it was obvious that both the council and the courts saw the process as rubber stamping exercise.…
The Anti-Poll Tax Unions publicised the strategy to block the courts, with leaflets and posters and articles in the local newspapers.
Mass demonstrations were called for the first day of the hearings, and in some areas the courts were brought to a standstill.
In Warrington on , 1,000 people took over the court and all the cases were postponed.
Similar events took place in Southwark:
1,500 people, mostly women and children, turned up at Southwark court and occupied the building.
It was absolute chaos, the courts couldn’t handle the numbers.
The police were stopping people from coming into their own court cases.
The crowds didn’t move until the court declared all 5,000 cases adjourned.
…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.
…Throughout England and Wales over a thousand people were trained to do court support work and could quote the relevant legislation.
Experience showed that the most effective way of wasting time, for those who were not familiar with the law, was to relate direct experiences of hardship.
People talking in their own language about their own circumstances were much harder for the magistrates to dismiss than legal technicians.
Many people made political speeches which lasted for as long as ten minutes, others outlined their financial circumstances.
They all took up valuable time, and sometimes made a powerful and moving impact on the public gallery.
Using the government’s own defenses against it can be a powerful strategy.
And I’ve even got an example in my archives of when the government managed to foil nonviolent tax resisters by using their own tactics against them.
During the Salt Raids in the Indian independence campaign, a group of policemen blockaded the road in front of an assembly of salt raiders, and then sent another group to cut off their escape route.
Then, rather than attacking the raiders, the police used satyagraha tactics to force a standoff:
“You cannot proceed.” the superintendent informed Mrs. [Sarojini] Naidu.
“We will not go back,” the poetess and leader replied.
“We will stay here.”
“We are going to stay here, too, and offer Satyagraha ourselves as long as you stay,” the superintendent said, ordering his men to stand their ground.
They parleyed for a short time and then Mrs. Naidu ordered a chair brought from a nearby house.
She sat down and wrote letters and talked jovially with her friends.
Her followers squatted on the ground nearby, many of them engaged in spinning cloth.
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.
Pickets and other such public demonstrations commonly accompany tax resistance
campaigns. Here are some examples that caught my eye:
During the Tithe War in Ireland, one parliamentarian noted with some panic
a news account of a mock funeral held in Ireland, attended by 100,000
people “who assembled to carry in a procession to the grave two coffins,
on which were inscribed ‘Tithes’ and ‘Rent’.”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League used signs, banners, handbills,
chalked-slogans, and sandwich boards to help get their “No Vote — No Tax”
message across at their public demonstrations.
The Benares hartal of was in
part a strike, but in part a huge demonstration, the duration and peaceful
discipline of which pointed out the determination of the
demonstrators.
When the Rebecca Rioters came to Carmarthen, they came en masse and
during the daytime, almost as a parade. They were “preceded by a band of
musicians playing popular airs, and men bearing placards with the
following enscriptions in large printed letters:” “Justice and lovers of
Justice are we all.” “Freedom and better food.” “Free tolls and
Freedom.”
The tax strike in the French wine-growing region in
was preceded by huge demonstrations and
parades. Wrote one observer:
All observers were struck by the extraordinary perfection of the
organization. It was not necessary once for the troops or police to
interfere with the multitude which was variously estimated was made up
of from 400,000 to 600,000 persons. A feature of the parade was the
large proportion of women participating. Groups from various cities bore
banners with various inscriptions and carried coffins, guillotines,
&c.
Another wrote:
…all night long trains entered the station every quarter of an hour with
crowds, many of whom had been travelling fifteen and twenty hours.
Looking worn and dishevelled, they formed in serried battalions, and,
headed by bands and trumpets and drums, young and old, men, women, and
children, marched to their quarters…
This morning five huge columns, approaching from various quarters,
welded at the Arch Peyrou into one procession nine miles long, and the
march through the streets began at
. Placards threatened, “The
day of reckoning is at hand,” “We will take up arms,” “Down with the
deputies.” Here were 200 handsome Norbannese women in mourning, there
500 young girls robed in white muslin, with tricolor robes.
In in Turkey, mass tax refusal was
backed up by mass demonstrations of as many as 20,000 people, demanding
the repeal of the taxes.
In , anti-Chavez protesters launched a tax
strike by tearing up their income tax forms in a demonstration in which
thousands of demonstrators marched on the tax offices in Caracas.
Farmers in New Zealand threatened to drive their farm equipment onto the
highways to jam the roads in protest against a new greenhouse-gas-targeting
“flatulence tax” on livestock in .
When the authorities tried to impose a tax on dogs in Breslau, Germany,
in 5,000 dogs (and their owners)
descended on city hall to protest.
One of Gandhi’s first experiments with satyagraha was
a strike in South Africa to protest against a tax on Indian immigrants
there. The culmination of that campaign was a massive protest march of
striking workers that deliberately violated laws restricting the right of
travel of Indians.
Ammon Hennacy was fond of accompanying his solitary tax resistance with
periodic fasts and picketings at
IRS
headquarters, typically around the time of the anniversary of the
Hiroshima bombing. He would hand out to passers-by copies of the
Catholic Worker as well as leaflets that
described his own particular protest — while also carrying a sign and
wearing a sandwich-board that put things more concisely.
The previously-untaxed caste of Bhats in India responded to being subjected
to the income tax in dramatic fashion: “Two thousand men turned out to
remonstrate with the Superintendent of Police who appeared on the scene.
He remained firm, whereupon they cut themselves with knives, cursed the
Assessors, bespattering them with their blood, and declared they would
rather die than surrender their birthright. When several were apprehended,
their wives began to hack their persons, and so severely that several have
since died. Up to the last intelligence the Bhats still gloried in their
refusal.”
American war tax resisters frequently hold rallies, pickets, street
theater, and other such actions around “Tax Day” (the date when federal
income tax returns are due). This among other things helps make sure that
their message is one of those represented in the obligatory tax day news
stories. Here is an example:
The group then left for the federal building, in which the
IRS
and a number of other offices are located, at which 75 people burned tax
forms and blockaded the street for a bit. There were no arrests. In
conjunction with the tax form burning, they used a banner with the
quote: “Pardon us, friends, for the fracture of good order, for burning
paper instead of babies,” sent from prison during the Vietnam War by
Daniel Berrigan… They offered their apologies for burning tax forms
instead of Colombian villages, Palestinian schools, Iraqi hospitals,
Filipinos’ mosques and Afghan homes.
In another case:
After a mock President Clinton bragged to onlookers about the many areas
in which the
U.S. was #1 -
military spending, arms sales, violent gun deaths,
etc. — he
drove home the point with an 8-foot Patriot missile tossed into a group
of students, parents, nurses and other ordinary people.
Mass dying ensued, followed by an appearance by the grim reaper himself. Ostensibly there to collect bodies, he assented to an interview with M.C. Daniel Woodham.
Death was the only one at the rally willing to even attempt an explanation of the maniacal logic of a still-bloated U.S. military budget.
Some war tax resisters in Wales brought their tax payment to the tax office in a bucket of blood. When the payment was refused, they poured the blood over the steps of the building.
In members of the Magdalene House Catholic Worker held a demonstration at the IRS office in which they “laid out a cloth altar with candles, flowers, and health care items to represent life, and tax forms with their blood poured on them to represent death.
They held a worship service and talked about why they were there.”
This was enough for several of them to get arrested.
During the rebellion against Thatcher’s poll tax, there were several demonstrations.
The Scottish Trade Union Conference organized a number of rallies,
including a 30,000-person march in Edinburgh, but then it put its weight
behind a strange 11-minute-long general strike at which people all over
Scotland were supposed to briefly stop working to engage in some short
anti-poll-tax activism. That protest didn’t go anywhere and the Union
Conference lost some credibility as a movement organizer.
Hundreds of thousands of people turned out to demonstrations in England,
with some of these rallies and marches turning into riots (or being
attacked by police, depending on whose stories you believe). On such
occasions, the riots became the message of the demonstrations, whatever
the intentions of the organizers were. This had mixed consequences for
the movement.
Eric Frank Russell’s satyagraha sci-fi story …And Then There Were None is now on-line in a new and improved format.
Tom Cordaro remembers Catholic Bishop Walter Sullivan, who supported Cordaro during a dispute with the IRS over his war tax resistance.
“I could not believe that this man — who had never personally met me — was willing to stand with me and my parish in this struggle against the U.S. government.
Because of Bishop Sullivan I knew that we were not alone and that support for war tax resistance existed in the Church.”
James Drummond reviews the course of the rebellion against Thatcher’s poll tax:
“[I]t is worth pointing out the significance of this, and what it means for all of us fighting against cuts and austerity today.
Firstly, this was a struggle which united the left.
Secondly, not only did it unite the left, but it mobilised millions of working class people to take direct action and break the law in their own interests, in open defiance of the Labour Party and trade union leaders.
Thirdly, it was a campaign which sank real roots into working class communities.
Finally, after years of defeat both before and since, it was a victory for our class.
The campaign brought down Thatcher and forced the abolition of the tax.”
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
Michael Paraskevas, an activist lawyer from Cyprus, has stopped paying his social security tax and is calling on other citizens to do the same.
He is protesting the plunder of the social insurance fund to pay off financial speculators in the wake of the economic crisis.
“It is unacceptable for people get no pension, or a reduced pension, simply because some people speculate,” he wrote, in a letter to the government announcing his resistance.
At War Tax Talk, Ruth Benn profiles Robin Harper, who has been a war tax resister .
Some business leaders in Apatzingán, a city in the Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán, finding that the government is giving them no protection from the Knights Templar Cartel, have decided that there’s no point in paying taxes any longer.
I’ve been slacking a bit in my reporting, but a lot has been coming across my
screen in recent weeks:
Some resisters describe war tax resistance as something they do so they
can live with themselves, or something they do to assuage their
conscience about where tax money goes. Being able to live in alignment
with your beliefs is a profound form of self-care — think about the
dis-ease you experience when you do something against your beliefs. War
tax resistance not only brings you into alignment with your beliefs
about war, it can also help you integrate your beliefs on other issues.
If you’re self-employed as a sole proprietorship in the
U.S., you’re
supposed to pay self-employment tax on all of your profits, just as though
you were employed and it was your salary. But if you’ve organized yourself
as an “S Corporation” — you can instead pay yourself a specific salary
out of your profits and you’ll only owe self-employment tax on
that. Seems an arbitrary and even sketchy loophole? Tax expert Peter J.
Reilly says it’s “a valid self-employment tax avoidance strategy… organizing as an S Corporation and avoiding self-employment tax seems like a no-brainer for a sole proprietor”
though he also warns that “you really should not use the strategy to avoid
SE/payroll
taxes entirely.”
NPR
looked into
Why More Americans Are Renouncing
U.S.
Citizenship and concluded that there isn’t one single cause, but
instead it is the result of “dominoes falling, one after another, leading
to an unexpected outcome.” But all of the dominoes have to do with taxes,
and how the U.S.
tax system makes life difficult for citizens living overseas.
Tax Resistance in Spain
Professor Roberto Centeno, writing at El Confidencial, made a bit of a stir by arguing that since much of the Spanish government debt is not legitimate, the people of Spain do not owe it and ought not to pay for it through their taxes.
Excerpts:
Following the marvelous example of civil dignity that Henry David
Thoreau gave us with the practice of disobedience against unjust taxes,
created and used against the interest of the citizens, now more than
ever it has become indispensable to put an end to the
particracy of
lies and corruption. And to do this by means of an exemplary action of
tax withholding against the enrichment without reason of the political
and financial oligarchs, by means of those taxes created and a debt
assumed to defend their interests, and so it will be them who reassume
this debt or answer for the consequences of its nonpayment.
It is a debt of the regime, a personal debt of the government that
contracted it, because it does not comply with the essential requirements
of a legitimate debt, which would be that it was contracted for the
exclusive benefit of the people.
I feel like I have way too little context to make sense of all of this, but various industrial and commercial unions are squabbling over whether to
support a business strike
in the Dominican Republic over the expansion of a value-added tax there.
Tax Resistance in Argentina
, twenty “productores,
industriales forestales, empresas de servicios, y colonos” (roughly:
“manufacturers, foresters, service businesses, and farmers,” I think) in
Colonia Delicia decided to stop paying taxes in protest at the poor state of the government-maintained roads.
The businesses say that the poor condition of the roads is making their
businesses impossible to operate.
Thatcher’s poll tax began to roll out in to strong opposition; in Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister in the face of riots and widespread tax refusal; in her pet tax was abolished.
A total disaster.
But it seemed like a splendid idea at the time to the tories!
Here’s a premature victory dance from the British right-wing, as found in the Spectator:
Michael Trend predicts the failure of the great “poll tax” protest
“Remember !” proclaimed a banner gaily swung aloft a “Stop the Poll Tax March” in Islington’s Upper Street .
I had happened upon the dissenting brothers and sisters of that borough by accident; but stayed to watch them troop by with some delight.
The head of what I thought was going to be a lengthy serpent of revolt was colourful enough with a motley band of unkempt-looking youths dressed in peasant-like tatters.
But, alas, all too soon there were the police vans and coaches bringing up the rear, with dozens of sleepy-looking constables peering out of the windows.
“We had expected many more,” said one enforcer of law and order; and then shared with me his opinion that the general appearance of the marchers was not supposed to be, as I had thought, a subtle historical reference to the age of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw but was just “their normal life-style, if you know what I mean.”
But could there have been so few — a mere 50 souls — in the people’s republic of Islington who felt so strongly on the pressing subject of the oppression of the people by “Thatcher’s brutal poll tax”?
“Or, community charge — if you don’t mind,” as Mr. John Gummer, the minister in charge of its implementation, puts it when being interviewed on the subject.
Noting how people refer to the new local tax that is going to replace domestic rates has been of great interest to me since I visited Scotland in .
Many Conservatives there then and, as I have since found, many in England go on referring innocently to the “poll tax” unaware of the supposed tremendous power of the name.
The Government itself has conceded that there is a problem of nomenclature as its leaflet on the “community charge or so-called ‘poll tax’ ” shows.
(Mr. Paul Thomas in ’s Spectator caught this particularly well in a cartoon showing the Government’s leaflet for the “Community Charge or so-called effing poll tax”.)
But I suspect that as with the march in Islington there is not a lot of mileage left in the game of the name.
A recent leaflet from the Association of District Councils and Association of Metropolitan Authorities advertised a one-day seminar on “How Scotland is coping with the ‘so-called poll tax’ ”.
When a so-called “poll tax” becomes a “so-called poll tax” we have reached a level of absurdity that shows we are probably ready to drop the whole business.
The historical connection with the dark days of the Middle Ages has also worn pretty thin.
For all the university Left’s attempt in to present the Peasants’ Revolt as some glorious movement of early Chartism, that depressingly brutal episode in our history (in which the 14th-century poll tax played only a limited role) means next to nothing to our historically illiterate population these days.
So I say, “Forget !”, and look back instead to — in Scotland.
When, , I went to speak to Mr. John MacKay, head of the Conservative organisation there, I could tell that the view put forward by Labour and the SNP that the poll tax would be a serious blow to the Government was treated with some respect by the Tories.
By this spring, however, when I was back in Scotland, that view had changed and Mr. MacKay was a much happier man.
In particular, he pointed out, the standing of the Tories in the Scottish opinion polls had not been damaged at all by the introduction of the new tax.
In contrast his party had recovered somewhat; the slump had come during the re-rating exercise — the final straw that finally broke the back of the old rating system north of the border.
I was in Edinburgh just as the collection of the new tax was beginning and saw that the SNP’s “Can pay, but won’t pay” campaign was a flop.
A promised list of 100,000 supporters never turned up.
I noted a tiny crowd of protesters — fewer even than their Islington brothers — gathering outside local municipal offices with SNP banners, “Say No to the Poll Tax.”
Twenty minutes later I passed that way again; a light drizzle had come and they had gone.
In fact almost everybody in Scotland has registered for the community charge — the only dispute is over whether the official figure is 98 or 99 per cent.
This, of course, is very much in the interests of the large local authorities (mostly Labour) who never wanted to see their finances and electoral rolls drop.
Now, much to the satisfaction of the Conservatives, these same local authorities are having to work flat out explaining to their voters something, curiously, that they had not mentioned before — the rebate system for those who genuinely can’t afford to pay.
The “Say No” campaign had a good year, but, like all good things, has come to an end.
There were many special reasons why this should have been so and why the English experience is, and will be, different.
Many Scots felt , with some justice, I think, that they were being used as guinea pigs.
Scotland is a Labour stronghold (its only stronghold, some would add) and the Conservatives under Mrs. Thatcher are widely hated there; moreover the anti-poll tax campaign proved to be a useful focus of all the opposition forces.
This pattern is not being repeated this year in England as the registration forms now begin to go out here.
The great fear for the Conservatives about the community charge south of the border has been that it would become the mid-term nightmare of this parliament much as the abolition of the GLC was of the last.
When the legislation was going through the House of Commons there were many Tory MP fainthearts who voiced anxieties about what they saw as the electoral damage that the charge would bring them in their several seats.
When I asked John Gummer about this earlier this year I could tell that he was keenly aware of the GLC analogy and was absolutely determined not to become another Patrick Jenkin.
In recent weeks he has pressed ahead with great signs of confidence (although the public relations razzmatazz of his launch, when he opened himself to ridicule from Labour as “Postman Pat,” was a mistake).
Many attempts have been made by the opposition to stir up the “Scottish experience” in the introduction of the community charge in England but they have made little headway.
In particular Greenwich’s attempt to “stop Gummer’s leaflet” proved ineffective and very expensive (no doubt the good burghers of that borough will not mind paying for it).
The public response to the community charge in England has been much more muted than in Scotland and it really does begin to look likely that the nightmare will not happen after all.
The earlier careful thought that went into the planning of the charge at the Department of the Environment — whose officials knew better than anyone else that the rates system was beyond redemption — is beginning to pay off.
Many local Conservative associations are reporting that, taken overall, the simplicity of the community charge (everyone pays the same) is a positive feature; the argument that local authorities will be made more accountable to their voters through the tax is beginning to be looked at more carefully — it was used as a campaigning point by the Tories who recently won control of Bradford.
Mr Gummer’s most pressing problem now is to persuade the press that they have been deprived of the “story” they have become so used to writing on the new tax; maybe he should point them towards an alternative scare story for this mid-term Government (there are, surely, many to choose from).
That would leave him with only one further problem; for the surest sign that political opinions of the community charge have changed is the growing number of institutions and individuals who are lining up to take the credit for it.
Among these have been the Adam Smith Institute — well-known boasters — who have taken to claiming in their literature that they “invented” the charge.
More significant, however, have been the gentle noises coming from Mr. Kenneth Baker (who ran the original working group that set out the terms of the new tax) that he would be quite happy to take the credit for this necessary reform done as painlessly as possible.
Mr. Gummer would do well to keep a closer watch henceforth on his political friends who have an eye to the future rather than his political opponents with their eye on the past.
According to Économie Matin, four French tax offices have been put to the torch .
“Hardly a week goes by without farmers dumping manure in front of some public building… or locks are vandalized.
Every day, tax officials are attacked by outraged taxpayers who are tired of getting stonewalled when they ask why their taxes have increased so much.”
Le Figaro also reports that French tax officials are getting nervous.
“Now our agents, who are only the executors of a policy implemented by the government, have become indirect victims of the wrath of taxpayers,” said a tax employee union representative.
“Our colleagues are all the more concerned in that they feel the attacks against the tax centers remain unpunished.”
One tax official whose job puts him in direct contact with angry taxpayers said, “I never leave a stapler lying on my desk, or any other object that might serve as a projectile when I meet with a taxpayer.
My colleagues do the same.”
[T]he group is encouraging Catalans to use an arcane legal formula to pay their taxes to an escrow account controlled by the regional government.
That would potentially deny more than 8 billion euros ($9 billion) to the Spanish state, which is legally entitled to collect taxes directly in Catalonia and most of the rest of country
The technique allows taxpayers to meet their legal obligations to the state before the regional government transfers the money to Madrid.
If the dispute over Catalan sovereignty turns nasty, the regional government can then withhold revenue from Spain without exposing voters to legal or financial reprisals from the central government.
“One of the most important spiritual directors in my life has been the Internal Revenue Service.
Janis Joplin’s lyric, ‘Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,’ comes to mind.
War tax refusers learn ways to become impervious to collection, and that generally means finding ways to live without owning property, relying on savings, or growing attached to a job that one couldn’t leave in the event of an IRS notice about wage garnishment.
“Becoming a war tax refuser was one of the simplest decisions I’ve ever made and one of the easiest decisions to maintain.
I can’t imagine ever changing my mind.”
The War Resisters League have come out with their annual U.S. Federal Budget Pie Chart, which purports to tell you “where your income tax money really goes.”
This is based on the Obama administration’s budget proposal for , which is more than usually an exercise in showmanship as the Republicans who control Congress will get the final say.
Still, the chart makes for a useful conversation starter in some contexts.
In Greece, too, the new government has moved to make things easier for those who practiced tax refusal in recent years.
Such resisters can, if they agree to begin paying something, have large hunks of their arrears written-off, and can make plans to pay the rest in up to 100 small installments without any interest of penalties.
As in the case of Scotland, critics are suggesting that these moves will encourage future tax resisters to be more bold in the hopes that they too might benefit from a future amnesty.
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.
BBC Radio 4 did a show on tax avoiders of various sorts: Can Pay, Won’t Pay (the show starts at about 2:38 in the on-line segment).
The show starts by looking at modern wealthy tax avoiders who try to reduce their taxes through legal or borderline-legal tax strategies.
But then the show moves on to talking about the poll tax rebellion of (which they characterize as a middle-class revolt and not a peasants’ revolt at all) — though without touching on the Wat Tyler-led armed part of the revolt.
From here, they move on to Thatcher’s poll tax, with a quick interview with a politician from the time insisting that he knew all along it was going to go wrong.
Then to a discussion of the “window tax” that started in .
The count of windows in a building was used as a proxy for its value for tax purposes.
People avoided that tax by the brute-force method of bricking up their windows.
And then the notorious tax on tea, which, according to the expert being interviewed, began as a sort of baptists-and-bootleggers collusion to protect the domestic beer industry from competition.
Then a brief overview of the modern back-and-forth between taxers and tax evaders.
Conscientious tax resisters don’t get any attention.
Today I’ll try to catch up on what has been going on with the tax resistance campaign taking place in Hong Kong as part of the “umbrella movement” protests for democratic reforms.
Beijing loyalists had been pushing what they were calling a “universal suffrage” bill, but one which would only allow people to vote for candidates that had been pre-screened by a Beijing-controlled committee.
This bill failed to pass the Hong Kong legislature , which was seen as a victory for pro-democratic forces.
The tax resistance campaign has posted a series of bulletins on inmediahk.net about the campaign and its historical precedents, including:
some of the illustrations accompanying the inmediahk.net series of articles about the tax resistance campaign in Hong Kong
The movement seems to be exploring new tactics.
The last time I checked in, the tactics being discussed seemed to mostly be either underpaying tax by a symbolic amount or paying the complete amount of the tax but in a symbolic fashion (by writing a large number of checks each for a value that is a number with symbolic value for the campaign).
Overpaying the taxes by a symbolic amount so that the government cuts a refund check for that amount.
some of the refund checks received from Hong Kong Inland Revenue
Expanding the underpayment or payment-with-many-checks method to other payments to the government besides taxes, such as student loan repayments, rates at government-run housing, and utility bills.
people brought their checkbooks to an event where they could use rubber stamps to quickly make many $6.89 checks
Donating money to charity so as to reduce the amount of tax owed.
Responding to a notice of assessment with an objection (in the 1cm×18cm space provided for objections) to the effect that the unrepresentative, violent Leung Chun-ying regime has no authority to assess taxes.
fine print fills the space allowed for objections to the tax assessment
Some links that have graced my browser in recent days:
The Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy is “building a European network of companies which support a European tax disobedience movement.”
In short, they’re trying to use the same bag of tricks that multinational corporations use to evade taxes on their profits in order to build an alternative economic network of European dissidents.
Fair.coop also has some commentary on the campaign.
Italian pacifist Turi Vaccaro climbed up a satellite dish at a U.S. military base near Niscemi, Italy, and, over the course of about 34 hours, with manual hand tools, did about €800,000 in damage.
Did the U.S. government ever press charges against Voices in the Wilderness for violating the sanctions?
Kathy Kelly
They would bring us into court with some regularity. It was curious because at one point there was a $50,000 fine. I thought, “What are you going to take — my contact lenses?” I just had to laugh. I mean, I haven’t paid a dime of taxes to the U.S. government as a war tax-refuser since 1980. So there is nothing they could take from me. The people that would go over were in the same boat. So good luck collecting from them!
Spirit
But as it turned out, they did fine your group $20,000, didn’t they?
Kelly
Yeah, they finally took us into court. And I think Condoleezza Rice inadvertently might have saved us. This is speculation on my part, but this much is true. Chevron settled out of court, acknowledging that they had paid money under the table to Saddam Hussein in order to get very lucrative contracts for Iraqi oil.
Condoleezza Rice was the international liaison for Chevron while it was paying money under the table to get these lucrative contracts. So when we finally had our day in court, Sen. Carl Levin’s staffers were still digging up this information and it was beginning to become public evidence that Chevron, Odin Marine Inc., Mobil and Coastal Oil had all been paying money for these oil contracts under the table to Saddam Hussein.
So there were big fish in the pond that broke the sanctions and there were little fish in the pond that broke the sanctions. I think some of the big fish said, “That is one hot potato. You drop that hot potato as fast as you can, and don’t make a big deal because those people are little fish but they’re mouthy little fish.” So they never tried to collect a dime from us. The money was just sitting there.
Spirit
Well, what exactly did happen to you when the U.S. government took you to court for violating the sanctions?
Kelly
We were found guilty and were fined $20,000. Federal Judge John Bates wrote in his legal opinion that those who disobey an unjust law should accept the penalty willingly and lovingly.
Spirit
Unbelievable! A federal judge lectures you about lovingly accepting this unjust fine using the words of Martin Luther King?
Kelly
Yes. We said to Judge Bates, “If you want to send us to prison, we will go, willingly and lovingly. We’ve done that before already. But if you think we will pay a fine to the U.S. government, then we ask you to imagine that Martin Luther King would have ever said, ‘Coretta, get the checkbook.’ We are not going to pay one dime to the U.S. government which continues to wage warfare.” At that time, supplemental spending bills appeared every year, sometimes two or three times a year, and congressional representatives and senators continued to vote yes on those spending bills for the military. So we said, “No, we won’t pay a dime of that fine.”
Spirit
You have also been a war tax resister for a long time.
Kelly
I’m a war tax refuser. I don’t give them anything.
Spirit
Oh, you’re not a 50 percent withholder, like many war tax resisters. You’re a 100 percent withholder?
Kelly
Yes, I’m a 100 percent withholder. I think war tax resistance is important but I happen to be a refuser. They haven’t got one dime of federal income tax from me since 1980.
Spirit
Why did you begin refusing to pay federal taxes entirely?
Kelly
I won’t give them any money. I can’t and I won’t. I won’t pay for guns. I don’t believe in killing people. I also don’t want to pay for the CIA, the FBI, the corporate bail-outs or the prison system. But particularly, I began as a war tax refuser. I wouldn’t give money to the Mafia if they came to my door and said, “We’d like you to help pay for our operations.” I’m certainly not going to pay for wars when I’ve tried throughout my adult life to educate people to resist nonviolently.
Spirit
How have you gotten away with not paying federal taxes ? Do you keep your income low?
Kelly
Many years I have lived below the taxable income. But in , someone from the IRS came to my home. I had in some years claimed extra allowances on the W-4 form. And I just don’t file. I haven’t filed . Now, that’s a criminal offense and they could put me in jail for a long time for that. If I was earning over the taxable income, I would just calculate how many allowances I have to claim so that no money is taken out of my paycheck. It says in the small print on the W-2 form to put down the correct number of allowances so that the correct amount of tax is taken out. Well, that’s easy. The correct amount of tax to take from me is zero, so I just do the math.
Spirit
Why do you think they haven’t come after you?
Kelly
Well, they have come to collect taxes. But I don’t have a savings account, and I don’t own anything. The IRS is like my spiritual director [laughs]. I don’t know how to drive a car, and I’ve never owned any place that I’ve lived in. I just don’t have anything to take.
Spirit
So has the IRS given up on even trying to collect?
Kelly
Once they came out to collect in 1998 when I was taking care of my dear Dad, who was wheelchair-bound, and a bit slumped over in the chair. Dad liked to listen to opera and I had a really awful old record player playing a scratchy record. I had been in the back of the house and I didn’t know she was coming, so I ran down to answer the door while the record player was making such a horrible noise. The apartment was fine but it only had a few sticks of furniture.
The woman asked me if I was going to get a job, and I told her I couldn’t leave my father. Then she asked if I had a bank account, and I said no. She said, “And you don’t own a car?” And I told her I didn’t even know how to drive. Then she just kind of leaned toward me and said, “You know what? I’m just going to write you up as uncollectible.” And I said, “That’s a very good idea.” [laughs] They’ve never tried to collect since. There was just nothing to take! Zero. Nothing.
On your side, you state that those who set themselves against Western wars pay, nevertheless, taxes, which are used by the State for war and the oppression of the colored peoples.
That is quite true.
In fact our anti-militarist struggle also is as yet only something very relative, and it must go on extending.
But in any case, we have fixed clear and inflexible borders: we refuse absolutely all direct, personal participation in war and in its social and moral preparation.
But several of us employ still other means of fighting against it.… Moreover, a few of us have already decided individually to refuse to pay any taxes, whilst the organization of which I am a member has already several times been the propagandist of collective refusal of taxation.
But whereas refusal, even on a very restricted scale, to do military service has been morally and socially efficacious, the refusal to pay taxes by a restricted number of citizens only has so far had very little result, as the authorities, in confiscating property and inflicting fines, take possession of sums much larger than a direct payment of taxes would have brought them.
From this point of view, your compatriots have already given some impressive examples of collective refusal, although they also were not able to avoid regular unfair demands of the Government.
I think “the organization of which I am a member” may have been War Resisters International.
Gandhi’s response to this point is an interesting one:
A non-violent man will instinctively prefer direct participation to indirect, in a system, which is based on violence and to which he has to belong without any choice being left to him.
I belong to a world, which is partly based on violence.
If I have only a choice between paying for the army of soldiers to kill my neighbours or to be a soldier myself, I would, as I must, consistent with my creed, enlist as a soldier in the hope of controlling the forces of violence and even of converting my comrades.
You can find more of Bart de Ligt’s thoughts on tax refusal, non-violent struggle, and Gandhi’s campaigns in the essay The Effectiveness of Non-Violent Struggle, also on the Satyagraha Foundation site.
And from the academic and related worlds:
A paper by Jay A. Soled and Kathleen DeLaney Thomas on Revisiting the Taxation of Fringe Benefits notes that many companies are compensating their employees with “a cornucopia of fringe benefits, including frequent-flier miles, hotel reward points, rental car preferred status, office supply dollar coupons, cellular telephone use, home Internet service, and, in some instances, even free lunches, massages, and dance lessons.”
Some of these are proving difficult for the government to effectively tax as income.
Gregg Polsky has come up with a potentially useful way of using Roth IRA conversions to keep money away from the tax collector.
Maciej Bartkowski looks at what causes people to break out of their apathy and join risky movements for social change, in Forming a Movement: Cognitive Liberation.
In a proposal similar to the “comprehensive disobedience” movement that was pioneered by Spanish activists, a group in the United Kingdom has inaugurated a “Golden Rule Tax Disobedience” campaign.
In their words:
The latest tax scandal is bringing the erosion of our democracy into ever
sharper focus. Britain suffers under an enormous democratic deficit due to
state capture by “free”-market neoliberal fundamentalism and its associated
corporate and financial interests, in aggressive ascendancy
. Notwithstanding the
financial crisis, this capture of the state
has remained unaddressed, with successive governments shamefully complicit in
it. Despite copious corroborative research and endless petitioning and
protesting, all we’ve seen is disingenuous hand-wringing and political
evasion.
Our collusion with this apology for a “democracy” must stop. We, the
citizenry, are therefore taking matters into our own hands — with a “Golden
Rule Tax Disobedience” whose intention is grassroots mobilisation against
systemic injustice, favouring far greater equality, shared and stable
prosperity, enhanced quality of life and, most importantly, an environmentally
sustainable future.
The evidential rationale for this action is overwhelming. Not least, £93bn of
“corporate welfare” is given as handouts annually to businesses operating in
our allegedly “free” market; and the government spends £26bn subsidising
harmful fossil fuels, yet a mere £3.5bn subsidising renewables. “Free”-market
fundamentalism has been an astonishing failure for the vast majority.
Our Golden Rule Tax Disobedience initiative asks citizens to withhold a small
amount of tax (through
VAT or their tax
return — everyone can join in), and then donate it to conducive campaigning
groups. This principled modelling of a redistributive ethos intends to shame
our politicians into taking effective action.
Principled tax activism has a long and distinguished history in circumstances
where the state has shown itself incapable of defending the public interest.
With no serious attempt by government to correct Britain’s massive democratic
deficit, our initiative is an idea whose time has come. We ask you to join
with us in taking back power in order to create a fairer and more sustainable
society.
Dr Gail Bradbrook — Director, Compassionate Revolution
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett — Co-authors of The Spirit Level
George Barda — Social justice and Occupy campaigner, Compassionate Revolution
Leon Rosselson — Writer/musician
David Drew — Former Labour MP for Stroud
Polly Higgins — Lawyer advocating for Ecocide Law
Joel Benjamin — Debt Resistance UK and People vs PFI
Professor Andrew Samuels — Analytical psychology, University of Essex
Professor Karín Lesnik-Oberstein — Critical theorist
Rev Paul Nicolson — Taxpayers Against Poverty
Dr Richard House — Chartered psychologist, education campaigner, Stroud
Liam Barrington-Bush — Co-founder, More Like People
Max Graef — Broadcast engineer, company director
Andrea Halewood — Chartered psychologist
Ben Jarlett — Digital media consultant
Martin Large — Publisher and author
Jojo Mehta — Environmental campaigner
Beatrice Millar — Steering group, Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility (PCSR)
Gabriel Millar — Teacher, Stroud
Alice Murray — Political activist and campaigner, Stroud
Aliyah Norrish — Digital content associate
Mark Nurse — NHS paramedic, Stroud
Councillor Brian Oosthuysen — Gloucestershire
Maja Passchier — Cellist and cello teacher
Hazel Raee — Mobile digital champion, Isle of Skye
Aline Sitoe Diatta was, says Wikipedia, “a Senegalese heroine of the opposition to French colonialism, often called the Joan of Arc or the Marianne of Senegal.”
When the French colonial administrators of the region where the Diola people lived began conscripting locals to fight in European wars and to engage in confiscatory taxation of rice and cattle, the Diola resisted.
Aline Sitoe Diatta was one of the leaders of this resistance, and also a martyr: she was arrested and tortured, and died while imprisoned in exile.
Emitai is a film about these uprisings from the Senegalese point of view.
Sieglinde Baumert has spent two months in prison for her refusal to pay a €17½ monthly television tax to support the government-run station.
The tax, which formerly was based on the number of televisions in a household, is now assessed on everyone in Germany whether or not they have a television.
Taxi drivers in Quebec, upset at being outcompeted by upstarts like Uber, are threatening to stop paying taxes if the government doesn’t act to protect their industry against competition.
Have you caught the tax evasion bug?
The recent leaks of the “Panama Papers,” with their details of how the 1% stash their money in shell companies in tax havens, have increased perceptions that the tax system is gamed by the rich and powerful — and have decreased the willingness of the average joe to continue getting fleeced.
[IRS chief] Koskinen
says the main factor that drives ordinary Americans to stop paying their
taxes, or to try to cheat on their taxes, is the perception that others
are doing the same. If you think that your neighbors are not paying their
fair share, you’re just a little less likely to pay your own tax bill in
full or in part.
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.
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.”
April 15th — the usual federal income tax return filing deadline in the U.S. — was in the more whimper than bang category this year.
The powers that be decided to extend the filing deadline to , and for that and other reasons, taxes are less on people’s minds than usual this time of year.
But here are some items that have recently come to my attention:
The U.S. government is sending out “stimulus” payments willy-nilly.
Thousands of dollars in forgivable “loans” are being made available to businesses (though it’s something of a crapshoot which businesses will and won’t get them), and most Americans are also getting some free money as well.
The individual stimulus checks are already starting to go out.
Americans who got tax refunds direct-deposited in their bank accounts last time they filed their taxes were the first to see money.
The rest of us have to wait a bit.
There was some worry that people who are so poor that they don’t have to file tax returns would be overlooked, but the IRS has created a method for non-filers to apply for the stimulus money too.
Businesses in Mexico are threatening a tax strike to pressure the government into granting tax relief or other financial aid during the pandemic crisis, and some state governors there are also making noise about withholding taxes from the federation.
As you may have heard, The New York Times finally got ahold of Donald Trump’s tax returns.
They show that he didn’t pay income taxes most years, and when he did in recent years it was token amounts ($750).
This seems to be largely because of grandiose business losses combined with sketchy deductions for business expenses (like $70,000 in annual hair care, or “consulting fees” to his family).
The upshot of this to us here at The Picket Line is that this contributes to the public impression that the rich evade taxes with impunity and that taxpaying is for suckers, thus degrading “taxpayer morale” and the willingness of taxpayers to cough up their tribute voluntarily.
See ♇ 25 November 2012 for more about attacks on the pillars of taxpayer compliance.
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.
I’m going through this material and hunting for details about specific tactical and strategic activity and decision-making by the people involved in this successful tax resistance struggle.
The All Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation put out a newsletter.
Among the tactics I see mentioned there are marches, a rally at the private home of the prime minister, leafletting (sometimes at the tax offices as people lined up to ask questions about their bills), mass burnings of tax bills (“In Bristol 5,000 turned up to one burning!”), outreach to private bailiff companies that would be responsible for conducting distraints, lobbying of local councils to short circuit enforcement efforts, educating resisters about the legal enforcement process and ways they can use it to their advantage, clogging the courts, rallying at (and in) the courts, encouraging employers not to cooperate with salary levies (including by strike threats), honoring prisoners, and (after victory) fighting for amnesty for non-payers.
It’s not clear how many of these tactics were actually put into practice.
Some are mentioned in passing, in vague terms, or in “we should” clauses that suggest they were still in the aspirational stage.
A single is being launched to say loud and clear “We’re not gonna pay” (the title of the song).
If this song charts it will be a clear message to Thatcher that we don’t want her poll tax, as well as inspiration to a much wider audience.
The band “Axe the Tax” consist of people in the anti poll tax campaign in Bristol, and all proceeds go to the campaign.
So Please!
Order it from your local “Gallup” shop (a mainstream shop like Virgin or Our price) within the next 2 weeks.
Try to make sure that everyone in your anti poll tax union does the same.
The first issue of the newsletter of the Sherwood and District Anti-Poll Tax Campaign noted “We have already produced lots of stickers and badges and are also responsible for the ‘No Poll Tax Here’ posters which are going up everywhere.”
Though I have yet to see this mentioned explicitly in any of the anti-Poll Tax material, the “No Poll Tax Here” signs, which were designed to be hung in people’s street-facing windows, were echoes of similar signs that were used during the Reform Act tax strike of 1832.
One problem with a tax strike is that it is relatively invisible.
It is difficult to tell if your neighbors are on strike with you or if you’re out on a limb by yourself.
Stickers and badges and signs and other such distinguishing marks can help overcome this invisibility.
That newsletter also mentions frequent door-to-door “membership drive” outreach, an information stall outside the local co-op, and a variety of public meetings.
The second issue also recommended this monkeywrenching:
The latest news with the banks is that they are over-worked with applications, so apply for your direct debit [automatic payment of the poll tax], but put Margaret Thatcher’s address, and let’s put a spanner in the works.
Another article reported that government enforcement efforts were being successfully snagged:
Many Scottish councils are now abandoning the use of bailiffs raids against those fined for non-payment, because they have proved so violently unpopular, and — in the face of large scale community mobilisations against them — completely ineffective.
Their plans to turn, instead, to ‘arrestments’ direct from people’s bank accounts have also run into trouble.
[In] — the head of Scotland’s clearing banks announced that they “would be unable to cope with thousands of requests to trace the bank account details of thousands of non-payers.”
Even if councils insisted on the costly and time-consuming process, he couldn’t guarantee they would be able to find even 5–6% of the names.
Faced with a seeming dead-end in either direction, and an ever growing back-log of court action, Scottish councils are rapidly running out of options.
Eric Milligan, head of Lothian region Labour council’s finance department, spoke for many councils when, in , he admitted: “Such is the scale of the non-payment movement in our region, that we may have to write-off large sums of outstanding poll tax.”
Elsewhere, dole office workers in London have been on strike in protest at management plans to get them to pass claimants details from DSS files straight to poll tax officials.
They’ve been joined by other groups of dole office workers who plan to refuse to process “arrestments” of unpaid poll tax from non-payers who are signing on.
And in Edinburgh, a group of local government workers are among the latest to announce plans to mount walk-outs if any employee in their department is penalised for non-payment.
Fight Back! was the newsletter of the St. Ann’s Anti Poll Tax Union.
One issue included this note:
S.A.A.P.T.U. supports the non-violent “Robin Hood” invation of the Council office meeting when the Poll Tax was set at £390 by Labour councilors.
Three people form Hyson Green and Sherwood A.P.T. groups face charges of assault for throwing “custard pies” at councillors.
After the Poll Tax riots, some of the ostensible leadership of the anti-Poll Tax movement distanced themselves from the protesters and prioritized putting a respectable face on the movement by throwing those arrested under the bus.
As a result, a grassroots defense movement almost immediately evolved to defend those arrested in the riots.
One branch of this was the “Nottingham Defence Campaign” which took as its charter “to co-ordinate genuine support for all people arrested in Nottingham for whatever reason, and hopefully to come up with a defence strategy for future occasions.”
a demonstrator pushes a paper plate of shaving-cream into the face of a Nottingham councillor
As of the first issue of its newsletter, dated , they were extending this support to fourteen people who were either arrested at the big Trafalgar Square demonstration or during a “Robin Hood” occupation of the Nottingham Council Chamber .
The latter demonstration was the one in which demonstrators had thrown “custard pies (made from shaving foam on paper plates)” at councillors who were implementing the Poll Tax.
Some of the demonstrators were charged with assault and eventually sentenced to brief prison sentences.
A later edition of the newsletter announced demonstrations at the council house and at the prison to protest the sentences.
Much of the work of the Defence Campaign was fundraising money to reimburse defendants for their expenses for travel to and attendance at trial.
Some defendants had previously pled guilty simply because it was too expensive to travel to court regularly.
From the looks of things, benefit concerts were the fundraising tool of choice.
The newsletter issues advertised several such concerts.
The Nottingham Evening Post also covered the poll tax protests there.
One article covered an occupation and lock-down of the City Treasurer’s office that took place on .
Another covered the disruption of the Nottingham city council meeting in which “[s]ome two dozen demonstrators” — “many dressed as Robin Hood outlaws” — “broke into the Council House chambers, unfurled banners, hurled toilet rolls, and pushed paper plates full of shaving cream into the faces of some councillors.”
A follow-up article covered one Tory councillor’s claims that Robin Hood and his Merry Men had gotten inside help during their raid.
“They must have been let in by someone.
Their route was a narrow winding corridor which they could not have known about.”
Another follow-up reprinted the establishment spin that the protesters “were members of extreme political groups” and “simply rent-a-mob” (Britishese for “outside agitators”) as Labour and Tory politicians alike condemned the violence and urged people to protest ineffectually.
Some details about the protests from that article:
The worst of the violence was in Bristol where police, facing missile-throwing protesters, drew batons and moved in on a crowd of about 500.
Twenty-one people were arrested and four police officers injured after crowds attempted to storm the Council House.
One of the biggest demonstrations was in Norwich where about 2,000 protesters stormed City Hall and forced the abandonment of the meeting.
Violence erupted in Birmingham when protesters invaded the city council buildings screaming abuse and waving banners.
The council meeting at Maidenhead was abandoned when a crowd of about 700 stormed the council buildings.
One of the Merry Men, John Cromby, was interviewed in a later paper and said he was not a member of any outside far-left groups and that the action, while carefully-planned, did not have the help of a council insider.
An Hackney protest against the poll tax descended into riot and looting, according to the Post.
Protest actions mentioned in the article included a 1,000-person sit-down occupation, and hanging effigies of Prime Minister Thatcher.
The issue noted that a delivery driver had lost his job after refusing to deliver poll tax forms from the printer.
Mr [Russell] Burrows, 40, said he refused on principle to deliver the forms: “I don’t regret what I did.
It’s about time more people took a stand against the poll tax, it’s a rip-off.”
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.
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
the historical example of Wat Tyler’s rebellion was often summoned in the poll tax resistance campaign
Here is an example, from the issue of Stand Firm (the TSDC newsletter).
It concerns a 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 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 , 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 , 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 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.
Refuse And Resist was a newsletter that covered the poll tax resistance from Scotland, where the government first rolled out the tax.
It took a radical, grassroots editorial stance, frequently making jabs at the Militant partisan faction that had elbowed itself in to leadership positions in the organized movement.
Sparrows’ Nest has an incomplete archive of this newsletter.
Here are some excerpts from issue #2:
On , The Sheriff Officer, H.M. Love & Co., Herriot Row, Edinburgh, was occupied by over 40 non-payers for more than an hour.
The office staff were assured that our intentions were peaceful as we hung our banners from the office windows for the benefit of the assembled media.
However, 17 members of our group were charged with breach of the peace.
The trial of the 17 will start at , at the Sheriff Court House, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh.
Come along and show your support!
That issue also gave this advice to anyone who might receive a notice of a Warrant Sale (in which a auctioneers would try to come to the home of a tax resister, and seize and sell off some valuable piece of property on the spot):
All you have to do is contact the same day or as soon as possible when you get the four days written notice necessary, your local Anti Poll Tax Group and we will rally a huge task force to physically stop any Poinding taking place.
Every threatened Poinding so far (Non-Registration) has been defeated by a human wall of defiant resistance.
Also:
The Debtors (Scotland) Act 1987 has so limited the nature of goods which can be poinded and sold, that anything which is saleable can easily be “farmed out” to a friend or neighbour until after the sheriff officers have called.
They also gave this advice to avoid bank account seizures:
There have been reports of people having their bank accounts frozen in the past two weeks.
If you have an account at one of the major banks or building society and you are not paying the Poll Tax, you would be well advised to move it to a safer place.
It is not always easy for Sheriff Officers to trace an account, and, with 252,000 warrants being issued in Strathclyde alone, it may take a long time to find yours, but better safe than sorry.
Alternatives to the major banks include…
If you do opt to move your account please put your reasons for doing so in writing for your bank manager.
If the big institutions realise that they are losing customers they might be persuaded to be less co-operative with Sheriff Officers.
That issue gave this description of the process of organizing people to resist “poindings,” and getting the word out quickly in the pre-email/IM era:
It is vital, with threatened poindings against an impossibly large class of a quarter of a million citizens, that local anti-Poll Tax groups, or small groups of people refusing payment, organise local anti-warrant sale task forces as soon as possible.
This can be done, as we’re doing in Ibrox/Cessnock, by contacting people who’ve signed pledges to resist the Sheriff Officers being used to collect the tax.
Then there has to be a “tree” of door-knocking or phone contact to alert people to get round a the time the poinding is threatened.
Issue #4 of the newsletter reprinted a newspaper article in which it was reported that “only eight out of 879 scheduled non-payment cases were heard” at the magistrates’ court in Goole, Humberside.
At least one of those was an acquittal, of a non-payer whose tax was not in fact yet due.
The article noted that “Northampton council has opted to take action against a list of known opponents of the tax, rather than swamp local courts with all 25,000 people who have failed to pay…”
That issue also reported on the process of resisting property seizures:
High Noon — for Sheriffs
The anti poll tax movement defeated 3 attempts by the Sheriff Officers to carry out “mass poindings” in Edinburgh in .
The Sheriffs men targetted 3 areas.
Several non-payers in each neighbourhood received a letter fixing a date for a poinding and threatening that “If no-one is present on said date, the Warrant to enforce entry by breaking open, shut-lockfast places will, if necessary, be implemented.”
On anti poll tax campaigners lay in wait for the Sheriff Officers at homes in the High St. area.
The highlight of the day’s resistance organised by Southside Against the Poll Tax — came when 200 people defended a non-payer’s home by completely filling Paisley Close.
Needless to say the Sheriffs didn’t show.
The state thugs had put in an appearance earlier, at other homes, but the constant presence of protesters ensured that even when they gained access they were unable to poind a single item.
The following day saw Haymarket Tollcross Anti Poll Tax Campaign co-ordinating the defence of non-payers in the Grassmarket area.
The Sheriff’s “dawn strike” was to no avail — even when the Sheriffs had police backup some non-payers kept their doors locked and bolted in defiance.
At lunchtime the Grassmarket was chock a block with 200 protesters who excitedly charged this way and that at the slightest hint of a suspected Sheriff Officer!
It was another total victory for the Sheriffbusters — not one poinding all day.
Stockbridge Show-Down
The Stockbridge and Comely Bank neighbourhoods were the scene for the next showdown.
Over 150 people were involved in defending 11 non-paying households.
Being involved in Stockbridge New Town Anti Poll Tax Group, I [John Ball] can describe what happened in some detail.
The successful two days physical defence of those non-payers homes was only possible because of our previous activity in the community.
When, earlier this year, the Sheriff Officers had hand-delivered threatening letters to local non-payers, our Group countered by flyposting “Stop the Sheriff” flyers, with our Hotline Phone №s.
We visited virtually everyone who rang with leaflets, advice, etc.
The delivery of the “poinding” letters saw us repeat the flyposting and personal visits — together with an intensified advertising of our group meetings.
Attendance leapt from 6–18 per fortnight to 25–30 weekly.
Around 15 non-payers from 11 households contacted us to say they had received “poinding date” letters.
At our group meetings we had long thorough discussions about what we should do.
Eventually it was unanimously agreed we would muster as many people as possible to stand guard at each non-payers home.
3,000 leaflets advertising the resistance were distributed to local homes and the call was put out to other groups in Lothian.
On we were in position at all 6 homes before (the earliest (normal) legal times for a poinding).
All homes were in ’phone contact, with one acting as a base.
There were leaflets for passers-by, plus an information sheet listing the homes being defended, Sheriffs car registration numbers, a lawyer’s telephone number, etc.…
Piled In
The Sheriff Officers made their move around Several teams were involved.
With one set seemingly acting as a decoy, 2 Sheriffs gained access to a flat in Cheyne St. But anti poll tax protestors piled in after them, and the Sheriffs were unable to poind anything.
By now protestors from the other flats — alerted by phone — were converging on Cheyne St.
The Sheriff Officers ignored the other nearby flats due for poindings and made a rapid exit stage left!
Frantic chases ensued as the Sheriffs fled with nonpayers in hot pursuit.
The state bully boys soon left the area, some with their car aerials resembling a surreal modern sculpture!
No more poindings were attempted.
That afternoon 100–150 people held an impromptu march round Stockbridge.
This was a great success, drawing in passers-by and boosting morale sky-high.
Our appetites whetted, we got stuck into the goodies at our “anti poll tax tea party” held outside some of the threatened homes.
we successfully defended 5 homes.
Sheriffs were sighted several times but our constant presence — maintained right up to 8 p.m. — scared them off.
Two days — not one poinding.
Poindings No More
Since then the Sheriff Officers have, as far as we know, issued no more such letters setting dates for poindings.
The successful organisation of these actions was carried out by the local anti poll tax groups — all 3 are “independent” non-party dominated groups — with significant solidarity from Lothian.
Neither the Lothian Federation Executive nor any political tendency played any organising role.
(Perhaps this is why the “Militant” Federation Secretary omitted all mention of these actions in his “report” of Lothian activity to the Scottish Federation Conference.)
3 lessons that could be drawn from these events:—
Don’t be content to just defend 2 or 3 committed non-payers against poindings.
Do extensive publicity to draw in all the others you don’t know about.
Guard every non-payers home from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
The Sheriffs usually strike early.
Be ready to take action such as a local march round the threatened homes.
This helps us go on the offensive.
Everyone in the area should know what’s going on.
Any Scottish Anti-Poll Tax group who would like to twin with an English Anti-Poll Tax group to exchange experience, information, ideas, etc. Write to Twins…
That issue also reported on several more successful defenses against “poindings and Warrant Sales” and noted that “At least 2 new Anti Poll Tax groups have since been formed in the localities where the poindings were stopped.”
Another article noted:
Court battles are just beginning [in London].
In Camden a major success was scored by the non-payers who turned up to represent themselves.
They had their cases adjourned till next year.
A crowd approaching 300 has been turning up each Friday, and locally spreading the news — turn up and get your case adjourned.
Liability Orders have been granted against all those who didn’t bother to turn up.
Also:
1000 people took over the magistrate’s court in Warrington on when the council tried to summon people for non-payment.
Because of the mass demonstration none of the cases were dealt with.
That issue also reported on how property seizures were being thwarted:
The South West Federation held a dayschool on responses to the bailiffs and from there set up a bailiff monitoring group in Bristol.
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 Barry (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 Barry and Bishops Lydeard, the whole community was mobilised.
In Barry 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.
A newspaper article reproduced in that issue concerned an occupation and barricade of a borough council treasurer’s office (with the treasurer inside, though he was eventually set free).
The occupation, which continued into the night, was prompted by threats to imprison a 74-year-old non-payer.
The article also mentioned in passing that
Four months ago, a fire-bomb caused £180,000 damage to the premises of Madagans, the bailiffs employed by the council, an attack condemned by the local poll tax union.
Another brief article from that issue:
Gloves Off
On Sheriff Officers were attacked in Belshill outside Glasgow when they attempted to carry out poindings in the homes of Poll Tax non payers. 50 people surrounded their car, rocking it.
The car was damaged with “Scum” smeared on the body-work with chips.
They didn’t bother coming back 4 days later when 200 protesters turned up to physically stop poindings planned at 12 homes in the town.
After the first day, 50 Poll Tax protesters occupied the offices of the sheriff officers responsible.
The police forced their way in and arrested them, causing thousands of pounds worth of damage.
Fortunately, Strathclyde Police Force has had to be cut because of non payment of the Poll Tax.
Another bloody good reason not to pay.
saw the first call to the Sciennes Marchmont Anti Poll Tax Group from several worried members.
Sheriff Officers (or some of their clerks) were visiting non-payers in the area, asking questions and delivering payment advice letters which contained a paragraph threatening poinding action.
Several group members met .
A full group meeting was arranged and posters were prepared telling people not to let the sheriff officers in, and carrying the group contact tel. nos.
At the full group meeting we decided to hold a public meeting the following week and to have our street stall every day. 100 posters were put up around the area.
The phone tree was activated and all group members were warned about the sheriff officers and reassured about what to do.
The public meeting was attended by about 30 people and included a lawyer who gave legal advice and a talk on the latest anti poll tax activity.
Many calls were received and the group visited, leafleted, or advised worried callers.
So far we are not aware of anyone being pursued any further by the sheriff officers.
Excerpts from another article in that issue, on the London scene:
The council are still taking people to court but virtually everyone who turns up to challenge the summons are having their cases adjourned to some unspecified date in the future… So clogging the courts is having some impact but the problem is that the resources of the state are quite considerable.
To back up their liability orders, the council (glorious “socialists” of course!) has started to use the bailiffs (but only giving out invoices at the moment).
To date, there has been at least one documented attack on the bailiffs, with a brick through the windowscreen and dented bodywork, and a bailiff has also been booted in the balls!…
One funny story is that the council was using three offices for people to pay their poll tax in until recently.
The Hoxton office has been closed down after a succession of bricked windows, graffiti, abuse, and the final straw were two armed robberies, the last one netting a mere £129 (shows how much local people are paying!)
…
One lesson that we learnt from the anti-bailiff operations down here is that basically it is like looking for a needle in a haystack and so the tactic of developing hardened “bailiff-buster” squads will not work — the emphasis has to be on local activity, solidarity, and confidence as only they will be able to react to the bailiffs in time.
That issue also reprinted some notes from Organize!:
Obviously, where bailiff resistance looks set to be strong, there is room for “hit squads” to go further on their own.
In the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, a gang of anonymous “outlaws” called at the home of the leader of the local council (run by the Moderate Labour Party) in to warn him that there would be “tit-for-tat raids” on the homes of councillors if bailiffs visited any non-payers in the forest.
Shaken council leader Mr Cooper told The Independent “I don’t know who they are, but they are obviously prepared to use violence and threaten property.”
South Yorkshire police stunned local councillors in when they announced that they are planning to refuse to arrest poll tax defaulters, even when instructed to do so by the courts.
Local police chiefs say they fear that the task “may become physically impossible for the police because of the large numbers of defaulters.”
Jannette McGinn sending the Sheriff’s Officers on their way.
In Rutherglen the Regional Council had a bitter taste of what is to come if they think they can use Sheriff Officers and Warrant sales to bully us into paying.
Janet McGinn refused to register or to pay the fines for not registering.
The Council singled her out for rough treatment and sent in the Sheriff Officers to “poind” her belongings.
(This is when they value your “luxury” goods prior to a warrant sale.)
The threat of a 1,000 protesters [sic] outside her home made the Council cancel the “poinding”.
Even so, 300 people did protest there and went on to picket and occupy the Sheriff Officer’s office.
The message is clear: God help the Sheriff Officer who enters here.
This has been seen time and time again when poindings have been attempted (after refusing to pay fines for not registering for the poll tax) in Rutherglen, Barrhead, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, and Irvine.
Each time they have failed to get access or have been too timid to show up in the face of protesting neighbours and anti poll tax demonstrators.
The Woodlands Against the Poll Tax News included this useful summary of the process the councils could follow to try to enforce the poll tax against resisters.
There are over 40 anti Poll Tax groups in Lothian.
Throughout the city we have set up task forces to meet the sheriff officers if they turn up at your door.
Ring your local group (list on back) and they will arrange a “welcoming committee” outside your home to physically prevent a poinding or warrant sale taking place.
It also noted this example of institutional resistance (or at least that’s one interpretation):
The four main Scottish banks have written to Scotland’s Regional Councils stating that they simply could not deal with hundreds of thousands of bank account arrestments of non-payers.
The banks have called for assurances from the Councils that they will not proceed with mass arrestments.
And it recommended this red-tape-tangling tactic:
Every year we are supposed to re-register for the poll tax.
If you have received your form for ignore it or send it back “not known at this address.”
Our experience is that you can frustrate registration for many months without incurring a fine.
It all helps to stop the poll tax.
One page in that newsletter was devoted to practical advice on how to frustrate government countermeasures.
For example, to frustrate bank account seizures, people were counseled to move their accounts out of major banks, to change the mailing address on their bank accounts to be different from the address with which they were registered for the poll tax, to open multiple accounts under multiple variants of their name or under a new name, to hold money in childrens’ bank accounts, to cash checks rather than depositing them, and to deposit money in a safe deposit box rather than a bank account.
The Somerset Clarion covered the May Day action at the home of John Roach of Roach & Co., the bailiffs who had been hired by Councils to carry out property seizures and sales.
Roach wisely stayed away from home that day, but “a small army of non-payers… surrounded his house, bricked up his front door, & held a mock auction of goods from his garage.
Tut, tut, Mr Roach, fancy leaving your garage unlocked — none of us would do that, not with people like you around!”
Among the speakers at the Sneinton APTU… was a housing clerk from the London Borough of Greenwich where 170 clerical staff went on strike because of the Poll Tax workload as so many people are claiming rebates.
DSS offices have also gone on strike in different parts of the country, Sheffield refusing to take Poll Tax from claimants and Glasgow and Edinburgh have taken similar action.
A virus has appeared on the computer system holding the register in Edinburgh.
Every ten minutes, one name disappears from the register!
The Poll Tax office in Islington was also attacked and damaged by an arson attack.
Tower Hamlets council had 43% of their forms returned, meaning that 40,000 people have not returned their forms.
Also 1,700 forms were “not genuine” with insults scrawled on them, etc.
In Greenwich, the Civil & Public Servants Association passed a resolution not to deduct poll tax payments (20% of the full amount) from claimants cheques.
Some recent links of interest:
War tax resister Lindsey Britt reminds readers of the Brattleboro Commons that “our taxes are our legacy.” Excerpt:
Taxes are part of a legacy that each person creates which will shape the world long after their death.
But with a large portion of tax money in the United States directly paying for weapons of death and destruction, all of us owe it to ourselves to consider the legacy that we are creating with our role in the war machine.
The decay of enforcement at the IRS has come to the notice of the very wealthy, who are hiding their wealth from the tax collector with impunity.
This in turn came to the attention of a few economics researchers, who compared the data from a variety of audits of people in the top-earning 1% to show that tax evasion is rampant among the ultra-rich.
And that study has come to the attention of journalists and pundits, who summarize the news in this way: “An underfunded and overworked IRS has enabled a handful of plutocratic tax cheats to live large at the expense of everyone else.” This is the sort of thing that causes “taxpayer morale” to collapse.
The city government of Vic, the capital of the Osona comarca in Catalonia, has decided to stop remitting its taxes to the Spanish federal government, and will instead send those taxes to the Catalan government.
In doing so, they are joining the Catalan nationalist “Jo Pago a Catalunya” tax resistance campaign.
Currently, the Catalan government forwards these taxes to Spain, so this is mostly a symbolic campaign.
But when enough people and institutions pay their taxes through the Catalan government, that government will be empowered to stop forwarding these taxes to the federal government as part of their declaration of independence.
In Defence of Marxism has reprinted Rob Sewell’s recap of the “We Won’t Pay” anti-poll-tax movement that brought down the Thatcher government, from the point of view of the Militant Tendency, which played a major (and controversial) role in that movement.
Groups in the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo have launched a tax resistance campaign aiming at forcing the resignation of the governor, who they say has made the security situation worse in the province.
, honoring those who refuse to participate in their governments’ war-making institutions.
It comes a couple of days before in the United States, and so conscientious objectors to military taxation are appropriately in the news:
“I want to live my values, which includes nonviolence,” said Lindsey Britt of Brattleboro. “Paying for destruction at home and abroad doesn’t fit into that, so I live more simply and refuse to pay a portion of my taxes.”
War tax resister Sue Barnhart has a letter-to-the-editor in the Eugene Weekly. Excerpt:
I have been a war tax resister since the 1970s since I do not want my money supporting murder.
The money I resist to the military I give to local groups that actually help people and the environment.
Now I am also a war tax resister because I don’t want my money supporting the biggest contributor to the burning of our planet: the U.S. military.
War tax resisters Lincoln Rice and Robin Brookes are hosting a discussion group at the upcoming World Beyond War #NoWar2021 conference on :
“War Tax Resistance:
Tax resistance to paying for the military began hundreds of years ago and continues to this day.
Let’s talk about the practicality and efficacy of refusing to pay for war.”
“I’ve decided I won’t pay any tax to the dictators, and that includes electricity.
If police and soldiers ask me, I’ll just tell them I don’t have any money.
I don’t care if they cut off the power to my house,” the resident of Yangon’s North Dagon Township told Frontier. “Most people in my ward who I’ve spoken to say they’re not going to pay either.”
The Civil Disobedience Movement in Myanmar apparently has a lot of support from within the Ministry of Electricity and Energy, which may make things easier on resisters.
Ko Aung Thu, who lives in the Shwe Lin Ban area of the highly industrialised township, said he had received a bill for but had no intention of paying.
“They killed people right here, in this township,” he said, referring to the security forces’ massacre of more than 50 people on .
“Why should I pay money to a bunch of murderers? I won’t pay any taxes.
If we pay taxes, we’re just supporting murderers.”
A hotel owner in nearby Bagan said he wouldn’t pay either and he expected many others would also refuse.
“I just heard today about how the state lottery isn’t able to run because so few people bought tickets.
I think most people won’t pay their electricity bills, either,” he said.
“We won’t support the dictator… the income from electricity charges is huge and they won’t be able to survive without that money.”
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is spearheading a Democratic Party effort to expand and further empower the IRS.
“I have proposed nearly doubling the funding for the IRS but also making a chunk of their funding mandatory and targeted toward high-income individuals and corporations.”
During site visits to two processing centers, management estimated that 42 percent of 164 devices used by the submission processing functions are unusable and others are broken but still functioning. “IRS employees stated that the only reason they could not use many of these devices is because they are out of ink or because the waste cartridge container is full,” it said.
The report added: “The lack of working printers and copiers affects many different areas of the IRS but has an especially significant effect on the return and income verification services functions” where employees must make copies of tax returns to fulfill requests for tax documents from taxpayers and other institutions.
At one center, though, only three of the 10 devices were working.
The human war on traffic ticket robot cameras continues, with the robots taking casualties in Guadeloupe and France and in Italy in recent weeks.
