Miscellaneous tax resisters →
individual tax resisters of other or more comprehensive sorts →
Wat Tyler
Wat Tyler is another name that frequently comes up when mention is made of English tax resisters of yore.
From what I’ve been able to find out about the Tyler case, it seems to be more complicated than a case of tax resistance, though tax resistance seemed to play a part.
In the reign of Richard, Ⅱ. a poll tax was passed at twelve pence per head, on all above the age of sixteen.
This being levied with severity, caused an insurrection in Kent and Essex.
A Blacksmith, well known by the name of Wat Tyler, was the first who excited the people to arms. The tax-gatherers coming to this man’s house, while he was at work, demanded payment for his daughter, which he refused, alledging that she was in the age mentioned in the act.
One of the brutal collectors insisted on her being a full grown woman; and immediately attempted giving a very indecent proof of his assertion.
This provoked the father to such a degree, that he instantly struck him dead with a blow of his hammer.
The standers by applauded his spirit; and, one and all, resolved to defend his conduct.
He was considered as a champion in the cause, and appointed the leader and spokesman of the people.
It is easy to imagine the disorders committed by this tumultuous rabble.
The whole neighborhood rose in arms. They burnt and plundered wherever they came, and revenged upon their former masters, all those insults which they had long sustained with impunity.
As the discontent was general, the insurgents increased in proportion as they approached the capital.
The flame soon propagated itself into Kent, Hertfordshire, Surry, Sussex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridge and Lincoln.
They were found to amount to above an hundred thousand men, by the time they were arrived at Blackheath; from whence they sent a message to the king, who had taken shelter in the Tower, desiring a conference with him.
With this message Richard was desirous of complying, but was intimidated by their fierce demeanor.
In the mean time, they had entered the city, burning and plundering the houses of such as were obnoxious from their power, or remarkable for their riches.
They broke into the Savoy palace, belonging to the duke of Lancaster, and put several of his attendants to death.
Their animosity was particularly levelled against the lawyers, to whom they shewed no mercy.
Such was the vehemence of their fury, that the king began to tremble for his own safety; and knowing that the Tower was not capable to stand against an assault, he went out among them, and desired to know their demands.
To this they made a very humble remonstrance, requiring a general pardon, the abolition of slavery, freedom of commerce in market-towns, and a fixed rent, instead of those services required by the tenure of the villanage.
As these requests were reasonable, the king soon complied; and charters were accordingly made out, ratifying the grant.
In the mean time, another body of these insurgents had broken into the Tower, and murdered the chancellor, the primate, and the treasurer, with some other officers of distinction.
They then divided themselves into two parties, and took up their quarters in different parts of the city.
At the head of one of these, was Wat Tyler, who led his men into Smithfield, where he was met by the king, who invited him to a conference, under a pretense of hearing and redressing his grievances.
Tyler ordering his companions to retire, till he should give them a signal, boldly ventured to meet the king in the midst of his retinue; and accordingly began the conference.
The demands of this demagogue, are censured by all the historians of the time, as insolent and extravagant; and yet nothing can be more just than those they have delivered for him.
He required that all slaves should be set free; that all commonages should be open to the poor, as well as the rich; and that a general pardon be passed for the late outrages.
Whilst he made these demands, he now and then lifted up his sword in a menacing manner; which insolence so raised the indignation of William Walworth, then mayor of London, attending on the king, that, without considering the danger to which he exposed his majesty, he stunned Tyler with a blow of his mace; while one of the king’s knights riding up, dispatched him with his sword.
The mutineers seeing their leader fall, prepared themselves to take revenge; and their bows were now bent for execution, when Richard, though not yet quite sixteen years of age, rode up to the rebels, and, with admirable presence of mind, cried out, “What, my people, will you then kill your king?
Be not concerned for your leader, I myself will now be your general.
Follow me into the field, and ye shall have whatever you desire.”
The awed multitude immediately desisted.
They followed the king, as if mechanically, into the fields, and there he granted them the same charter, which he had before granted to their companions.
These grants, for a short time, gained the king great popularity; and it is probable, it was his own desire to have them continued.
But the nobles had long tasted the sweets of power, and were unwilling to admit any others to a participation.
The parliament soon revoked these charters of enfranchisement and pardon.
The low people were reduced to the same slavish condition as before, and several of the ringleaders were punished with capital severity.
The insurrection of the barons against the king, are branded in history with no great air of invective; but the tumults of the people against the barons, are marked with all the virulence of reproach!
Benjamin Haydon’s Meeting of the Birmingham Political Union (1832)
In , the parliament of the United Kingdom debated the Reform Bill and occasionally alluded to the threats of tax resistance being made by the various Political Unions that were pushing for the Bill’s passage.
Here are some excerpts:
Henry Brougham, The Lord Chancellor, in the House of Lords,
The system, we are told, works well… Whence, then, the phenomenon of Political Unions — of the people everywhere forming themselves into associations to put down a system which you say well serves their interests?
Whence the congregating of 150,000 men in one place, the whole adult male population of two or three counties, to speak the language of discontent, and refuse the payment of taxes?
I am one who never have either used the language of intimidation, or will ever suffer it to be used towards me; but I also am one of those who regard those indications with unspeakable anxiety.
With all respect for those assemblages, and for the honesty of the opinions they entertain, I feel myself bound to declare as an honest man, as a Minister of the Crown, as a Magistrate, nay, as standing by virtue of my office, at the head of the magistracy, that a resolution not to pay the King’s taxes is unlawful.
When I contemplate the fact, I am assured that not above a few thousands of those nearest the Chairman could know for what it was they held up their hands.
At the same time there is too much reason to think that, the rest would have acted as they did, had they heard all that past.
My hope and trust is, that these men and their leaders will maturely re-consider the subject.
There are no bounds to the application of such a power; the difficulty of counteracting it is extreme: and as it may be exerted on whatever question has the leading interest, and every question in succession is felt as of exclusive importance, the use of the power I am alluding to, really threatens to resolve all government, and even society itself, into its elements.
I know the risk I run of giving offence by what I am saying.
To me, accused of worshiping the democracy, here is indeed a tempting occasion, if in that charge there were the shadow of truth.
Before the great idol, the Juggernaut, with his 150,000 priests, I might prostrate myself advantageously.
But I am bound to do my duty, and speak the truth; of such an assembly I cannot approve; even its numbers obstruct discussion, and tend to put the peace in danger, — coupled with such a combination against payment of taxes, it is illegal; it is intolerable under any form of government; and as a sincere well-wisher to the people themselves, and devoted to the cause which brought them together, I feel solicitous, on every account, to bring such proceedings to an end.
Blah blah blah.
Standard politician stuff: trying to take advantage of a populist uprising while keeping it at arm’s length.
I’m struck in particular by Brougham’s blind belief that he has “never… used the language of intimidation” while at the same time he declares the gatherings of Political Unions “illegal [and] intolerable under any form of government” and reminds us that “by virtue of my office, at the head of the magistracy… I feel solicitous, on every account, to bring such proceedings to an end.”
But there’s a nod and a wink there, since he sees these unruly mobs of commoners as the bad cop to his Reform Bill’s good cop: pass the Reform Bill, he tells his colleagues, and the mob will then have a legitimate outlet for their grievances within the political system and they won’t be tempted to resort to these threatening independent organizations.
This tack was also made in the House of Commons:
Thomas Babington Macaulay, in the House of Commons,
I do not predict — I do not expect — open, armed insurrection.
What I apprehend is this — that the people may engage in a silent, but extensive and persevering war against the law.
What I apprehend is, that England may exhibit the same spectacle which Ireland exhibited three years ago — agitators stronger than the Magistrate, associations stronger than the law, a Government powerful enough to be hated, and not powerful enough to be feared, a people bent on indemnifying themselves by illegal excesses for the want of legal privileges.
I fear, that we may before long see the tribunals defied, the tax-gatherer resisted, public credit shaken, property insecure, the whole frame of society hastening to dissolution.…
…Sir, I firmly believe, that if the people of England shall lose all hope of carrying the Reform Bill by constitutional means, they will forthwith begin to offer to the Government the same kind of resistance which was offered to the late Government, three years ago, by the people of Ireland — a resistance by no means amounting to rebellion — a resistance rarely amounting to any crime defined by the law — but a resistance nevertheless which is quite sufficient to obstruct the course of justice, to disturb the pursuits of industry, and to prevent the accumulation of wealth.
And is not this a danger which we ought to fear?
And is not this a danger which we are bound, by all means in our power, to avert?…
…There is in truth a great anomaly in the relation between the English people and their Government.
Our institutions are either too popular or not popular enough.
The people have not sufficient power in making the laws; but they have quite sufficient power to impede the execution of the laws once made.
The Legislature is almost entirely aristocratical; the machinery by which the decrees of the Legislature are carried into effect, is almost entirely popular; and, therefore, we constantly see all the power which ought to execute the law, employed to counteract the law.
Thus, for example, with a criminal code which carries its rigour to the length of atrocity, we have a criminal judicature which often carries its lenity to the length of perjury.
Our law of libel is the most absurdly severe that ever existed — so absurdly severe that, if it were carried into full effect, it would be much more oppressive than a censorship.
And yet, with this severe law of libel, we have a Press which practically is as free as the air.
In 1819 the Ministers complained of the alarming increase of seditious and blasphemous publications.
They proposed a law of great rigour to stop the growth of the evil; and they obtained their law.
It was enacted, that the publisher of a seditious libel might, on a second conviction, be banished, and that if he should return from banishment, he might be transported.
How often was this law put in force?
Not once.
Last year we repealed it; but it was already dead, or rather it was dead born.
It was obsolete before le Roi le veut had been pronounced over it.
For any effect which it produced it might as well have been in the Code Napoleon as in the English Statute-book.
And why did the Government, having solicited and procured so sharp and weighty a weapon, straightway hang it up to rust?
Was there less sedition, were there fewer libels, after the passing of the Act than before it?
Sir, the very next year was the year 1820 — the year of the Bill of Pains and Penalties — the very year when the public mind was most excited — the very year when the public Press was most scurrilous.
Why then did not the Ministers use their new law?
Because they durst not; because they could not.
They had obtained it with ease; for in obtaining it they had to deal with a subservient Parliament.
They could not execute it; for in executing it they would have had to deal with a refractory people.
These are instances of the difficulty of carrying the law into effect when the people are inclined to thwart their rulers.
The great anomaly, or, to speak more properly, the great evil which I have described, would, I believe, be removed by the Reform Bill.
That Bill would establish perfect harmony between the people and the Legislature.
It would give a fair share in the making of laws to those without whose co-operation laws are mere waste paper.
Under a reformed system we should not see, as we now often see, the nation repealing Acts of Parliament as fast as we and the Lords can pass them.
As I believe that the Reform Bill would produce this blessed and salutary concord, so I fear that the rejection of the Reform Bill, if that rejection should be considered as final, will aggravate the evil which I have been describing to an unprecedented, to a terrible extent.
To all the laws which might be passed for the collection of the revenue, or for the prevention of sedition, the people would oppose the same kind of resistance by means of which they have succeeded in mitigating — I might say in abrogating — the law of libel.
There would be so many offenders, that the Government would scarcely know at whom to aim its blow.
Every offender would have so many accomplices and protectors, that the blow would almost always miss the aim.
The veto of the people — a veto not pronounced in set form, like that of the Roman Tribunes, but quite as effectual as that of the Roman Tribunes — for the purpose of impeding public measures, would meet the Government at every turn.
The Administration would be unable to preserve order at home, or to uphold the national honour abroad: and at length men who are now moderate, who now think of revolution with horror, would begin to wish that the lingering agony of the State might be terminated by one fierce, sharp, decisive crisis.
I often read contemporary radicals complaining that the government uses liberals and half-baked liberal reform as a way of defeating radical change.
Here is a good example of a politician making that explicit.
Ugliest is this part of the speech:
We read that in old times, when the villeins were driven to revolt by oppression, when the castles of the nobility were burned to the ground — when the warehouses of London were pillaged — when a hundred thousand insurgents appeared in arms on Blackheath — when a foul murder perpetrated in their presence had raised their passions to madness — when they were looking round for some captain to succeed and avenge him whom they had lost — just then, before Hob Miller, or Tom Carter, or Jack Straw, could place himself at their head, the King rode up to them and exclaimed, “I will be your leader” — and at once the infuriated multitude laid down their arms, submitted to his guidance — dispersed at his command.
Herein let us imitate him.
This is an allusion to the tax revolt led by Wat Tyler in .
Tyler was assassinated while he was negotiating with the King, and his followers became furious.
The King is then said to have boldly gone out to the crowd and told them that he was on their side and would be their leader and fight for their concerns, and on the spot he granted them a number of concessions and pardoned their leaders.
An opponent of the Bill, Charles Weatherell, called him on his good-cop/bad-cop routine: “the honorable and learned Gentleman… deprecates, he revokes, he abjures anything tending to excitement; but in abjuring the thing, he uses expressions that forcibly recall it to the mind, and he eloquently deprecates that which in his arguments he seems most to inculcate… [He] says that he does not wish the people to resist the payment of taxes; but, at the same time, he who would not, of course, wish to lead them to erroneous conclusions, has told us what will happen if the Reform Bill is not passed, for he says that the tax-gatherer would be resisted.”
While these topics of the non-payment of taxes were under discussion, the honorable and learned Attorney General was present: if the law was not what the honorable and learned Gentleman had compared it to — a rusty nail, he would set himself in motion.
Was it true that this non-payment of taxes had been the subject of discussion?… He himself meant to assert that where there was a conspiracy to refuse the payment of taxes, there was a crime of a higher kind than some of the peace-making gentlemen opposite imagined.… [T]hese assemblies to rob the King of money voted by the Parliament were not a bit-by-bit question, almost amounting to a breach of the peace, as it had seemed to be considered in another place.
Those men were no lawyers who, if non-payment of taxes was combined with circumstances of conspiracy, would not say, that it was an offence far advanced in the scale towards high treason.
He could hardly have imagined there would have been so much said out of doors upon this subject, or he would have come armed with his authorities for this assertion.
Did the House know the sort of publications that had been issued on this subject?
He had had put into his hands a pamphlet, with a portrait of his noble and learned friend, the Lord Chancellor; it was a bad portrait — but it was a portrait prefixed to his speech on this question.
It was right to publish his speech, and the cheaper the rate at which such speeches were circulated, and the more they were ventilated through the country, the better.
He complained not that it had been so ventilated, but that a note had been appended to it in such a way, that unless looked at most carefully, it might be taken for part of the speech itself.
The note was this — “God grant that all this may be right; but, depend on it, that the watchword will now be ‘pay no taxes.’ ” He repeated, that unless the sword of the Attorney General was, in fact, the rusty iron it had been compared to (though it had ever and anon been proved a sword sharp enough), these were publications that did require the attention of his honorable and learned friend.
He would not say, that the Attorney General would neglect his duty in permitting these publications to go unreprehended and unnoticed; but he would go the length of stating to the Attorney General, that if the language used in that House, bold and unlimited as it might be, by the latitudinarian nature of their forms of debate, was thus permitted to be exceeded out of doors, the law was, indeed, a dead letter.
It was quite true, that the British public were not to be governed by the sword — but they were by the laws; and one of those laws was, that the recommendation of peace-breaking, of tumult, of risings against the Government, of non-payment of taxes, was an offence which, by a slight limit alone, was out of the pale of treason.
A number of other opponents of the Bill tweaked supporters for being too cozy with the Political Unions and for refusing to condemn their tax resistance resolutions strongly enough.
On a House of Commons member named Trevor spoke about an advertisement in the Times that read:
At a numerous meeting of the Committees and inhabitant householders of the parish of St. James, Westminster, the following resolution, proposed by Mr. Ewen, and seconded by Mr. Pitt, was unanimously agreed to:— “That this Committee acknowledge with the utmost gratitude, the exertions of his Majesty’s Ministers in favour of the Bill for the better regulation of Vestries, &c. now before Parliament; and as the success of that excellent measure is no longer doubtful, it is the opinion of this Committee, that the meeting of the inhabitant householders of this parish, for the purpose of taking into consideration the propriety of withholding the payment of all parochial rates under the select vestry system, as advertised in The Times, Morning Herald, Morning Chronicle, and Morning Advertiser, on the , should be postponed, and in the mean time the Committee recommend to the householders not to [withhold] the payment of such rates as may have become due.”
That reopened the debate on the propriety of tax resistance in general.
Trevor, alarmed, said that “if such threats as were conveyed in that advertisement were allowed to be made, and the people were told to withhold the payment of taxes, it would be impossible for… Parliament any longer to exist as a deliberative assembly.”
A Mr. Hume responded, saying that there was no cause for alarm, as there had been a case when a parish had actually followed-through on such a threat, and that had failed to bring down the anarchist apocalypse:
At a meeting of his fellow-parishioners of Mary-le-bone (of which he was the Chairman) a resolution was come to, not to pay the taxes imposed by the Select Vestry, but to allow their goods to be distrained.
He considered that his fellow-parishioners had acted legally, and their conduct had produced a most beneficial effect, for a disposition was already shown on the part of the Select Vestry to accommodate matters.
[T]he parishioners of Marylebone had no intention of violating the law.
The law directed, that in case of nonpayment of rates the goods of the party refusing were to be distrained.
The inhabitants of Marylebone would refuse to pay the rates imposed by the Select Vestry, but they would submit to the alternative provided by the law, and allow their goods to be taken away.
He thought that their resolution could not be considered in the light of a violation of the law.
Cutlar Fergusson wasn’t buying it.
While it wasn’t criminal to refuse to pay taxes because you couldn’t afford to (it then became a matter of civil distraint), a refusal like the one described, particularly a conspiracy of refusal, was criminal: “a high misdemeanour… a most dangerous proceeding, totally subversive of the law, and if persevered in, might be the means of the entire dissolution of society.… It was absolutely necessary, for the preservation of the institutions of the country, that the payment of taxes should be enforced.”
Henry Hunt backed Fergusson up:
A man might refuse to pay the taxes, and allow his goods to be distrained; but that was not the question.
The question was, whether it was lawful for 150,000 persons to conspire together to refuse the payment of taxes.
But the matter did not stop there.
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.
Hunt then complained that some trickster (he accused “the Whigs” generically) had forged his signature to an order to his printer telling them to print up 1,000 copies of a broadside signed with his name and reading: “Englishmen, rouse yourselves!
Pay no rates nor taxes, until you get the Reform Bill.”
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 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.
One way a tax resistance campaign can claim victory is by convincing the government to either formally rescind the tax, or to recognize the legal validity of tax resistance.
Charles Ⅰ went around Parliament to create a new property tax, and John Hampden famously said “no” in .
He lost his court case, but the next Parliament legalized his resistance by voiding the “ship-writs” tax and declaring the court judgment against him invalid.
American Amish, after a long campaign of lobbying, lawsuits, civil disobedience, and public relations, successfully won an exemption to the U.S. social security system, including its tax, and also canceled the outstanding social security tax bills of 15,000 Amish resisters.
A number of pacifist groups, frequently including war tax resisters, have been trying to get their governments to recognize or legally formalize a right to conscientious objection to military spending that would permit conscientious objectors to pay their taxes in a way that would not pay for the military portion of the government’s budget: a “Peace Tax” as it were.
So far, none of these long-standing efforts — which have included legal challenges using a variety of arguments, lobbying, and appeals to international legal bodies — have borne much fruit.
Governments seem universally hostile to the idea, and those international legal bodies with any clout have been unwilling to push the point.
Besides this, it is difficult to separate a government’s military budget from the rest of its budget in a way that would make a separate “Peace Tax” plausible.
The American version of the “Peace Tax” legislation, for instance, would ironically result in more taxpayer money going to military projects.
Italy has an otto per mille tax, which people can designate either for their church or for “humanitarian and cultural projects” of the government’s choosing — this resembles the sort of plan the “Peace Tax” promoters have in mind, but Italy’s government cunningly declared its participation in the Iraq War a “humanitarian and cultural” project and siphoned the funds off that way.
A tax resister who was opposed to the death penalty came to an agreement with the state of Delaware in which the state permitted him to pay his state taxes into a fund designated for paying state tax refunds of other taxpayers, rather than into the general fund that funded the prison system and executions.
American Quaker war tax resister Joshua Evans was so persistent that eventually the tax collector gave up.
“I was told it was concluded that as I gave myself up very much to the service of Truth, it was not proper I should be troubled on account of military demands; and I understood my name was erased, or taken from their list.”
Occasionally something similar happens today, when because a war tax resister has so few assets, or those assets would take too much trouble to discover, the IRS formally lists the resister’s file as “uncollectible” and gives up the attempt to force payment.
After ten years, a delinquent income tax payment hits a statute of limitations and the U.S. government is generally forbidden to pursue the matter further.
American suffragist activist Sarah E. Wall resisted her taxes for 25 years, when finally, according to Susan B. Anthony, “I do not know exactly how it is now, but the assessor has left her name off the tax-list, and passed her by rather than have a lawsuit with her.”
Something similar happened to English suffragist tax resister Charlotte Despard and some others: “[T]he Government rather than go to the trouble of selling up the recalcitrant ‘debtor,’ and attracting attention to the principle involved, had quietly dropped the matter in several instances.
Mrs. Despard had had no application for taxes since she had been sold up last year.”
Ellen C. Sargent patiently pursued legal challenges in California to try to promote women’s suffrage with a “no taxation without representation” argument.
She began by petitioning the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a refund of her property taxes, and then filed a lawsuit when this petition was denied (the lawsuit also failed).
When farmers in drought-ravaged regions of Argentina threatened a tax strike in , the government responded with a clever bit of ju-jitsu — it declared an agricultural emergency in the area which exempted those farmers from paying taxes.
Utah governor J. Bracken Lee stopped paying his federal income taxes in the hopes of prompting a Supreme Court test case that would invalidate what he considered to be extraconstitutional federal spending.
(The court declined to take his case.)
A group referred to as “the Texas housewives” resisted paying the social security tax on the salaries of their household help, and pursued a two-year parallel legal challenge to have the tax invalidated, before finally being turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago won a court case that found property assessments in the city to have been performed incorrectly — with $15 billion in property held by wealthy, well-connected Chicagoans somehow left off the rolls — thus effectively legalizing the resistance.
“As the matter stands,” a newspaper account put it, “citizens howled about their taxes, refused to pay them and a court upheld them.
They are in revolt with legal sanction.”
During the Land League’s rent strike in Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell reported that “a large majority of landlords” reduced the rents on their properties, “[which] shows that they did finally recognize the situation, and that they determined to make the best of it.”
When the Prussian quasi-autocracy tried to ignore the legislature and govern on its own, the legislature formally declared tax resistance to be legal, and said that the autocrats had no authority to raise or spend money.
Something similar happened in Russia half a century later, when the Czar dissolved the legislature, which then reconvened in Vyborg and called on the citizens to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.
According to a book on war tax resistance: “In Russia became the first country to establish legislation exempting pacifists from paying war taxes.
Thirty British citizens were invited by Czar Alexander Ⅰ to establish a cotton mill.
Because some of the employees were Quakers, a petition was submitted to the Czar from the employees asking for freedom of conscience and an exemption from military service, church taxes for war, etc. The Czar issued a certificate which read ‘His Imperial Majesty has given his gracious assent to this petition … all … shall be exempted from all civil and military taxes … the sect of Quakers may now and in future be freed from war taxes for the support of the Military…’ Two English Quakers visiting Russia in found these provisions still in effect.”
The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia began as a tax resistance and mutual insurance group, but was soon successful in convincing the government to rescind the offensive tax.
But history is also full of lessons about the foolishness of trusting the government when it responds to your tax resistance campaign by insisting that it’s on your side and wants to help.
For example:
When tax resistance leader Wat Tyler was assassinated while negotiating with the King in , the king boldly went out to the enraged crowd and told it that he would be their leader and would press for their demands.
Instead, he waited for the fuss to die down, then executed some of the other leaders of the rebellion.
When the Whigs were whisked into power in the wake of the Reform Act agitation around , the tax resistance movement celebrated its victory… only to find that the Whigs could be just as tyrannical about prosecuting those who promoted tax resistance as their Tory cousins.
The recent American TEA Party was quickly coöpted by the Republican Party, which learned how to lead it by the nose with witless rhetoric, but conceded nothing on the tax-and-spend big government front.
During the Annuity Tax strike in Edinburgh, the government passed something called the “Edinburgh Annuity Tax Abolition Act.”
Despite its name, that act did not abolish the annuity tax, but merely concealed it with an aim to making it more difficult to resist.
The following comes from a sort of local history column in the Cheltenham Chronicle:
The Revolt Against the Poll Tax
A Government can always cause a revolution or an attempt at one by increasing taxation to the point where the taxpayers prefer the trouble and expense of revolting to the worry of being bled to death.
For it is worry to a man who has been toiling for years to support his wife and family and himself to find that a large proportion of his earnings have to go to support a lot of people whom he has never seen and who ought to be able to support themselves without his help.
We remember how an attempt to levy a poll tax of one shilling per head caused the men of Essex to assemble in their thousands, armed with clubs, rusty swords, and bows and arrows, and to march on London like the men of Kent and the men fo Hertfordshire, with this result amongst others, that the treasurer and chief commissioner for the levy of the poll-tax were beheaded.
That was a foolishly and wickedly drastic proceeding, which defeated its own object.
If they had stopped short of murder we should have more sympathy with the tax-resister of Wat Tyler’s time.
But did the men of Gloucestershire take down their bows and arrows from the wall and pick up their chibs and swords and start out to murder the poll-tax collectors?
It seems they did not, for “The names of certain malefactors who lately in divers parts of the kingdom of England, against their fealty and allegiance due to our lord the King of England and the peace of the same Lord the King, rose with other malefactors and perpetrated very many treasons felonies, and other misdeeds,” do not include those of any Gloucestershire folk, but only people living in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Herts., Middlesex, London, Winchester, Kent, Somerset, and Canterbury.…
Gloucestershire Patriots Refuse To Pay Illegal Taxes in Few Words.
It is well to recall sometimes the names of those to whom we owe the fact that to live in England is by no means the same thing as to live within sight of a Russian prison.
The following are the names of “such as refused to subscribe and pay the loan unto his Majesty within the county of Gloucester” about : Sir Robert Poynts, Sir Morris Berkley, Sir William Master, Sir John Prettyman, Richard Berkley, Esq., Henry Poole, Esq., John Dutton Esq., Thomas Nicholas, Esq., Nathaniel Coxwell, Esq., Nathaniel Stephens, Esq., Walter Bourcher, Esq., John Croker, Esq. Others did not positively refuse, but simply stopped away — Sir Edmund Cary, knight.
Sir Baptist Hickes.
Bart., Sir Walter Pye, Sir Thomas Thynne, Sir Giles Fettyplace, Sir Nicholas Overbury.
Sir Henry Rainsford, Samuel Burton.
Archdeacon of Gloucester, Anthony Abbington, Esq., Richard Delabere Esq., Thomas Chester, Esq. William, Earl of Northampton, and John Brydgeman wrote from Gloucester on , to the Privy Council:— “May it please your Lordships, … I met with the Commissioners for this County Gloucester, being in number 25, of which 12 denied both payment and subscription, as by the bends sent up to your lordships will more plainly appear.
Pardon me to advertise your lordships that these knights and gentlemen that thus refused, did so in the fewest words and arguments that could be imagined, and when they were moved to enter into bond, they did it as willingly, and did submit themselves as dutifully to his Majesty and your lordships’ pleasure (the premisses excepted) as can be expressed.
The City and County of the City of Gloucester have consented, and four other hundreds, so that we are in good hope of the rest.
The next hundred I am to go to (for I intend out of the duty and affection I have to perfect the service to visit whole shire), are such as the chiefest of those gentlemen which refused to subscribe do dwell in, we urging them that their denial might be a great hindrance to the service in respect of their neighbours; they answered that they would by no means hinder it, either by persuasions or other ways, and pressing them to assist the Commission (the neglect whereof I thought would be very ill taken by his Majesty and your Lordships), their answers were that it was not fit for them to persuade others to do that which they in conscience had refused to do.”
