Labour MPs Against the Poll Tax

Official Labour Party policy on the Poll Tax was that they could not support non-payment as 'law-makers can't be law-breakers'. Perhaps what was meant by this was 'law-breakers can't be law-makers' and they feared that openly backing the non-payment campaign would alienate potential swing-voters. Whatever the reason, party-line was to campaign against the Poll Tax's implementation, and once it was implemented this changed to a promise to abolish it once they were in power. For many this was not good enough. Indeed, Geoff Eley describes movements such as the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign as 'new outlets for working class grievances increasingly disenfranchised by the available Left Party'.


However, there were Labour MPs who did support non-payment. They were largely part of Labour's Campaign group, chaired by Tony Benn. This was a group of MPs on the left of the Party. These MPs signed a petition supporting non-payment. Below is a photo of the petition and a list of signatories, some of whom are still in politics today.

Coming to Conclusions: Membership of the Campaign

When starting this project I wanted to research the Poll Tax for several reasons. One of these was the magnitude and diversity of the protest. As direct action goes the scale of the non-payment campaign is still impressive. Another reason though was that I wanted to test Frank Parkin's instrumental/expressive binary. Definitions of instrumental and expressive in this context can be found in the glossary.


On the surface Parkin's binary seems a perfect match for the Poll Tax. So many people participated in the non-payment campaign and among those participants there were people who could not afford to pay and people who would not pay even though they could afford to because they thought it was an unfair tax. Using Parkin's binary, the former would be instrumental and the latter principled and expressive. Parkin's binary can be loosely applied to Can't Payers and Won't Payers, but it does not tell us anything new about the campaign against the Poll Tax. Indeed it is even misleading.


Any binary by its very nature, both connects and divides. The subjects of the binary are linked by their relevance to a topic, but kept separate by their differences. This has implications when describing campaign membership as a binary. Both subjects are connected to the campaign, but each subject plays a different role. When the binary is instrumental/expressive or Can't Pay/Won't Pay it is assumed that one of these subjects, expressive Won't Payers, took a leading role. However the campaign against the Poll Tax was more complicated than this.


The campaign was led and organised locally by groups of core members. This was a product of the All Britain    Federation of Anti-Poll Tax Unions, an organisation which had local Anti-Poll Tax Unions affiliated to it. The Anti-Poll Tax Unions were run by a core group who spread the message of non-payment through organising wider public meetings and leafleting. These core groups were made up of between ten and twenty people. By November 1989 there were seventeen Anti-Poll Tax Unions in Birmingham. A year later, once the tax had been in place for seven months, there were 44,000 non-payers in Birmingham. Non-payment was much wider than the core groups, but the core groups did lead the campaign on a local basis. 

A public meeting was held with speakers from instrumental organisations.

Leaflets were printed in other community languages to help spread the message further.

Parkin's binary would suggest that the core groups would be made up of expressive Won't Payers, whilst the rest of the 40,000 would be predominantly instrumental Can't Payers. In reality the core groups were predominantly made up of members of instrumental Leftist organisations such as the Socialist Workers Party, the Anarchist Federation and the Indian Worker's Organisation. There was also a strong trade union presence at the city-wide federation of Anti-Poll Tax Unions. Some of the core members were Won't Payers who represented instrumental organisations. Some were Can't Payers who were expressive in their politics, such as one unemployed man who was a full-time activist for the Anti-Apartheid movement. Parkin's binary, used by Parkin to explain membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1960s, is too simplistic for the Poll Tax. The Poll Tax was introduced at a time when unemployment was decreasing but still high, and came at the end of a decade in which the government had alienated many sections of society. In such an economic and political climate, the Poll Tax hurt and angered many people. These people came together in a complex social movement whose membership defies categorization based on instrumental and expressive politics and whether or not they could afford to pay. The only binary that can be applied to such a complex movement as the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign is a political/non-political binary. 


The core members were political, both in instrumental and expressive ways, and a large number of Birmingham's 40,000 were non-political. Rosanvallon defines ‘l’impolitique’ or the non-political as ‘a failure to develop a comprehensive understanding of problems associated with the organisation of a shared world’. In terms of the Poll Tax, the non-political could be interpreted as a failure to understand the tax in terms of class and fairness. One who understood the ‘problems associated with the organisation of a shared world’ would have viewed the Poll Tax as a class issue, whether on they were on the Left or the Right. The political person viewed the Poll Tax as either unfair on the working class, or as fairer than the rates were for the middle class. In contrast the non-political person viewed the Poll Tax as something they either could or could not afford. APTUs were created and joined by political people who saw the tax as unfair and as something to mobilise against. Of course, some of the thousands of non-payers who never attended an APTU meeting had a political understanding of the Poll Tax, but at the same time many must have not paid simply because they could not afford it and not because of political reasons. To a certain extent, that the number of non-payers in Birmingham fell from 300,000 to 40,000 from June to September 1990 shows this. In those three months Birmingham City Council processed around 260,000 rebate applications. Although not all rebate applications were successful, the granting of rebates could account for some of the decline in non-payment as an eighty per cent discount made the Poll Tax more affordable. Consequently, some non-political non-payers may have started paying. However, at eighty per cent, this was not a full rebate, and some still may not have been able to afford it. Therefore, of the 40,000 who continued refusing to pay it is likely that there were political and non-political non-payers. Political non-payers worked at the centre of the campaign and non-political non-payers turned the campaign into a mass movement through their non-payment alone.   


The political/non-political binary works here where Parkin's binary fails.


  

Oral History Interviews

Over the last two weeks I've been interviewing people who were involved in the campaign against the poll tax, so thank you very much if you're reading this and you participated! It's been really interesting and I've been getting some different perspectives on the campaign, which mainly seem to stem from whichever Leftist group the interviewee was, or is still, part of. So far most of the people I have interviewed were already active on the Left when the poll tax was implemented.

At the moment the thing that really stands out is that they all emphasise the importance of community action, but also maintain that the campaign seems to have been led and organised locally by core groups of activists more than general community members.

It would be great to hear from some community members who were less politically active before the poll tax to see if they share this perspective.  

Over the next few days I aim to go through the material I've got so far, and to write a more detailed post on the interviews. Please bear with me!

Campaign Badges

Thanks to Chris Shelley for looking through his attic and finding these badges for me.

Anti-Poll Tax Campaign in Balsall Heath and Spark Hill

Photos of the campaign in Balsall Heath and Spark Hill.

Student Involvement in the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign: Looking at Redbrick

Student involvement in the anti-poll tax campaign is interesting because it straddles my analytical categories of 'Can't Pay' and 'Won't Pay'. This is because students, as we can assume most were not earning and were supporting themselves with their grants- living on baked beans etc.-, fall into the category of 'Can't Pay', however student activism conventionally follows the pattern of 'expressive politics' (see Glossary for definition), which is usually attributed to the middle class, or 'Won't Payers'. As I'm looking at whether 'Can't Payers' were at all politicised by the anti-poll tax campaign, and at whether new protest networks came about as a result of the campaign, the political nature of Birmingham's students is of great interest to me.

Being a student at the University of Birmingham it made sense to start looking here, on campus, to find out about student involvement in the campaign. I will, at a later date, explore anti-poll tax action at Birmingham City University which, until 1992, was known as Birmingham Polytechnic.

I thought the best place to start would be the student newspaper Redbrick. The Redbrick archive is housed on campus in Special Collections in the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, who own the collection. So far I've been through every issue from September 1988 to May 1991 looking for articles and letters about the poll tax. I thought that if there were any protests on campus about the poll tax then the Redbrick would have reported on it. There was no mention of protests about the poll tax on campus, however, as there were no mentions of on-campus protests against the government abolishing student grants either, which was probably a greater concern for most students, I think it is safe to infer that on-campus protests just did not really happen (or that the Redbrick didn't not report on such things, but I think that is unlikely). Therefore that there are no reports of student activty on campus, does not mean that students weren't involved, just that if they participated in the campaign then it was off-campus.

Indeed, there is evidence that students were interested in the poll tax. In Issue 1005, published on 7th December 1988, in an interview with Clare Short, the interviewer asks her if a recent Labour deafeat in Scotland was "a protest vote against Labour's rather timid Poll Tax campaign?". In Issue 1006, 18th January 1989, the poll tax is lumped together with incoming student loans and the possible destruction of the NUS as "attacks facing students". Then, come 1990 when the poll tax was introduced in England and Wales, there is an article about what students in Birmingham will pay. "Poll Tax: £80 to pay..." was published in Issue 1017 on 8th February 1990.

Issue 1017. Thanks to Redbrick for permission to use the photos. Click on photos to enlarge.

This article explains the poll tax for Birmingham was set at £406 per person and that student would have a bill of just over £80 per year. The article continues, "Students in University owned accomodation will be immediately worse off, since no rates are included in their bills at the present time". However, it explains that if students own their own house or rent but can persuade their landlords to remove the rates from their rent bills, they could be better off. But the article states that the majority of Scottish landlords did not reduce rent, and no local landlords would comment on the matter. 

Issue 1020, 22nd March 1990, expresses frustration at the Labour Party in an editorial about Neil Kinnock titled "Who's Better; Who's Best?", which mentions "recent in-party squabbles over the Poll Tax".

Furthermore, Issue 1021, 17th May 1990 mentions the poll tax a number of times. First of all, on p.4, there is an article called "Tories Feel the Pinch" about the local election results. This suggests that "the citzens of Birmingham have shown just what they think of the poll tax at the local election ballot box".

                                                        

Issue 1021

Then, on p.6, there follows an article on the "Poll Tax Protest". This reports that "well over 1,000 people attended an anti-poll tax demonstration in Chamberlain Square on May Day Bank Holiday" and that demonstrators burned their bills in protest. This article also takes up the issue of student non-payment, writing that " The Welfare Office have told the Guild that the Univeristy would take no disciplinary action against students who did not pay, as it was something outside their control. However, the senior registrar has said that action would be taken if students' non-payment was detrimental to the University's standing". Furthermore, it is mentions that the council has "no offical policy on penalties for non-payment".

Issue 1021

Although these articles suggest some interest in the poll tax, based on the assumption that Redbrick prints articles that would interest students, they don't tell us much about what students themselves thought. We can gauge the writers' politics, but not necessarily that of the wider student body. Though, that student non-payment is mentioned and in such a way that suggests one could get away with seems to suggest that non-payment was thought of as an acceptable form of protest. The letters page can shed some light however. On p.10 of the same issue, there is a letter from a first year student regarding "the vexed problem of what Christians should do in response to the poll tax".

Issue 1021: This is part of the letter. Click to enlarge.

This letter shows that at least one student had serious issues with the morality of the poll-tax. He supports non-payment, paying his poll tax bill amount to Shelter instead, and suggests that if other Christians cannot bring themselves to tear up their bill, then they should protest in some other way. This is an interesting response as it suggests that this particular student is not a 'Can't Payer', but a 'Won't Payer' of sorts.

One last direct reference to the poll tax, of what I've read so far, appears in Issue 1028, 31st January 1991. This article "Same Again!" explains that the poll tax bill will remain the same in 1991, but mentions that Council Leader Sir Richard Knowles think it is "regressive" an would like to see a return to rates based on ability to pay.

From looking at these issues of Redbrick we can see that the poll tax was an issue that affected students. However it is difficult to gauge the extent to which students participated in the anti-poll tax campaign and what their stance on non-payment was generally.

I have spoken to someone who was a foreign student in Leeds at the time of the poll tax. Dr Armin Grünbacher is a lecturer here at Birmingham now, but at the time he was on his year abroad in Leeds. He alerted me to what foriegn students thought of the tax. He explained how, from what he could tell, they were surprised to be hit by the tax, and the German students were divided over non-payment. Some who wanted to stay in England for longer than a year paid up, others who were only here for 3 terms refused to pay, and were not caught.

Birmingham Federation of Anti-Poll Tax Unions

I’m currently researching the Birmingham Anti-Poll Tax Federation. In November 1989 the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation met and Tommy Sheridan greeted 2,000 delegates. Across the UK Anti-Poll Tax Federations were set up coordinating local action against the Poll Tax, even informally overseeing smaller Anti-Poll Tax Unions.

I know there was a Birmingham Anti-Poll Tax Federation, but I want to know more about it. How large was the influence of Militant and other Leftist groups? Did it oversee smaller unions? What did the Birmingham Federation do? I know it organised campaigning; organising petitions and handing out leaflets, but I want to know more.

If you were a member of the Birmingham Anti-Poll Tax Federation or of a Anti-Poll Tax Union elsewhere in Birmingham, please get in touch.

This membership card was sent to me by Chris Shelley. As you can see the Federation was committed to non-payment. Chris made the point that he never got round to putting his name on his membership card, despite the campaigning he did for the movement.

MA Dissertation: The Anti-Poll Tax Campaign

I'm writing my MA dissertation on the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign of the early 1990s. The Campaign involved one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in the twentieth century in Britain. Around 17 million people refused to pay their tax; they broke the law rather than pay what was widely considered to be a harsh and unfair tax. As well as non-payment there were large demonstrations and petitions. In short, there was a great deal of activism at a time when it is often assumed that British citizens became apathetic.
 

My research will examine the extent to which the non-payment campaign was a movement of people who, as the slogan of the time put it, 'Can't Pay' and those who 'Won't Pay'. In doing so I will attempt to situate the campaign in a wider history of political activism whilst also acknowledging that as a single-issue campaign some participants may have had no political motives for non-payment, only economic ones. Historians and sociologists writing about the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign have often focussed on the ‘Won’t Payers’. Some hail these activists as starting a new wave of activism like that of the 1960s. Participation in the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign is sometimes seen as a badge of honour for activists who went on to be involved in other protest movements, such as 1990s radical environmentalism. I will investigate this claim, but I think this is an overly simplistic analysis of the campaign and its legacy.


My research will explore the ‘Can’t Pay’ side of the campaign. I will try to understand the links between ‘Can’t Payers’ and ‘Won’t Payers’, the extent to which the campaign was a union of these participants, and to what extent one group drove the campaign more than the other. I want to investigate the make up of the ‘Can’t Payers’, exploring to whether or not they had links to Labour Party politics, or if student politics influenced their decision not to pay as well as not being able to afford it. Did having a supportive network of ‘Won’t Payers’ and ‘Can’t Payers’ influence their decision not to pay? This was a big decision considering that non-payment meant breaking the law. Was there even such a supportive network, or were these predominantly individually made decisions? 


To address these questions I want to talk to people who were involved in the Anti-Poll Tax Campaign. I want  to further investigate the role of Anti-Poll Tax Unions, and Birmingham will make a good place for a case study as areas such as Small Heath had about 60 percent non-payment.


If you remember the poll tax or have any thoughts about this, please don't hesitate to comment or contact me.