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.