Why was the poll tax stupid?
Not my words, but lifted from Skynews.
By Anonymous Poll Tax Protester
"Why should a Duke pay more than a dustman?"
With that simple question, Margaret Thatcher's henchman Nicholas Ridley summed up the Tory attitude towards ordinary working people as they introduced the hated Poll Tax.
As a replacement for the old council rates system, the Poll ("head") Tax meant that individual financial circumstances would not be taken into account - people would pay the same as everyone else in the area.
The unjustness of this system was exacerbated by the fact that the poorest, inner-city boroughs needed a lot more council services than those in the comfortable shires, so ordinary people in those boroughs were expected to pay many hundreds more per head than far richer people.
In an added act of vindictiveness, Thatcher introduced the Poll Tax a year earlier in Scotland, an area where the Tories were much more unpopular.
However, they miscalculated as the Anti-Poll Tax Federation was set up, organising demonstrations and support for those who couldn't pay and providing an example to the rest of the UK on how to fight back.
As the tax hit England and Wales in 1990, Anti-Poll Tax Unions sprang up, with thousands of volunteers supporting a non-payment campaign, recognising that it wasn't a choice whether to pay or not, but that many people could not afford the tax and had to be supported rather than isolated and left to the courts, the bailiffs and possible imprisonment.
Despite this mass campaign, to their shame, the Labour Party leaders declared that, while it was OK to express disagreement, nobody should refuse to pay the tax as they should not break the law, leaving the way open for Labour councils, as well as Tory and Liberal, to set high Poll Tax rates and threaten their populations with penalties.
However, the campaign wasn't to be cowed and, on the morning of 31 March 1990, the organisers watched with trepidation to see if the national anti-Poll Tax demo in London would be a success.
We needn't have worried - thousands upon thousands poured off coaches and trains towards Kennington Park and the overflow park behind it, with an estimated minimum of 250,000 demonstrating on the day, many not having left the park before the front of the demo reached Trafalgar Square.
The Tories, with the aid of the media, attempted to demonise and criminalise the campaign after the riots that ended the demo, but they didn't count upon the fact that many marchers were even "traditional" Tory supporters from areas that had never demonstrated in their lives and they witnessed the coordinated attacks by mounted riot police on sections of the march.
The non-payment campaign flourished, with 34 Anti-Poll Tax Unions in Hackney alone. Registration numbers and descriptions of bailiffs' vans were circulated amongst hundreds of activists so that, whenever the bailiffs arrived, the threatened non-payees were quickly supported and the bailiffs were run out of town.
As many as 2,000 people at a time were summonsed to courts around the country and the campaign encouraged them to attend causing the court system itself to be completely unable to cope with the overwhelming tide of people arriving.
In the end, 15 million people nationally were refusing to pay Thatcher's hated tax and, in those circumstances, it was clear that it would have to be repealed.
Many of the Tories currently eulogising Thatcher were among the MPs who queued up to tell her to resign when her leadership was challenged, because they realised that the Poll Tax would only go if she did and their very careers were on the line if not.
That is why many millions of people are not mourning Thatcher or listening to the calls for compassion and respect because the Poll Tax proved that she had absolutely no compassion or respect for us.
