Everyone knew it was going to go off…
As previously related, the introduction of the Poll Tax (officially disguised as the Community Charge.) in 1989-1990 enraged millions of people across the UK, as being a single flat-rate charge on everybody, based on the number of people living in a house rather than its estimated price, and not taking account of income or property ownership (as the rates system had), everyone would pay the same rate set by the local council, regardless of how rich they were or how much their property was worth. This gave the tory government fits of joy, as it would increase the burden of paying for Council services on the working class, and lightened the load for the better off, by thousands (millions in some cases).
Thatcher and co thought they would get away with this, after a decade in which they’d mashed up all working class opposition – steelworkers, miners, printers, etc. They were on a roll. The Poll Tax, they thought, would not only make them more supporters among the middle class, but also stick the knife into the leftwing Labour Councils they hated so much, forcing them to slash services, especially in inner cities… They clearly felt they would push the tax through whatever the opposition…
The introduction of the poll tax was widely unpopular from the outset, and increased when tax rates set by many local councils turned out to be much higher than initially predicted.
Huge campaigns sprang up against registering to pay, filling in forms, giving the local council any info etc., and then against payment. Thousands of local anti-poll tax groups or unions were set up. Opposition ranged from marches, occupations, resisting bailiffs seizing property for unpaid poll tax, to riots and filibustering the courts with endless arguments . Hundreds of people were jailed.
Community networks of members were set up to watch out for and resist bailiffs, and the operation became so successful that debt collecting firms in some areas went out of business. In Edinburgh local APTUs patrolled working class areas with cars and radios to watch for bailiffs, and in London some cab drivers fulfilled the same role. Bailiffs offices were often picketed and occupied, and in Scotland hundreds of people defended houses against the forced removal of goods by sheriffs.
The campaign for non-payment gained in strength through the early months of 1990, and eventually became the single most damaging reason for the government to continue with the poll tax. By August of 1990 one in five had yet to pay, with figures reaching up to 27% of people in London. 20 million people were summoned for non-payment. Many local authorities were faced with a crisis, and councils faced a deficit of £1.7 billion for the next year. Initial successes with non-payment campaigns led to several large demonstrations in cities across the country, including the famous disturbances that occurred in central London on March 31.
Here’s a first-hand account of the demonstration/mini-riot that took place in Brixton, South London, on 9th March 1990, written by a local anti-poll tax activist s few years later.
It’s worth bearing in mind that for two-three weeks every night seemed to bring news of another riot at another town hall; Hackney went up the night before Brixton, Southwark, Islington… the list went on…
Many people in Lambeth – still one of the Country’s poorest areas, with high unemployment and low pay – simply wouldn’t be able to pay at all anyway; thousands swore blind they would never pay a penny.
Across the Borough about 20 odd anti-Poll Tax groups were set up. The ‘Leftwing’ Labour Council, made angry noises about refusing to co-operate with the Poll Tax; several councillors including leader of the Council Joan Twelves joined the all-Lambeth Anti-Poll Tax Federation, when it finally managed to lurch into existence after months of inter-trot/trot vs anarchist bickering. As happened all across the country, the divisions concerned fundamental differences in strategy and ways of organising: broadly speaking Labour campaigners thought you could fight through the Council and the TUC, the Socialist Workers Party was for stopping the Poll tax through workplace (ie council workers, ie NALGO) organisation, and that community or street groups were pointless; Militant was for building community groups but under their direct control and run top down by their activists; the anarchos and other non-aligned sensible types weren’t against trying to get NALGO members to strike against implementing the Tax (although sceptical of the likelihood of NALGO taking a strong position – from experience! Although in October 1989 Oval DSS workers struck for a week, in protest against being told to snoop on claimants for poll tax; this was part of a campaign of strikes across the UK) and had seen the shambles Left Councils like Lambeth made of fighting Central Government: we felt the best strategy was self-organised local groups run from the bottom by the local people themselves. As it happened the SWP flitted in and out of the anti-poll tax movement with all the attention span of a slightly dizzy gnat, depending on what other things were going on (“Non-registration is a damp squib, comrades, the Dockers Strike is the Big issue Now.”) Militant and the anarchists (who had been organising through 2 or 3 local Community Resistance groups in the Borough) fought constantly as the Milis tried to impose as much control over the campaign as they could. As 1990 dawned the moment when we would have to pay (or not) approached; the Council despite its soft left white noise was preparing to agree how much we would be charged… The tension rang in the air…
Here’s an account on burning poll tax bills in Brixton from around this time.
There were riots or angry demos at many if not most Town Halls around the country, in the space of a few weeks, as the local councils met to decide how much poll tax they’d be extorting from residents. Many of the protests in London ended in fighting with the cops. The night before the Lambeth demo Hackney had gone up, a huge battle spreading out from the Town Hall, with 60 arrests. You could go to a riot every night that week in London (many of us did!) There was an unreal atmosphere in the country, not like anything since. I guess like the riots of July ’81, people involved felt a sense of possibility, that the daily grind could be shaken and maybe overturned… It seemed believable to some of us that the strength of community resistance and the willingness to get stuck in were the start of a new era… We were naive maybe, but that’s how we felt.
There were about 3000 people at the rally outside the Town Hall. The council had tried to defuse the inevitable confrontation by letting quite a few protesters into the gallery to observe the ‘hard-left’ Labour councillors (currently running the Borough) faffing around, and several hundred in to watch proceedings on a large screen in the hall next door. (Watching a Lambeth Council meeting on TV is thought to have inspired the makers of Big Brother.) 100 pigs, many from other sties, were drafted in, as Scotland Yard’s public order monitoring unit T020 anticipated that there “could be trouble”… well duh.
Inside the council dithered, outside a large and vocal crowd sang songs, chanted, gossiped about where they’d been in the last few days… Southwark Town Hall… Hackney Town Hall… Islington Town Hall… A couple of lifesize effigies of Thatcher were hung from the bus stop in Acre Lane and burned to wild cheers. There was a band playing calypso (if I remember right!) and people were dancing on top of all the bus shelters (beats waiting for a number 37).
Speeches outside… blah blah same old lefty rhetoric mostly, till one of our local Community Resistance Against the Poll Tax group made a slightly inflammatory speech slagging off the Labour Party. Of course all the trotskyists whose existence was entirely parasitical off Labour started having a go at him.
Meanwhile 2 Special branch cops were wandering round in the crowd, recognised by someone present, whose house they’d raided previously! She spent much of the early evening following them round loudly announcing their identity to the crowd… Somehow they escaped a kicking, what were we thinking? (They showed up on other poll tax events that year.)
I can’t exactly remember how it kicked off… some pushing and shoving, people trying to pile into the tiny door to the Council chamber I think. The cops were on edge, not surprisingly, and started laying into people near the doors. So of course we started chucking stuff at them, many of us had brought a little something. Paint bombs first, then, bricks, bottles, bits of wood. The filth charged into the crowd and pushed us out of Acre Lane, into Brixton Road, there were quite a lot of us, 500 or so in one group. I think many people did go home at that point, and some got trapped the other side of police lines. There was some skirmishing in the high street, bobbies were hiding behind vans, then we marched through Electric Avenue, heading for the Cop Shop. There are not many feelings better than being in an angry crowd: running in to your mates, trying to swap jackets and stuff to fool their surveillance efforts, sharing drinks and fags and chanting… We didn’t quite get to the Cop Shop, they’d learned from ’85 (ie don’t let the mob besiege you in your own police station!) and made a stand at the corner, forcing us into Stockwell road. There was a running battle here, cops charging and retreating under a hail of missiles. We were joined by groups of kids from Stockwell Park Estate, some of them lobbed stuff down at the old bill from above. From somewhere a single panda car with 2 cops in it, driving right into the middle of the crowd at Stockwell Green, shouts of “turn it over!” and over it goes on to its side. With the cops in it. The looks on their faces – priceless.
There was a lull, people standing around laughing, I looked over and our Anti-Poll Tax group’s banner was hanging from the windows of the squat over the way. “Brixton/Clapham Community Resistance Against the Poll Tax” – you can say that again: here’s the community, and this is the resistance! (Later this image was used repeatedly on the telly.) The mounted cops came out and we melted out of Stockwell road. Some Trot or other was shouting “Lets march on Downing Street!” Yeah, lets not.
A couple of hundred of us got together and tried to go for the Town Hall again, but were beaten off. I think someone did start throwing petrol bombs at one point but they didn’t explode? Certainly there weren’t many mollies.
Word got out that the Council had set a budget but had postponed agreeing a rate of poll tax (they were still talking about something like £600 a head a year). So we get another crack at them in three weeks… Everyone ended up in the pubs. On a high.
27 people did get lifted on the night. And some in raids later I think. I seem to remember one or two did go down. Some “black community leaders” blamed all the trouble on “white outside agitators” AGAIN! Play another record that one’s scratched. Folk round here of course like everywhere were rabid about the poll tax, but as soon as many people saw a large mob of coppers they’d start pulling up the pavement. It was just part of the culture then.
A couple of weeks later, on March 27th, Lambeth Council met again to try and agree how high the Poll Tax was going to be. Could Lambeth beat Haringey and set the highest in the country? For the thousand who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay it was academic, just a matter of civic pride. Another mini-riot broke out, it was in some ways a carbon copy of the one two and a half weeks earlier, but smaller: marching through the market again, pushing and shoving. Not as much fun. The night was overshadowed for some of us by the death of a local anarchist comrade, Leo Rosser, one of the old 121 Bookshop/Black Flag crew, a few days before, in terrible circumstances. Shame he never lived to see Trafalgar Square go up, a few days later…
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Part of past tense’s series of articles on Brixton; before, during and after the riots of 1981.
Part 1: Changing, Always Changing: Brixton’s Early Days
2: In the Shadow of the SPG: Racism, Policing and Resistance in 1970s Brixton
3: The Brixton Black Women’s Group
4: Brixton’s first Squatters 1969
5: Squatting in Brixton: The Brixton Plan and the 1970s
6. Squatted streets in Brixton: Villa Road
7: Squatting in Brixton: The South London Gay Centre
8: We Want to Riot, Not to Work: The April 1981 Uprising
9: After the April Uprising: From Offence to Defence to…
10: More Brixton Riots, July 1981
11: You Can’t Fool the Youths: Paul Gilroy’s on the causes of the ’81 riots
12: The Impossible Class: An anarchist analysis of the causes of the riots
13: Impossible Classlessness: A response to ‘The Impossible Class’
14: Frontline: Evictions and resistance in Brixton, 1982
15: Squatting in Brixton: the eviction of Effra Parade
16: Brixton Through a Riot Shield: the 1985 Brixton Riot
17: Local Poll tax rioting in Brixton, March 1990
18: The October 1990 Poll Tax ‘riot’ outside Brixton Prison
19: The 121 Centre: A squatted centre 1973-1999
20: This is the Real Brixton Challenge: Brixton 1980s-present
21: Reclaim the Streets: Brixton Street Party 1998
22: A Nazi Nail Bomb in Brixton, 1999
23: Brixton police still killing people: The death of Ricky Bishop
24: Brixton, Riots, Memory and Distance 2006/2021
25: Gentrification in Brixton 2015
LONDON RADICAL HISTORIES 
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