Revolution Destroyed?

Have I ensured that a world socialist revolution will never happen?

A book by Steve Wallis (www.socialiststeve.me.uk)

Chapter 12

Poll tax – the People’s March

One of the most neglected aspects of the fight against the poll tax, in previous anti-poll tax histories, was the People’s March Against The Poll Tax. It is worthy of an entire chapter of this book for two reasons: it played an important role at a difficult time for the anti-poll tax struggle, and it was a very significant part of my development as an activist.

The People’s March was modelled on the hunger marches in the 1930s, particularly one from Jarrow in the North East of England to London. It took place in September and October 1990 and there were three legs: one from Liverpool, which I went on, one from Glasgow and the other from South Wales. There were a small number of people who completed each leg, 25 at most, but other activists joined us at different towns and cities on the route and all three legs congregated in London for a mass demonstration. One of the people who joined us for a short distance on the route was (the now late) Cyril Mundin, a pensioner from Northampton who was one of the first people to be threatened with jail for not paying his poll tax. Marchers on the Glasgow leg of the march had occupied the council treasurer’s offices and barricaded the reception area, shortly before we joined up with them for the rest of the march to London. In the end, the News of the World “newspaper” paid Cyril’s poll tax – otherwise he would probably have been the first person to go to jail for poll tax non-payment.

The Liverpool leg of the People’s March took just over five weeks (including a few days in London at the end of the march). I was a postgraduate student at the time but my PhD supervisors were happy enough for me to take a lot of my annual leave for two academic years at the same time.

Most of the marchers arrived the evening before the march started, but since I lived in Manchester (which is near Liverpool), I arrived on the morning of the start of the march. The People’s March got a great send off with a demo of a few thousand in Liverpool. It attracted a fair amount of attention in the local media, as happened throughout the march – an important reason for the initiative, as well as being a focus for local activists.

About half the marchers on the Liverpool leg were already members of Militant before the march started. Some of us, including myself, were recent recruits but most of the Militant members had a considerable amount of political experience. One of the other marchers was a member of the miniscule Communist Party of Britain, but the rest were non-aligned activists. Some other organisations, particularly the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), were annoyed that Militant’s leadership of the anti-poll tax federations prevented their members from going on the march; I sympathised with that point of view but the team spirit on the march was probably better than it would have been if the SWP had got its way. About three quarters of the marchers were members of Militant at the end, but many of them dropped out of activity a reasonably short period of time after completing the march so I didn’t see many of them again. Militant had a big problem of members “burning themselves out”, and hence the organisation shrank rather than grew in size, during the anti-poll tax campaign. [As I pointed out in chapter 10, if Militant member (and big business infiltrator) Steve Nally had not said on national TV that the All Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation would “name names” in an inquiry into the Trafalgar Square riot, Militant would have grown considerably during the campaign; I’m sure this would have easily made up for burn-out.]

The way in which Militant, like other socialist organisations, generally worked at the time was that differences were debated within the organisation, which then put up a united front in the campaigns in which it was involved. I was not particularly aware of this way of working, since I had only been a member for about two months, and quite early in the march I received a telling off from the most senior member of Militant on the march, the full-timer Tony McNulty, for joining in with non-aligned marchers who complained to him about how the march was organised. Presumably because I had arrived late for the march, nobody had told me that Tony was supposed to be in charge! Needless to say, the normal way in which Militant conducted its activities was suspended fairly early on in the march, in favour of marchers’ meetings, since non-aligned activists and newer members of Militant (including myself) became concerned about the lack of democracy.

The person I got on with best on the march was somebody else who joined Militant shortly before going on the march – Naomi Byron. Naomi was about 18 years old when we marched, but she developed tremendously as a socialist on the march and since. She became the main youth organiser for the Socialist Party (which Militant evolved into) for many years, including long after she was a youth clearly indicating that the party had problems developing new youthful leaders, playing an important role in organisations such as Youth Against Racism in Europe and Save Free Education; she now works in the Socialist Party’s finance department. Naomi and I also got on well with another activist called Paul, but I have not stayed in touch with him. I have met up with Naomi on numerous occasions since the People’s March (but infrequently nowadays since I have left the Socialist Party) and we still get on well. Naomi only did about half the march, stopping at her hometown of Leicester and meeting up with the other marchers again for the final demonstration in London.

There were many public meetings and local demonstrations along the route of the march, and all the marchers were encouraged to speak at these events. The first time I spoke from the platform of a meeting was actually just before the march, at a Labour club in Stockport; at that meeting I encouraged Labour Party members not to pay the poll tax and talked about the forthcoming march. I spoke at several public meetings during the march itself, and at one local demonstration. I found that I was much more confident and competent if I made notes beforehand of the points I wanted to raise, but I never wrote out my speeches in full. Unless you are a very good reader, it is difficult to appear natural when you are reading from notes. [The exception to this is when your speech is translated into other languages while you give it; you can read the next sentence (or part of a sentence) while the last one is being translated.] I became a very confident speaker by the end of the march, although the political content of the speeches was undoubtedly far from brilliant – generally confining my comments to anti-poll tax strategy and encouragement for people to join the Labour Party and change it from within. As I mentioned in the last chapter, I was not particularly keen on joining Labour (and I made minimal attempts to influence Labour from within) but this was the Militant “line” at the time. I made sure that I sold (or attempted to sell) the Militant newspaper after speaking, so that people knew of my affiliation.

I am very tall (six feet four inches) and I’m thus well suited for carrying banners. I therefore spent much of the time on the march helping carry the main banner. Because of this, I was given the nickname Stevie Banner. I still carry banners a fair amount but that nickname hasn’t been used since, except when I occasionally meet someone who was also on the People’s March (particularly Dave Griffiths who was a Militant full-timer at the time of the march).

One of the most dangerous and amusing incidents in my life occurred during the People’s March. I was the only person left in a van that was parked at a petrol station, when the van started to move forward. I was in the back of the van at the time. I hadn’t yet learned to drive, and I was not particularly aware of the different parts of a vehicle. I therefore did not know about the handbrake that somebody had forgotten to put on. Instead of reaching forward and putting it on, I managed to scramble out of the van by climbing into a front seat just before it left the petrol station! The van rolled down the road until it turned off near a roundabout. Fortunately, it did not crash into anyone or another vehicle and came safely to rest. Social events were an important aspect of the march, and a song about this incident was performed at one such event. It was very funny!

During the march we stayed in a mixture of activists’ houses, community centres and the odd Labour club. Usually, when we stayed in people’s houses, we were put with other members of Militant or non-aligned activists. However, Militant was (and the Socialist Party still is) very weak in Birmingham. I therefore stayed with a member of the SWP in that city, and during a discussion with members of that party in that city, I had my first experience of cannabis. I don’t think I tried smoking it on that occasion but I certainly enjoyed the smell! I have later sometimes tried smoking cannabis but I have never felt particularly “high” on cannabis with it seeming to be a rather unpleasant cigarette. I very rarely smoke tobacco (I have probably smoked less than one packet in my entire life) and I strongly dislike the taste and smell of cigarettes. I tried a legal drug called “herbal ecstasy” at the V2001 music festival about eleven years later, and experienced no effects whatsoever. I once sampled heroin that was left on a spoon that a homeless person that I invited to stay with me used to inject himself. It tasted foul! Experiences like this helped me improve my model of the world, but their mood-altering properties could have been a problem if I had particularly enjoyed illicit drugs.

Several of the marchers joined Militant during the five weeks, and I probably played a bit of a role in their recruitment. I also helped recruit somebody who joined Militant after an anti-poll tax meeting. The person I came closest to recruiting myself on the march was a woman who I stayed with in Milton Keynes. At the end of quite a long discussion, she said that she would probably either join the Labour Party or a tiny organisation she had met at university – Workers Power. When I enquired what she meant about joining the Labour Party, she said that if she joined Labour she would of course join Militant as well. [I found out later that Workers Power also operated within the Labour Party, a fact that she presumably had not been informed of.] However, that woman didn’t join Militant in the end, according to some Milton Keynes Militants I met at a conference some months later.

The most influential person I played a role in recruiting, during my time in Militant/the Socialist Party, was undoubtedly Paula Mitchell (who met up with us briefly when the People’s March came to Manchester but did not come with us any significant distance). I first met Paula when my then best friend Julian Beard, who knew Paula at University College London, took me round her flat. I noticed that she had some anti-poll tax stickers on a notice board on her wall, and I was curious – she told me she was in the anti-poll tax union (APTU) on the Old Moat estate in Withington. Paula first got involved in her APTU at about the time I got involved in mine, but she took even longer than me to finally join. I met her several times in the meantime, including after I’d joined Militant, and I think my encouragement was one of the factors in her eventually joining Militant. Paula is now the full-timer responsible for all the London branches of the Socialist Party and she is on the Executive Committee (the leading body) of that party. I am hoping she will launch a leadership challenge for her party and its international (the CWI) to reverse its recent sectarian role (that I will criticise in later chapters).

When you strongly collaborate with someone of the opposite sex (or the same sex if you are gay or either sex if you are bisexual), there is a tendency to become attracted to that person. The two women in Militant/the Socialist Party that I fell for the most were Paula and Nathalie Monier (who died in an “accident” that I believe was an assassination, about a week before Princess Diana, as I’ll explain in chapter YYY). I was still very shy and unconfident around women when Paula was living in Manchester and never asked her out – the closest I came to a date with her was a trip to the cinema with my friend Ivan and Paula’s friend Marie Tivnan (also in Militant). I got the feeling that Paula had similar feelings towards me as I had towards her when I met her again at a conference after she had moved to London, but I made the mistake of telling Julian and agreeing to him finding out for me if my suspicions were correct. This was a very unromantic thing to do and, even if she did have such feelings, it is unsurprising that she replied in the negative. A long-distance relationship or one of us moving would have been a bad political move in any case, so this could have been yet another instance of putting the future of the world above personal happiness.

The local press (and TV cameras in Liverpool) had been quite willing to publicise the People’s March but the national media almost entirely ignored the march until it covered the final demo in London after it had happened. There were a couple of exceptions – a consumer TV programme called Advice Shop covered a day in the life of some People’s Marchers (recorded fairly early in my leg of the march but shown after it had finished) and an article (in the magazine of the Independent) about the Glasgow leg published on the day of the final demo – Saturday the 20th of October.

We arrived in London a few days before the final demo that ended the march, and we spent some of that time speaking at meetings in London. I remember speaking from the platform of a trade union meeting and an APTU public meeting in London. We also went to the national centre of the Militant Tendency, which was then a large building in Hackney, where another meeting took place. I went to this centre several times during my involvement in the organisation but that was my first time there. It was a good opportunity to tour the centre and meet the main leaders of Militant including Ted Grant and Peter Taaffe. We were presented with souvenir posters of the People’s March; I got mine signed by other marchers on the same leg and by important figures in Militant. At the final demo, I rushed after the left-wing Labour MP Tony Benn, and got him to sign it. I had been a fan of Tony Benn when I had illusions in the Labour Party in my youth, and still had a great deal of admiration for him. In recent years, however, I feel he has played a disgraceful role in helping some socialists keep illusions in Labour. At the 2001 general election, he resigned his seat as an MP, when he could have stood as an independent or preferably as a socialist alliance candidate.

The final mass demonstration occurred on a weekend, and was attended by about 35,000 people. This demo was well stewarded by the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation, but an unstewarded split-off march (organised by the anarchist-dominated Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign) went to Brixton prison after the main demo, where some of those accused of involvement in the violence on the 31st of March riot were being held, and it resulted in violence. Needless to say, it was this violence that dominated the media coverage of the march. The 26th of October edition of the Militant newspaper revealed that a leading member of the organisation considered agent provocateurs to be involved:

Small groups like Class War and those they attract are an open door for provocateurs to enter. If the state forces wanted a group to use to incite trouble they would not have to look much further.

It was just a matter of weeks after the People’s March that Margaret Thatcher narrowly won a leadership challenge from Michael Heseltine and then resigned. Thatcher came within a whisker of gaining an outright victory over Heseltine, in which case she would probably have remained Prime Minister. Arguably if mass non-payment had dissipated over the summer and autumn, then Thatcher would not have won so narrowly and the poll tax may have survived. If it hadn’t been for the People’s March, which provided a focus for activists at many towns and cities throughout Britain, then the mass non-payment campaign could well have fizzled out.

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