Revolution Destroyed?

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

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

Chapter 9

Poll tax – preparation

It is now widely believed that the poll tax was former prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s biggest mistake, and it was probably the overwhelming unpopularity of the poll tax (rather than the issue of Europe which was superficially the trigger) that was the major factor that led to her only narrowly winning the Tory leadership election of 1990 over Michael Heseltine and subsequently resigning. However, I have tended to suspect that Thatcher was playing a conspiratorial role within the Tories on behalf of the working class by overruling advisors in order to bring in such an unpopular and unaffordable tax, attacking the whole of the working class at once and producing an opportunity for a revolutionary socialist organisation, the Militant Tendency, to hit the big time by leading a struggle involving many millions of people. My current view is that she was most likely outfoxed by socialist conspirators who advised her, due to being overconfident.

Militant was then a secretive organisation that conducted many of its activities within the Labour Party. In chapter 2, I described how the Militant-led Labour council in Liverpool in the mid-1980s had inflicted Thatcher’s first major defeat, winning a large amount of badly needed extra money for that beleaguered city in the first year, but then fouled things up, sending redundancy notices to the entire workforce, due to infiltration.

The “community charge”, or the “poll tax” as it was popularly known, was used to partly pay for local services and was a replacement for the rates (which were based on the values of property and paid by landlords rather than tenants). It was a flat rate tax that was the same for a multi-millionaire as a low-paid worker, although unemployed people and students only had to pay a fifth. It was generally higher in areas with Labour councils because poor people generally use more council services (because many rich people send their kids to private schools for example), and poor people have traditionally voted Labour. Therefore, the Tory government attempted to blame Labour councils for the high levels of the tax, but most working class people correctly blamed the Tories for this massively unfair and unjust tax.

The poll tax was introduced in Scotland a year earlier than in England and Wales, at the start of April 1989, which was another (perhaps deliberate) mistake of the Tories because Scottish people are generally more radical and it was therefore possible for the mass movement to get established there before spreading to the rest of Britain. It was never introduced in Northern Ireland.

According to the book A Time to Rage, which was a history of the anti-poll tax struggle written by its Scottish leader Tommy Sheridan and the journalist Joan McAlpine, the idea of a mass non-payment campaign was first raised at a conference of Militant in Scotland in the autumn of 1987 by then Labour councillor Chic Stevenson; this proposal received unanimous approval. After months of detailed discussion in Militant’s branches, a special Scottish conference in April 1988 (again unanimously) decided to back mass non-payment. The first Anti-Poll Tax Union (APTU) was launched at a meeting in Pollok four days later, electing Tommy as secretary and deciding to build mass non-payment elsewhere – he therefore spoke at many meetings across Scotland, and later in the rest of Britain.

When the idea of a mass non-payment campaign was first mooted, other left-wing organisations were sceptical if not hostile. The leaders of the Labour Party and the trade unions were virtually unanimous in their hostility to such a mass movement, as they are generally to mass movements of working class people. Their historical role has been to hold the working class back since mass movements inevitably lead to people becoming radicalised (usually to the left but to the right when the movements are reactionary) and radical members can vote these parasites out of office. There were a few exceptions, but most Labour and trade union leaders at the time were pro-capitalist, despite many of them at times masquerading as socialists (usually in words but not deeds).

The Labour Party and trade unions were then regarded by Militant as mass workers’ organisations with capitalist leaderships – Militant called Labour a “mass workers’ party” whereas some other Marxist organisations called it a “bourgeois workers’ party” (“bourgeois” being Marxist terminology for “capitalist”). Some of those Marxist organisations such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) still use that term today, wrongly thinking that Labour did not fundamentally change when it transformed itself into New Labour. In contrast, Peter Taaffe, who was then the second most influential leader of Militant, behind Ted Grant, played an important role in shifting the organisation towards the position it (now called the Socialist Party) now holds of Labour being a completely bourgeois party (a position which I share).

The SWP in particular was very sceptical about the prospects of building a mass non-payment campaign against the poll tax. The SWP’s leader, the late Tony Cliff, said at a meeting in Scotland that not paying your poll tax was like getting on a bus and refusing to pay the fare! When the poll tax bills first arrived in Scotland, the SWP leadership (based in London) advised its members to pay up, but they did a u-turn when it became obvious that non-payment was a reality.

When the poll tax was starting to become an important issue in England, I lived in the Moss Side area of Manchester, very near Rusholme. Rusholme Anti-Poll Tax Union (RAPTU) was my local APTU, initially called “Rusholme Against the Poll Tex” but later named the same way as most other APTUs. I also went to a couple of anti-poll tax meetings in Moss Side but no organisation took off in that area, probably due to the lack of community spirit at the time (with big problems of gangs selling drugs and using guns). Community sprit massively improved years later, largely due to the Lashley Family Must Stay campaign against the faimily’s deportation which I played a leading role in, as I’ll describe in chapter YYY, causing gangs to move to other areas of Manchester such as Longsight, but there was a big resumption of gang shootings in Moss Side in 2006.

I went to the founding meeting of RAPTU, which was advertised as being organised by the local branch of the Labour Party. Militant had a big influence in that branch and one of the local councillors was a Militant member called John Byrne, who has more recently kept his head down in the Labour Party (voting for cuts to remain a councillor until ousted by the Liberal Democrats) as a member of the miniscule split-off group that produces the journal Socialist Appeal. John and another member of Militant spoke from the platform at that meeting. SWP members also attended and participated in the debate, and I remember getting a copy of their paper Socialist Worker rather than the Militant newspaper, because I was put off by Militant’s disaster in Liverpool that I mentioned earlier (I was a big fan of the Militant Tendency and Derek Hatton until they sent out the redundancy notices). I was also put off by the fact that Militant was then a secretive entrist organisation in the Labour Party rather than an open revolutionary organisation like the SWP. At that time, and throughout most of the anti-poll tax campaign, Militant members on the platforms of meetings called for people to join the Labour Party and change it from within, and they usually didn’t mention that they were Militant “supporters” (claiming that they were supporters of the newspaper rather than “members” of an organisation to try to avoid expulsion). Not making the so-called “open turn” earlier (i.e. becoming an open socialist organisation outside the Labour Party), preferably when suspensions and expulsions happened en masse in Liverpool, was a big mistake – I will talk about the open turns in Scotland and the rest of Britain in chapter 14.

My first activity of the anti-poll tax campaign was to build for a national demonstration, which happened to be in Manchester. The date of this march was chosen to coincide with the introduction of the poll tax in Scotland. There was another demo in Glasgow at roughly the same time. I went with some other people to the houses above some shops on Wilmslow Road in Rusholme, trying to persuade people to put up posters advertising the demonstration. These houses were chosen because they were on the route of the march, and we wanted to show marchers that they had local support. We were successful in several of the houses.

That Manchester demonstration was organised by the Trade Union Congress (TUC). The TUC leadership wanted to restrict the strategy of the anti-poll tax movement to demonstrating and waiting for a Labour government. However, many of us on the demo wanted to use it to help build mass non-payment, and many of the placards on it, as well as many marchers’ chants, called for such a strategy. This was the last demo on the issue of the poll tax called by the TUC – they obviously realised that they were helping build a movement that they could not control.

The demo ended in Platt Fields, Rusholme. I was persuaded to attend a “Militant readers’ meeting” held in a large pub room nearby. The room was packed and I just about squeezed in at the back; some people were turned away due to lack of space. One of the speakers was Michelle Lundström, a local young Militant member billed as a member of the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS). Militant was very strong in the LPYS, since young people are generally more radical than older people, so the Labour leadership closed down branches and eventually abolished it altogether in favour of its new docile youth organisation Young Labour, but the LPYS was still quite strong at the time of that demo. Michelle was not in RAPTU but she was in my Militant branch when I finally joined the latter organisation. I was very impressed by Michelle’s speech, particularly because it came from somebody so young and local, in contrast to the national speakers at the meeting.

However, one thing put me off joining Militant at that stage – the level of sacrifice expected from its members. This was illustrated by the financial appeal in which some of the donations were very large. I was not yet convinced enough of Militant’s ideas to make such a big sacrifice. When I did finally join over a year later, I had become convinced of the need for a large level of sacrifice and I paid quite a high level of subs, especially when I got a fairly well-paid job – for a while my subs were the highest in the Manchester/Lancashire region. I also overcame my reluctance to publicise my generosity and made some large donations, sometimes the highest, usually at public meetings or conferences. Nowadays, most socialist organisations, including those that came out of Militant such as the Socialist Party and Scottish Socialist Party, have realised that many potential new members are not prepared to make a similar level of sacrifice as the most experienced comrades, and the minimum level of subs is much lower. However, things were different with Militant in those days.

After the demo, RAPTU’s next task was to prepare for the poll tax registration forms being sent out. We encouraged people to send the forms back with a question to try to disrupt the registration process. I took part in this exercise. It was also a good way of getting ordinary people involved in taking some form of action, in advance of the much more important refusal to pay about a year later. RAPTU produced posters with the slogan “Pay No Poll Tax” in large letters on one side, and with advice and contact details on the back. These were designed to be displayed in people’s windows, to help popularise the idea of mass non-payment at this early stage. I went round all the houses in my street (Albemarle Street) in Moss Side and managed to persuade several people to put up posters in their windows. They didn’t stay up as long as I would have liked, but most people on the street would undoubtedly have remembered them being up when the bills finally came. Of course I kept a poster up in a window of my house throughout the anti-poll tax campaign.

There were threats of fines if you failed to fill in the registration forms, and there were other ways of finding out about people’s addresses if you refused. Therefore, Militant and RAPTU realised that non-registration was not going to be a viable strategy of defeating the poll tax. However, I would have continued to refuse to fill in the form, perhaps indefinitely, but my lodger at the time (Keith Guest) filled it in himself.

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