Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: A Short History of the Anti-Poll Tax Struggle 1987–1993
Chris Robinson, Thinkwell Books, £10

A LESSON for the Labour leadership lurks at the moral core of this timely history of the poll tax and the juggernaut of rebellion against it by working people.

Chris Robinson’s book reminds today’s leaders — and the wider labour movement — that the unjust, cynical “community charge” as it was euphemistically called was defeated on the streets, in parlours and in pubs, and not in Parliament.

The abject failure of the then Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, and his party’s cowardly siege of its own left wing in the miserably deluded hope that this would reward them at the ballot box comes across on every page. 

Sound familiar?

It was left to courageous, energetic young activists like Robinson and others like him to do the hard graft of organising popular resistance to this replacement for domestic rates that endured a slow and deservedly excruciating death in 1991–93.

Their reward was nothing less than the fall of a rightwing icon. The poll tax was Margaret Thatcher’s most costly political miscalculation, a £21bn existential disaster that toppled her in an ignominious blizzard of recrimination.

Other than comprising a superb, concise history of the tax, its background and context, and how the campaign against it gained more steam than the Flying Scotsman, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay tells a tale that has major implications for today’s Labour.

First, the campaign, by refusing to pay the regressive new levy, gained no traction within the parliamentary party and municipal cohorts who bridled at any hint of law-breaking, pitting long-suffering workers and the poor against out-of-touch Labour suits.

The book is set against the backdrop of the party’s civil war, ultimately won through Kinnock by Blair, providing the essential grid reference for understanding what is really at stake today as Sir Keir Starmer purges the left. 

Helped by a compliant right-wing media, Labour’s divisions greatly empowered Thatcherism and reinforced its assault on trades unions, progressive town halls and workers’ rights.

Second, the book provides refreshing and overdue absolution for the much-maligned Militant Tendency, Kinnock’s whipping boy that he abused to distract from his own, disastrous capitulation to Thatcherite monetarism. Militant was at the organisational heart of the anti-poll tax defence.

It’s a stretch to equate Militant with Momentum, the left-wing groundswell that catapulted Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership, but the frustrations from below that engendered both are clearly comparable.

Third, activism on the doorsteps and in the courtrooms brought down a prime minister, demonstrating the potential invincibility of unglamorous, patient grassroots activism. 

As Robinson writes: “The anti-poll tax struggle was the greatest campaign of civil disobedience in British history, and ended in victory. 

“More importantly, our campaign of mass non-payment demonstrated a crucial lesson: when we get organised, politically educate ourselves, put into place a worked out, fighting programme and have a bold leadership, we can win.”

Finally, the great merit of Robinson’s book that gives it such historical heft is the local focus he provides, by chronicling in fascinating detail the anti-poll tax campaign in his own backyard of Northwich in Cheshire. The author and his comrades in this sleepy rural town would be swept up by a tornado that rocked the foundations of national politics. 

This represents perhaps the most important lesson of all for socialists: that the battery of opposition to injustice derives its energy from communities, whose struggle to re-found Labour in the interests of workers is as old as the party itself.