At the end of the nineteen eighties, after having largely defeated the working class movement in Britain, Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government planned to crown their victory with a new way of charging people for local government services, which became known as the poll Tax.

Instead, they found themselves faced with perhaps the biggest mass movement in British history, with millions of people refusing to pay, the courts, full local councils, overwhelmed and disruptive street protests across the country.

First, Thatcher herself was brought down and the tax soon followed.

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For many workers, activists and radicals, the nineteen eighties in Britain were a deeply depressing time.

The wave of workers militancy, which grew through the nineteen sixties and seventies and was boosted by struggles of working class women, LGBT plus people, Black Asian and other people of color, had come to a crashing hall against the neoliberal counter effect of Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative government.

Years of rising wages and living standards won by workers organizing and taking action on the job started to be replaced by widespread layoffs, deteriorating conditions, and mass unemployment.

This reserve army of unemployed workers was then a powerful weapon to be wielded against anyone still in employment who wanted to fight things like pay cups, because they could just be fired and replaced by one of the many unemployed.

One of these unemployed workers with Dave morris So.

In the nineteen seventies, I was a postman postal worker in Islington, North London.

In the nineteen eighties, I was unemployed.

Most significantly, I think I was helping to build a claimants union was the Union of Unwaged Unemployed People in Tottenham, where I lived in North London, which was very active throughout the nineteen eighties and it helped people with you know, their claims for benefits.

We fought for people's housing.

We were a social network as well, and I think in some ways that was a good lead up to the introduction of the bull tax.

Wondering if he wanted to spend the rest of his life working at the raw Male, like many postal workers ended up doing, Dave fancied a bit of a break, so he decided to quit to take some time off, during which he traveled abroad and mingled with activists in places like Amsterdam, Berlin and Poland.

He then got to thinking about how to apply the lessons he learned from them back in the UK.

So the nineteen eighties was a very significant decade in British history.

Up to the end of the seventies, there was a kind of post World War Two consensus that the ruling class in Britain was quite shocked about what had happened during the Second World War.

The rise of fascism, the rise of communism, communist governments as well, and after the war, I think there was a general census amongst all key political parties that the welfare states, stability, increasing kind of material possessions was the way to kind of keep people happy, to keep people quiet.

What Dave's describing here is sometimes known as the post war consensus, whereby following the devastation reaped by the war, powerful working class movements pressured governments into offering huge concessions.

This resulted in the development of modern welfare states across much of the developed world, with things like unemployment benefits, public housing, universal healthcare, old age pensions, workers' rights and so on.

These movements would grow over the coming decades.

But in the sixties there was a growth in new movements that were looking far beyond that.

They wanted to be free, they wanted to protect the environment, they wanted, you know, to have control over their lives, and that code on.

Throughout the ninet in seventies, there were the labor movement was strong and growing.

There were major strikes in the nineteen seventies.

There was a growth of movement to end homelessness by occupying empty houses, and it looked as far as like the ruling elite were concerned, it looked like the post war consensus wasn't doing enough to kind of gig people in their place.

And Margaret Thatcher, who is a name you don't say in public in this country except special circumstances, was elected as Prime Minister in nineteen seventy nine.

And basically the Conservative Party had planned for years to get back in power and to start cracking down, which they did on the trade unions.

They brought in new laws against the protests.

They started privatizing the previously nationalized industries, the gas and electric, postal service, the coal industry, and basically rolling back the gains that working class people had made since the Second World War.

So that was the kind of political backdrop.

The other thing that the Conservatives were very keen to do was to ensure massive unemployment.

Throughout the nineteen eighties.

I think we had something like three million people unemployed.

The claimants union movement had been built over the last fifteen twenty years, and we were fighting for more rights for claimants, for benefits and so on.

The government was kind of cracking down all round, and they would begin to sell off council houses, social housing and so on, so that was the kind of political backdrop.

There'd been some major defeats in the nineteen eighties.

First there was the year long minor strike, which was a colossal struggle the government treated as a war.

The minor strike was a pivotal moment in the history of the worker movement in Britain.

We've got a whole series of episodes about it which you can check out to learn more, and we've got a mini series with striking miners coming soon.

They basically declared war on mining communities and were determined to close down the mining industry if they couldn't control it, close it down in this country.

That was inspiring and heroic struggle, but unfortunately it was unsuccessful, which was followed by some other major strikes which were all lost.

Another key dispute here was the year long struggle of print workers at Whopping, East London against Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

This ended with the effective destruction of the powerful organization of newspaper print workers in the UK.

And there were other conflicts and disputes and campaigns that struggled to make Eddie headway against the government.

So that was again and the other backdropped to when the government brought in the poll tax.

They didn't call it the poll tax, they called it the community charge.

Made it sound like something really fluffy that nobody could object to, and it was really It wasn't just an unfair tax because previously local government was financed by households.

What each household paid depending on the value of their home notional value or actual value.

But instead of a tax based on home values, the new tax would be a flat rate paid per adult person.

So for example, the Duke of Westminster, one of the richest people in the country, used to pay over ten thousand pounds a year on his old estate, but with the poll tax, he would only have to pay four hundred and seventeen pounds.

And people that were working or living on his estate, like his butler and his chef and whatever cleaners, who weren't paying previously, was suddenly having to pay the same.

Now for most people, this just seems blatantly unfair.

However, this points to the drastic extent to which the Tories wanted to remake the UK.

Their Environment Secretary Nicholas Ridley said the following quote, why should a Duke pay more than a dustman.

It's only because we have been subjected to socialist ideas for the last fifty years that people think this is fair end quote.

And while up until this point the Tories had largely been successful in making the changes they wanted to in the UK, this was the crucial juncture in terms of how far they'd be able to push and would they be able to reshape the very concept of fairness, which is often thought about as a central feature of British national identity.

So it was a colossally unfair tex but it was also an instrument of social control because then everybody, every adult would have to register and be.

Followed around wherever they live and be.

In some kind of regime where they could be forced to pay this tax.

The poll tax register was also going to be compiled from the electoral register, so the tax was also a pretty obvious vote grab by the Conservatives.

The people least likely to be able to pay the tax for the poorest, who were much more likely to vote labor, and so if people tried to avoid the tax by dropping off the electoral role, then that would also mean potential labor votes disappearing.

So the Tory.

Government hoped that most local authorities were Labor Party run and they hoped that the local authorities who had to implement the tax would get all the grief from the public because inevitably the community charge would be higher in those areas which had to raise more money for their local services, which were basically working class areas rather.

Than leafy rural areas.

So it was a political gambol which because they had won so many battles the Conservative Party, the Tory government, they thought they could pull this off.

The tax was the brainchild of the right wing think tank, the Adam Smith Institute, which is a little ironic because Adam Smith himself rejected pole taxes.

But the Conservatives felt so invincible that they were going to try to do something which no British government had attempted in centuries.

People were aware that the last time the British governor the English government had tried to introduce a poll tax, which was called poll tax, was thirteen eighty one.

It lives in the collective unconscious of this country, inspiring what was called the Peasants Revolts.

There was a mass uprising against what was dubbed the poll tax in thirteen eighty one, which ultimately resulted in that pul tax being scrapped.

A long story which I won't go into, but it went.

Down history and no government since for the previous six hundred years had introduced this tax on existence, not tax on households or homes for raising money for local services, guide to local services.

So a lot of people were saying, wait a minute, that's the pull tax.

Why they called it community charge?

So everybody started calling it the poll tax.

The government said no, this community charge lot of pul tax.

Only one other country in the world about time had a poll tax, Papa New Guinea, but it was already in the process of abolishing it in the UK though, rather than introduced to tax nationwide, the government planned to introduce it first just in Scotland in April nineteen eighty nine, then introduced it to England and Wales a year later.

So at the time this was about nineteen eighty seven, I was involved with the Claimants Union movement and we had a Federation of Claimants Union.

Claimants unions were self organized groups of claimants of state benefits, things like unemployment also known as the doll, as well as old age pensions, disability benefits and so on.

Members of claimants unions would support each other with claims issues, with nonpayment, withdraws of benefits and so on, sometimes using direct action like building occupations.

They would also take on other activities like putting on social events and supporting striking workers on picket lines and providing them with advice on benefits.

There was about one hundred and fifty local claimants unions all over the UK and we used to have national meetings and holidays and all kinds of stuff that we organized for claimants conferences.

And we had quite good relations in the Tottenham Claimants Union with a similar claimants union in Edinburgh, and I remember I think it must have been an national conference in London of the claimants union movement, the Federation of Claimants Unions.

A guy from the Edinburgh Claimants Union was telling me about the struggle in Scotland against the pul tax and.

I remember saying to him, you know, I remember these very words.

Didn't we beat that in thirteen eighty one and so we had four warning in England and Wales, but there was growing resistance in Scotland throughout the first year.

The first year in Scotland was all about the government bringing in the registration system.

So the first year of its implementation, if you like, was registering everybody.

The next year would be setting the rates, each local council setting the rates that everybody was expected to pay, and then the third year would be actually trying to enforce the payment.

So in Scotland, really they pioneered, you know, all the kind of key elements of the resistance.

And this guy I knew from Edinburgh Claimants Union said that they'd set up this network called Community Resistance against the poll Tax and they were encouraging the setting up of groups in local neighborhoods, on housing estates in different towns and villages around Scotland.

Now, at the beginning, they'd.

Already had this experience of Claimants Unions, which were autonomous local groups, you know, of peoples supporting each other, promoting solidarity of mutual aid.

So there was a sort of quite a kind of natural progression there.

But there were other, if you like, powerful tendencies political tendencies also opposed the poll tax, mainly because they opposed the government, but they weren't necessarily encouraging the kind of movement that would go on to have the success it did, so the Labor Party they wanted the poll tax to be scrapped.

They didn't want people not to pay it.

They just wanted people to go upside petitions and basically wait until the next elections and vote for them.

And they wanted the pulp tax actually to still be functioning so that the government if it all started falling apart or was colossally unpopular, the Tory government would.

Get the blame.

In nineteen eighty seven, a local anti pol tax union was formed in the Maryhill area of Glasgow.

It started going door to door recruiting people to begin a non payment campaign and signing up members.

By January nineteen eighty eight, two thousand people had joined the group and pledged to refuse to pay.

Meanwhile, as well as Labor, other major parties in Scotland also weren't fans of a mass non payment campaign.

The SNP, the Scottish Nationalist Party that was campaigning for independence for Scotland.

They took a similar position, but.

They had a more nuanced strategy of encouraging celebrities and people that could pay not to pay as a matter of protests, but not encouraging people on mass not to pay it, because if they wanted to get into government, they of course would be relying on people to obey the law, pay their local taxes and whatever.

So at the beginning there was a kind of you know, how is his tax going to be beaten?

The SMP made a call for one hundred thousand Scottish people who could afford to pay the tax to pledge not to pay, in a move that they said would be enough to force the Tories to back down, which of course it wasn't.

In the latter part of nineteen eighty seven, other local anti poll tax groups started springing up across Scotland, often started by groups of grassroots activists, revolutionary socialists or anarchists, and these were organizing for direct action in resistance to the tax.

And gradually the whole non payment camp.

Well.

First of all, non registration, refusing the register, refusing to pay became absolutely the only way the tax was actually effectively opposed, and all the others just basically faded into the background.

So, following the pattern of resistance to the tax which began in Scotland, Dave and others in England and Wales started following suit.

So we were one of the first groups in England and Wales the Tottenham against the Pole Tax, and really it came out of the initiative of the Totten Playment Studio and we said, oh, we need a big, broad based campaign committed to non payment, committed to mutual aid, solidarity, protest and look what they've done in Scotland where the movement was becoming very successful.

So gradually lots of local groups started springing up all over London, all over England and Wales.

And once we set up top of against the Poulter, I think we started not so much with a big public meeting, but we called a meeting as I think fifty people attended and it was up and running.

The idea was to create a mass campaign, so we started having stalls in the high road every week and then other groups got set up in my borough, which is called Harringay.

To give you a bit of an idea, London is made up of thirty two boroughs, most of which have a population of around a quarter of a million people.

So there were four key groups in my borough, Hornseanwood, Green against the Pole Tax, Crowdchen against the Pole Tax and Green Lanes against the Pole Tax.

And then some of those groups, well all of those groups started setting up Ward based groups.

Wards are more localized kind of if you like, political geographic areas, about twenty in Harringay, so we tried to get Ward based groups set up.

This was replicated all over the country.

The idea was to call for non registration, nonpayment, generate massive amounts of publicity.

This was called before the internet, you know.

And in Haringey we particularly were obsessive about leaf fitting door to door, so we leafitted all homes in the borough, which is about one hundred thousand homes, four times during a two or three year period of the campaign.

And what we did is.

That we we did a you know, a kind of advice, you know, how to disrupt the poll tax, how to support each other, build a movement, how you can get involved.

It was all about empowerment and collective action on one side and on the other side.

It was a poster, a four sized poster saying pay no poll tax and with the contact details of what became Harrygate Anti Poll Tax Union, which was the kind of federation with did her again and it did say, you know, put this in your window.

By that time, the poll tax was already becoming notorious.

People knew they wouldn't be able to afford to pay it.

They knew it was a Tory con Conservative Party Thatcher con, So this poster was really popular.

Hundreds and hundreds of boasters went up in people's windows overlooking local streets.

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After preparing the groundwork, Dave and other organizers eventually arranged for a mass meeting open to the publick.

Our first big public meeting for the whole borough Harngay.

We bought the town hall in part of the borough.

A thousand people attended the public meeting.

Now, the left wing groups are really really keen on who were the speakers, but the kind of grassroots activists we thought, how can we use this public meeting to build the movement, so who cares about the speakers that much.

What we decided was we would sign people up at that meeting to become street reps, so they would represent their streets.

They would be the lead person, the condum it for the.

Campaign representatives for the campaign for their street or their block of flats or whatever.

And we managed to sign up five hundred street reps at that one event, so then we had the infrastructure for a total borough wide presence and coordination for what needed to be a mass movement.

We weren't under any illusions that the authorities would come down hard when push come to shove in trying to enforce this tax.

There were street stoors all over the borough.

With this base level of organization in place, local communities began to resist the first phase of the tax registration, where local councils would try to get details for every adult resident in each borough to bill.

It's worth remembering that this hadn't been the case before this point because the previous local taxes were based on households, and so the council building departments might only have contact details for one person in each household.

We had process, so that was the phase when it was the registration, we had burning of registration forms.

People would come to events and we'd have a brazier and people would be chucking their forms onto.

The Fireation resistance turned out to be pretty effective at causing problems for councils finding out who needed to pay the tax, in which local authority was extremely challenging in any case, so in inner London boroughs fifty five percent of the population changed address in a single year.

Even in rural councils over a third of people changed a dress.

Some council registration officers experienced harassment and violent threats from local residents as they went around trying to register people.

Some quit their jobs, and one, Fred Truman in Bristol, even died by suicide.

In the end, around a million people disappeared off the electoral role over the period of registration for the poll tax, and even the national census in nineteen ninety one reports a significantly lower population than there probably was, which is mostly attributed to people trying to avoid the tax.

We did the same when the bills came round for the tax.

Before we got to the tax implementation d which was the first of April nineteen ninety, you know the year before that was building up a campaign that will be able to convince everybody that everybody else was not going to pay this tax.

Outside of Haringey, other similar groups were being formed around the country.

Some were set up by claimants unions, some by grassrooms activists, and some were set up by members of left political groups.

The most significant one at this time was called the Militant tendency known as Militant now called the Socialist Party.

Militant at the time was an influential Trotskyist group, meaning that they were following the teachings of Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky.

They primarily existed as a faction within the Labour Party, although significant numbers of their activists, particularly elected councilors, had been expelled from Labour in the previous few years.

They embraced a non payment campaign and many of their members also helped start or organize local on payment groups, so.

The grassroots mobilization was growing.

First of all, we helped to create a London Federation of anti Poltax groups and our group Tottenmagatest the Poultax was the secretarial group and I was the delegator.

So effectively.

I was active secretary for the London Federation and there were already hundreds of groups all over London, and we had links with other federations around the country, and we called a national meeting because we thought they needed to be national coordination.

I mean, Scotland had its own kind of national coordination because they predated what we were doing in England and Wales.

So we called a meeting and about three hundred and sixty local unions, local antipol tax groups and unions were represented and that was the first national meeting.

Now militants had their own plans, so they kind of boycotted the events, organized something two days before just of their own members and called it a steering committee for an All Britain Federation, which was quite a sectarian thing to do.

We talk more about the strategies of other revolutionary left groups in the bonus episode of this double episode, available for our supporters on Patreon link in the show notes.

But this kind of decision is not a particularly unique one for this kind of socialist group.

Part of their typical strategy is to work within united fronts on campaigns, and larger groups will often try to lead these campaigns so that could either mean trying to take over existing umbrella groups or if this doesn't seem possible, they might set up their own versions.

In this case, though everyone seemed to agree that the priority was beating the tax.

However, we didn't want to get into a dispute with them, so following the first national meeting, had that first national meeting, we agreed to work with Milleton and the groups that they had set up to create and unified All Britain Federation.

But they were already a pre existing national organization with like three or four thousand members, so they basically engineered the situation where they were completely dominant in the ORBIT Federation and there were only three independent delegates from Harringay, Bristol and I can't remember the other area possibly leads federations that were on the national committee.

So it was a very uneasy kind of alliance at the national level.

But they didn't really do much at the national level, and all the activity really was at the grassroots level, and the movement continued to grow and to be coordinated horizontally in all kinds of different ways.

At this meeting in November nineteen eighty nine, in order to build the strongest level of organization against the poltar acts.

Dave and other grassroots activists essentially agreed to form part of an overall federation controlled by Militant, but they decided that they also needed to preserve a certain level of autonomy, the ability to organize independently of Militant, if that would become necessary at some point.

At this time, Militant did have elected officials in Parliament and in local councils, which could give them a conflict of interest in terms of councils legal responsibilities with collecting the tax, and so a level of caution around this possibility would seem sensible.

What we decided to do is to ensure that national coordination could continue independent of any party control, and we set up something called the three D network, which became very important later on.

Three D which is don't register, don't pay, don't collect.

These referred to the three main strategies of the movement in England and Wales to resist registrationation for the tax, resist paying the tax, and encourage council workers to resist collecting the tax.

In Scotland, by this point, the registration phase for the tax was already complete.

There had been debates within the movement about whether or not to try to organize resistance to registration, but this resulted in most groups there deciding not to resist registration and instead focus on non payment.

Some left groups didn't have faith in a community non payment campaign and so instead argued for a focus on trying to get council workers to refuse collecting the tax through their trade unions.

Now we do discuss this in a bit more detail in our bonus episode for our patron supporters, available in the link on the show notes, but not to give you a spoiler, we're not going to be talking much about this during these episodes because while a couple of unions did nominally pass motions supporting the non payment campaign, none of the efforts to encourage workers to refuse to collect the tax really came to anything.

Still, network did appeal to workers not to collect, although the bulk of its activity was focused on encouraging people not to register or pay.

We had our own national network and bulletins and communication channels.

So meanwhile, the London Federation kind of became transformed and basically taken over by militant in a kind of uneasy, not completely clear way However, the coordination at grassroots level across London continued.

So I was no longer secretary.

But everybody agreed that the one thing that nationally we all need to do was prepared for a mass demonstration in central London but also in Glasgow in Scotland on the thirty first of March Saturday, thirty first of March nineteen ninety.

Yes, so the big date, certainly in England and Wales, was thirty first of March nineteen ninety because the following day, the first of April, was the implementation dates in which bills would start being sent out by local authorities.

Before the mass central demonstration in London, there were significant large protests in villages, towns and cities across Britain.

Now, something absolutely remarkable happened in the week or two before that date.

All over the country.

Local councils were meeting to set their rates, what they were going to charge, and every single council meeting of that kind resulted in mass protests all over the country, including in small, quiet villages everywhere, and with phenomenal turnouts.

We're talking about I mean Harringing.

I think we had about one thousand people, but even in some places which had a population of maybe total pop place of twenty thousand, they might get five hundred people turning up at council meetings to say don't implement the poll tax and so on.

Actually, in Haringey we had the highest rates in the whole country.

I think it was seven hundred and forty pounds a year adults were expected to pay.

This is an equivalent of over two one hundred pounds today, so would be over four two hundred pounds for a standard household of two adults, and of course significantly more for people with roommates or children aged over eighteen.

For some other examples of local protests, ten thousand people marched in Plymouth in a protest organized by a former Conservative Party voter, five thousand marched in Taunton, fifteen hundred people took to the streets in Stroud.

In the small quiet town of Midsummer Norton and Radstock, ten percent of the total population of twenty thousand residents marched against at tax and pelted police with stones, bottles and rotten fruit.

Local battles with police also all over the place, including Bristol, where twenty six people were arrested and multiple police officers injured, one of them kicked unconscious.

In Hackney, East London, after police attacked demonstrators with batons, the crowd defended themselves with bricks, bottles and stones and then began attacking local shops, smashing windows and expropriating goods.

Almost thirty police were injured and fifty seven people were arrested.

In Rochester upon Medway, the Kent Evening Post denounced protesters who stormed a council meeting as quote animals.

In Exeter, four police officers were injured in fights with protesters who also threw food at counselors in the council chamber, reportedly hitting the mere in the face with a pasty.

So they had this rolling protests movement at the grassroots everywhere in the country.

And this was all in the two weeks before the national demonstration.

I later learned that police.

Estimates official estimates for the demonstration in Trafalgar Square, Central London, they expected twenty thousand people to turn up, but anybody involved in that movement would have known it was going to be ten times that, and that's what happened.

About two hundred thousand people.

And we've had some very large demonstrations since then, but at the time it was.

One of the largest ever in British history.

And I remember in Harringay we all met at the local underground station, about two hundred and fifty people, people carrying plat guards, people dressed for a kind of day out, carnival celebration of the movement.

Yes, people were angry about the tax, but they were up to then it had all been very localized.

Everybody was beavering away in their local areas.

It was great to come together.

I mean almost every you know, local group had their own banner to say, you know whatever, cattering against the poll tax or also anti poll tax groups.

Some of them based in workplaces or it could have been you know, a school.

There was all kinds of different groups with banners and blackards, all coming together in just south of the river, preparing to march to Travagar Square for this mass demonstration.

On that day.

I decided not to be involved in the London wide kind of organization of that march, and I focused on mobilizing the people in Harangey.

I think I may have had a megaphone and you know one time and that kind of stuff, so that the organization of the demonstration was largely left to the All Britain Federation, so people marched in their sections and it was quite fluid in many ways, and it was a really fun, positive but angry atmosphere.

And we marched past Downing Street where the Prime Minister hangs out head of government, and I think it was huge.

We were marched to the Fargusku which only has a capacity of.

About sixty thousand people.

That when the organizers a few days beforehand realized it was going to be absolutely huge, they tried to get the police to agree to re routing the march to Hyde Park, which is a massive open space that could have gobbined eight millions, but it was refused.

And when people got to Downing Street, unsurprisingly, at one point some people sat down and had a protest opposite.

Down the street.

Now, normally, you know, that's not a big deal.

After a while, people get up and move on, but the very quickly police kind of zoomed in and tried to keep people moving.

Now, according to the excellent book Poll Tax Rebellion by Danny Burns, which we've relied on heavily for these episodes, the initial sit down outside down street containing the home of the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, only consisted of around twenty people, but two of them were violently arrested by police.

One man in a wheelchair was pulled out of his chair and thrown into a police fan, and a woman was arrested and stripped of her clothes in front of the crowd.

This resulted in more people sitting down.

This resulted in police forces arriving and it looked like reflecting afterwards that the police wanted a confrontation.

This group seyn Down swelled to around three hundred.

They basically tried to move people away from downing streets and force some everybody into Travalgar Square and the police would surround the square and contain the demonstration.

It wasn't possible, it didn't happen.

It created huge amount of resentment and conflicts and battles started erupting.

First, demonstrators responded to baton charges using whatever they had to hand, fighting with placard sticks or throwing banner poles and bottles.

The whole mood of the demonstration changed.

Police started driving police fans into the demonstration.

Really the whole thing degenerated really quickly into a massive physical battle where people defended themselves from police violence.

Please betruncheons, cars driving at people.

A lot of people were injured by the police.

The police completely lost control.

Police drove numerous vans at high speed into crowds of protesters, mowing pedestrians down at speeds of up to forty miles an hour.

So people began trying to block in police fans with their bodies, banging on the windows and attacking them with whatever they could, like scaffolding poles.

A temporary construction cabin was set on fire, as was South Africa House, the diplomatic mission of apartheid South Africa.

Yeah, I mean it decended into a riot basically, and it spread out from Trafaber Square all over the center of London, people barricading streets and looting.

There was looting in particular on roads after Faber Square, like Regent Street.

Symbols of wealth were violently attacked, like shops selling jewelry and fur coats, and luxury cars like BMW's were overturned.

Really, the whole thing just got completely out of control.

I think they police underestimated the numbers, They underestimated the.

Depth of anger.

After ten years of thatterism and previous defeats through you know, government intransigence and the police had been militarized in a way the previous ten years that hadn't happened in the previous century, and people fought back and it became the worst really the or most significant example of public disorder in England really for probably a century or something.

By the end of the day, five hundred and forty two police officers had been injured, in addition to thousands of demonstrators and members of the public who had been indiscriminately beaten by police.

Three hundred and forty one were also arrested.

Yeah, they luck out, They luck out, and luck out out.

Adios learn more about what happened following the poll tax riot and the subsequent non payment campaign in Part two.

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Our theme tune is Bella Chau Thanks for permission to use it from Disky Dead Soiler.

You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Engin Hassan.

Thanks for listening.

Catch you next time, Lady