Police square off against poll tax protesters, March 1990. Photo: James Bourne / WikiCommons
Revolutionary reflections | The moral economy of the anti-poll tax movement
Andrew Stone •The anti-poll tax movement took on and defeated a Conservative government seemingly at the height of its powers. In the second instalment of his case study of the movement in Coventry, Andrew Stone explores the ways that protestors developed political justifications for resistance. Part one can be read here.
The ‘common sense’ of capitalist society is that there is a natural equation between what is legal and what is just. Exploitation, inequality, oppression are all thus excused as long as they remain within the boundaries of what the institutions of a profoundly class-based system has deemed acceptable, and conformity to the laws which manage social relations is expected of the population. The anti-poll tax movement (APTM) profoundly challenged this discourse.
The predominant set of arguments that were mobilised against the movement were centred around a nexus of social obligations – to fellow taxpayers, to the law, and to the democratic process. Non-compliance with the poll tax was therefore presented as noncompliance with general principles of paying for social services, of respecting the legal process, and of democratic accountability. This was not political philosophy in the abstract, but the ideological battleground of the campaign, and it forced supporters of the movement to articulate a politics that challenged the legitimacy of these concepts. Once they had done so in relation to the poll tax, some went further to consider a wider social critique. This essay will again draw on research into the movement in Coventry, undertaken in 2001, to see how these ideological battles played out.
The broad conceptual framework used here will be EP Thompson’s ‘moral economy’. Although he developed this in specific reference to ‘confrontations in the marketplace over access (or entitlement) to necessities – (e.g.) essential food’,[i] in particular 18th century food riots, the theory has since been extended by historians in a variety of fields. In Thompson’s words, these are discussions ‘concerned with the social dialectic of unequal mutuality (need and obligation) which lies at the centre of most societies’.[ii] The thought-provoking, if abstract, work of Richard Bellamy,[iii] as well as Paul Bagguley’s excellent case study of the movement in Leeds,[iv] both inspired this application to the APTM. It is also deployed in Simon Hannah’s very useful new account, Can’t Pay Won’t Pay.[v]
The obligation to pay tax
One of the key national aims of the poll tax was to create, in Nicholas Ridley’s words, the ‘citizen as consumer’.[vi] This was to assert a rational public choice model onto local government, in which the only rational choice was to vote for those representatives who ensured the best ‘value for money’ provision of services. (Poll tax capping supposedly backed up this principle through national intervention.) A letter from Bernard Ison to the Coventry Evening Telegraph typified this view:
I don’t think that it is the poll tax that worries people too much. After all, everyone uses the services the council provides, so we must expect to pay. What worries people is the size of the poll tax. In the city of Westminster, the poll tax will be under £200. This figure has been achieved by cutting out inefficiency and incompetence – by good housekeeping. Why can’t other councils do the same? Or is it easier to spend someone else’s money?[vii]
A resident in the affluent Kenilworth Road, who again considered the reception of services as the measure of equity, was quite happy to pay the £394 bill due in Coventry, which for her would have been a significant reduction from the previous, less regressive, Rates system. She commented: ‘It’s good, isn’t it? It’s good for us. We all receive the same services’ – although she did worry that ‘nearly £400 is going to be a bit dear for some people’.[viii]
A clear attempt was made by its implementers to shift the tax from notions of contribution towards those of consumption. It was ‘a tool of social engineering… shifting (British society) from a social democratic to an “enterprise culture”‘.[ix] Yet even on the grounds of service receipt, many remained unconvinced. Tracey (who, as we saw in my previous essay, was driven into non payment by material necessity rather than ideology) considered the poll tax to be:
Just another overt form of taxation for not a huge amount in return. Certainly no improvement in anything. They weren’t offering, you know, better social services, or that you’d be able to phone up and get an appointment at the doctor’s at the drop of a hat. Nothing like that. It was just the status quo that was going to cost you a lot more…[x]
Not only was there a palpable resentment at the shift of the burden in the funding of local services, the legitimacy of the link between receipt of services and a flat rate contribution was also questioned. A letter from Peter Craner to the Coventry Evening Telegraph turned the traditional argument of subsidies for the poor on its head:
If wealthy people choose to live in large houses in isolated areas, fair enough. But when I am expected to subsidise their services, it is a different matter. For example, when somebody can prove to me that it costs as much to empty my dustbin as it does theirs, I shall concede the poll tax is fair.[xi]
The assertion that local taxation was not concerned with income, only with service outcomes, was seen as a mark of its injustice for the many that could not afford to pay. For many of my interviewees this cavalier governmental approach to their personal finances was summed up by Environment Minister Nicholas Ridley’s rhetorical question, ‘Why should a duke pay more than a dustman?’[xii] Christine, who misattributed the quote to Margaret Thatcher, placed particular importance on it:
It took me months to really realise that the phrase that got me involved in the first place was Margaret Thatcher, as a throwaway comment almost, that ‘the duke should pay the same as the dustman’. Well, there was no-one in that room (at the APTU meeting) that was on the same as a duke, yet [we] were being expected to pay the same…it’s so unjust it’s ridiculous. It’s the pinnacle of injustice. Obviously there’ s a political aspect but the moral anger I felt that she could just say it. She didn’t give a shit, basically, that people were too poor to pay it.[xiii]
Mrs F. Atkinson also raised this point in a letter to the Coventry Evening Telegraph, with a rhetorical question of her own: ‘If dukes and dustmen are charged equal poll tax, should they receive equal pay and perhaps equal respect?’[xiv] Clearly the concept of equity was one which could easily be used to attack the poll tax once extended from its narrow terms of reference into a wider social critique.
Jack Sprung was a retired shop steward at Leyland Triumph and the General Secretary of the British Pensioners Trade Union Action Association. In 1967-8 he resigned as a Labour councillor after nine years when he ‘grew to realise that there was never going to be socialism through the Labour Party’• He joined the Coventry Workers Association, a breakaway from the Communist Party. He argued that the possibility of such a wider social critique was what necessitated ‘blackmail…a splitting tactic to divide the community, and pander to the most reactionary people.’[xv] This tactic was the much-hyped ‘non-payment levy’ announced by the Labour council, a charge of £20.60 to cover for non-payment. This was easily accommodated into the New Right’s ‘free-rider’ discourse, though it was curious, wrote J.R. Raine to the Coventry Evening Telegraph,[xvi] that the council was simultaneously insisting that it would recover all its debts. Liberal defences of civil disobedience are generally more equivocal about tax revolts for this reason – that they are said to increase the burden upon others.[xvii]
Photo: Simon Speed
Yet this objection only applies if the refusal to pay fails to achieve its ultimate objective – the tax’s abolition. In the case of the poll tax, the successful repeal of the legislation resulted in a more equitable (though still imperfect) balance of burden under the Council Tax. Nevertheless, a remarkable proportion of correspondence to the Coventry Evening Telegraph that opposed non-payment referred to this ‘levy’ for non-payment. Perversely, the success of many people in evading payment and swelling this notional levy led others to protest at its imposition by refusing to pay either that portion, or the bill in its entirety. Though the vitriol against non-payers continued to flow, the effect, in the words of Mrs Sandra Vincent, was ‘if you can’t beat them, join them.’[xviii]
Such independent acts of what might be called ‘miss-compliance’ were more common than was immediately visible. According to the Poll Tax legal group report of an Audit Commission conference:
The conference revealed the existence of a vast unorganised protest movement who are sabotaging the community charge quite independently of the existing non-payment campaigns. These include people who are paying only their old rates bills, people who are deducting the transitional relief portion of their demands and people paying direct debit who run ‘disorderly accounts’ whereby no or insufficient money is to be found in them when payment is due.[xix]
Although some of this was undoubtedly accidental or unavoidable, the Audit Commission considered it was also a conscious, but undirected phenomenon. Its unorganised nature probably places the Commission in a better position than a work of social history to assess its numerical significance. None of my interviewees engaged in, or were directly aware of, deliberate miss-compliance (apart from earlier disruptions of the registration process). The likelihood that it was generally practised by individuals peripheral to the movement is suggested by some of the local figures who publicly engaged in it. Housing Committee Chairman Councillor and milkman John Mutton, unaligned but representing ‘Militant-controlled’ Binley and Willenhall ward, announced that he was paying his old rates bill plus inflation.[xx] Some, who were not directly associated with the movement, but with left-wing reputations to maintain, such as Councillor Raj Malhotra[xxi] and Green parliamentary candidate Janet Alty[xxii] did the same, although for both of them the net effect was to pay more than they owed. Others, such as Councillor John McNicholas, promised to ‘go as far as possible within the law’ without paying,[xxiii] an ambiguous formulation which probably satisfied neither side.
The obligation to the law
The reason that such a formulation was seen by many as ‘a fudge’[xxiv] was the central role played by the principle of obedience to the law in the hostile discourse of the local press and the Labour Council (as was the case nationally). This was partly the result of a disbelief in the efficacy of non-payment. The Coventry Evening Telegraph, for example, editorialised approvingly of the Council’s message that ‘refusing to pay the poll tax is a mug’s game’.[xxv] But the ‘ample legal sanctions available to councils’ to enforce payment were in the hands of the Labour Party.[xxvi] In fact, this discourse of power and responsibility was inherently contradictory – based, as it was, on a perceived impotence in the face of the law displayed by chair of the Council’s Finance Committee (and later Coventry North East MP and Gordon’s Brown’s Defence Minister) Bob Ainsworth’s insistence that the council ‘has certain powers and duties that it can’t get out of.’[xxvii]
Yet there obviously was a choice to be made – of whether to repeat the limited, but illegal challenges to central government exemplified by the experiments of the Poplar councillors in ‘municipal socialism’, and more recent opposition to rate-capping in Liverpool and Lambeth. What militated most strongly against this was Labour’s attempt to prove itself a competent government-in-waiting. According to the Coventry Evening Telegraph, this rendered anyone who suggested that a future Labour government would grant an amnesty for unpaid poll tax as ‘living in cloud-cuckoo-land (as) it would be electoral suicide for Labour to promise financial rewards to law-breakers.’[xxviii] The danger they perceived in being associated with such lawbreaking meant that their limited electoral opposition to the tax did more than abstain from non-payment, it actively sought to undermine it. Likewise, in its legal campaigning the General Council of the Trades Union Congress argued that ‘this central aspect of TUC policy on the poll tax should be reinforced during the summer months to counter non-payment and non-compliance slogans.’[xxix]
However, the assertion that the law was sacrosanct, and that to challenge it was to invite a state of Anarchy, bore little relation to the lives of many people – whether criminalised by debt or choosing to trust their own judgement as to the justice of various laws. The APTM combined these two themes. For example, a local May Day protest against the tax, which drew up to 1000 protestors,[xxx] and wound through residential streets garnering applause from residents, included a range of people – from pensioner Hilda Stagg, whose handmade placard read ‘Supergran says no to poll tax – don’t pay’, to sleeping babies wearing ‘Axe Poll Tax’ badges, and several local trade union banners.[xxxi] At the final rally Militant Labour MP Dave Nellist argued:
We have moved into illegality and declared war on Mrs Thatcher and the Tory tax… Yes, we are talking about breaking the law and I agree that you need rules for a civilised society. But it’s better to break the law than to break the poor.[xxxii]
An average of three hundred people per year were imprisoned for rates debt in the decade before the poll tax was introduced,[xxxiii] so the precedent for criminal enforcement was present. Nevertheless, large numbers of people exposed to this for the first time responded with outrage. For example, Tracey described to me her experience of being summonsed:
It was a Thursday morning and I got there about nine o’clock, when it opened, and signed the register. And there were so many people there! It was unbelievable. And this was just a magistrates’ court!
So I gave my name to a clerk and then waited. And by midday I could see that people were breaking for lunch. So I said (to the clerk) ‘Well, I’ve been here since nine o’clock and nobody’s called me’… and then she said, ‘There’s a warrant out for your arrest.’ I said ‘What?’ She said, ‘Yeah, because you were summoned to be here this morning…’ I can remember flapping, literally flapping, wringing my hands in despair. And then she trundles off and about half an hour later I was called through.
It’s a large court… Obviously there’s a police officer bloke, three JPs (Justices of the Peace), all men… They read out, ‘You’ve not paid’, etcetera, [they] didn’t listen to anything. They just read a prepared script and I didn’t really have a chance to speak and then they said, ‘You’re guilty of non-payment’. I don’t know when they decided this between themselves, because they didn’t particularly discuss it while I was there. ‘And…we sentence you to thirty days in prison’. And I just said ‘You can’t do that…’ I remember panicking. I said, ‘It’s not a question of not paying. I can’t pay. And I’ve offered to make payments, albeit not very much. You can’t possibly send me to prison for thirty days. I’ve got two kids and what’ll that achieve?’ And I thought I was going to collapse at that point…[xxxiv]
After discussion between the magistrates her sentence was suspended, dependent on a repayment plan. Tracey described it as ‘the most horrible morning of my life’, and the JPs as ‘completely and utterly vile’. Her experience of the law ‘was a real eye opener. I half wish I had protested and told them I wasn’t going to pay, all the hoops I had to jump through.’[xxxv]
The experience of the courts drove many to question the fairness of the law. In one such incident Jack acted as a McKenzie Friend [non-lawyer courtroom companion] for an Iranian man who had brought a copy of the Koran on which to swear, but the clerk insisted that he use a Bible. Jack complained to the court that this was racism, for which he was arrested:
They took me inside and I had a conflab with the magistrates, who said they’d charge me with contempt of court, and I’d go down unless I apologised. I said ‘I’m prepared to apologise to the magistrate, because I’ve got no beef with him. But I’m not prepared to apologise to the clerk.’ Well, the law only applies to the magistrate. So on that basis they let me off…[xxxvi]
The assertion that the law, even if unjust, must always be dutifully obeyed was denied by supporters of the movement. They noted that we regularly exercise a level of discretion between laws – local journalist and author Chris Arnot pointing to breaches of the speed limit and buying perishable goods on a Sunday.[xxxvii] Indeed the flouting of the same law provided ammunition for accusations of hypocrisy, with letter-writer K. Lees wondering ‘if members of the right-wing ‘No Turning Back Group’, which condemned anti-poll tax protesters for breaking the law, will now tum their vitriol against big business for its blatant disregard of the Sunday trading laws?’[xxxviii] In a similar vein fellow correspondent James Flynn pointed to the Coventry Evening Telegraph’s tacit support for breaking the same law.[xxxix] Activists in the APTM argued that nonpayment, although illegal, was only a civil offence, and should be viewed as a political rather than a criminal act. The analogy of Dave Griffiths, vicechairman of the Coventry and Warwickshire Anti-Poll Tax Federation, of letting a dog foul in a public park, reassured fears of reprisals at the expense of making the protest sound rather frivolous.[xl]
Socialist Campaign Group paper calling for Labour to support non-payment. Photo: Pipenetal / WikiCommons
Some people defended non-payment as a token act of civil disobedience to protest at a bad law. G.M. Locock, for example, described Dave Nellist’s planned non-payment as ‘a dignified, peaceful and proper way to register a protest against an injustice’, but believed that for most citizens ‘the cost of being taken to law to defend a principle is just too high.’[xli] But for many it was a pragmatic act of making the law unworkable – based on a view that the law ‘reflects current political power’, as D.G. Cowell put it.[xlii] If private pressure rather than unbiased persuasion was the basis of the formation of law, they argued, then it was hypocritical to complain at coercive opposition – as at least the opposition was a transparent airing of interests. Dave Cowell of the Mid Stoke APTU argued:
I have no crisis of conscience about this. The poll tax is a bad law. It is morally wrong and opposing it creates no problem for me. The law is unjust and people must be prepared to fight to change it.[xliii]
For Pat the debate was also quite easily resolved – legal forms of opposition could do little after its imposition except hope for a change of government:
I think that most people at the beginning assented to the idea that we had to do it legally. But I don’t think that when it came to practice that really had much cutting edge.[xliv]
The obligation to the democratic process
People who identified with the APTM generally disagreed with the idea that opposition to a democratically elected government is anti-democratic. Even many liberal theorists have made the point that not only is the ‘elected dictatorship’ of parliamentary democracy an imperfect form of government, but that even if it were perfect a democratic process does not always ensure a just outcome.[xlv] While the poll tax was commonly cited as part of a series of measures designed to weaken welfare provision and redistribute wealth to the rich, few placed its essential injustice in the method of government, as W.H. Oldham did when he wrote to the Coventry Evening Telegraph condemning ‘Mrs Thatcher’s dictatorship’.[xlvi] Rather campaigners pointed to the undemocratic powers that it bequeathed, such as those that allowed Community Charge Registration Officers to override the decisions of elected councillors.[xlvii] They also condemned the prospect that payment would be linked to voting, a possibility which was raised by the powers Registration Officers had to crosscheck electoral rolls, and perhaps the prime reason for the 1991 Census showing a one million undercount of the electoral register.[xlviii] Indeed, one of the prime reasons that the Conservatives had tried to avoid the use of the label ‘poll tax’ was the prospect that it would be viewed as a tax on voting.[xlix] But not all of its supporters were so circumspect. D.D. Lee wrote to the Coventry Evening Telegraph that:
The won’t-payers and their elected political representatives are bent on lawlessness in order to retain their long-established position of freeloaders at the expense of the responsible people of the country. Just as one can be unfit for jury service by virtue of unlawful activity, so should one be disenfranchised.[l]
Toni Cardinali, chair of Earlsdon APTU and rebel Labour council candidate, responded:
It is this kind of thinking which brought about Thatcher resurrecting the poll tax in the first place, i.e. that people should have to buy their votes. This undermines the very basis of democracy, which is that everybody has a right to an equal say in the laws which govern them.[li]
Many campaigners felt their link to the formation of these laws to be very weak, and so looked forward to their opportunity of a public platform in court. Although the majority of non-payers did not go to defend themselves, there were so many that even a small proportion doing so still proved an organisational headache for the magistrates. Some who attended did so to slow the process down. Christine related how she went to court to support a friend, Simon:
I’d discouraged him from paying. I felt really bad about it – he got his court summons six months before me… He stood up and spoke for about half an hour! And finally they just said ‘Okay. Don’t pay. Next.’ And he was just trying to use up court time – which was part of the campaign. Which I was in awe of, because he wasn’t political at all. But he did a marvelous job…[lii]
Others, like Tracey, just wanted their circumstances to be heard – but the legislation demanded that magistrates not consider them at liability hearings. Yet there was clearly discrimination exercised against those claiming a right to a McKenzie Friend, who were assumed to be blocking the process for political reasons unless they could convince the magistrate otherwise. Whether the Friends swung many cases is doubtful, (Gill, whose friend Toni did many cases, told me with surprise, ‘he actually got one person off!’[liii]) but at least they were of some assistance in helping people through a confusing and intimidating process. Jack, who as mentioned previously acted as a Friend, considered their restriction ‘another blow against democracy’.[liv]
Another sign that the law was acting politically, and that data collection for the poll tax had worrying implications for privacy (though to nothing like the extent that has become normalised since) was the special treatment of those considered to be ideological non-payers. In Leamington, for example, a distant court in Southam was taken ‘out of mothballs’ to hear poll tax cases, with the aim, campaigners believed, of preventing visible public protests and reducing court appearances.[lv] Then in January 1991 ‘routine’ cases were returned to the main court, while a day was set aside for the cases of five APTU activists. This suggested that investigations beyond the required ascertaining of liability had taken place, and that the reasons for their non-payment had already been judged. One of the defendants, David Beckett, complained that ‘I feel the council has victimised me because I am a member of the Anti-Poll Tax Union.’[lvi]
Karl Heath, a retired Coventry Polytechnic lecturer and Cambridge Law graduate, wrote to the Coventry Evening Telegraph:
You describe opponents of the poll tax as ‘politically motivated’. Why, in a democracy, should it be wrong to be ‘politically-motivated’? What is wrong, and politicallymotivated, is the attempt to rubber-stamp and rush through hundreds of liability orders like a conveyer-belt without allowing people to defend themselves.[lvii]
It was this necessary challenging of the legitimacy of legal and political institutions which gave the APTM a sense of, if not a developed strategy towards changing, social relations more broadly. When F.W. Finlay told the ‘non-payment of poll tax mob’ that they should not try to tell ‘our elected government’ what to do, and rather they should ‘shut up, pay up and grumble like the rest of us’,[lviii] the attitude spoke of someone who did not believe that people had a legitimate role in politics outside the election of governments. Sixteen year-old Zoe Andrews disagreed, saying that it was right to ‘speak up, stand up and don’t cough up.’[lix] Similarly, numerous attacks on non-paying elected MPs like Dave Nellist and John Hughes, or locally elected councillors or candidates such as Toni Cardinali, argued that their stance was anti-democratic – even when, in the latter case, his work in Earlsdon APTU was the prime reason for his ward selecting him.[lx] These individuals, although useful publicists for the campaign, were not its essential basis of authority – which was enhanced, not by deferral to structures of hierarchy, but by the entrance of ordinary people into the political sphere. Dean summed this feeling of empowerment up:
I remember it being very exciting. ‘People power’ may sound corny and simplistic but there was a sense that ordinary people had got their way. Which was a big surprise… The victory gave people confidence. It’s bound to, isn’t it? People think ‘Right, we can do this’.[lxi]
For the minority of revolutionaries within the movement, this pointed to a potential power that could be utilised to discredit state control. But for many it was seen as a legitimate form of dissent within the existing system that was necessary to correct an abuse of power. While many had their cynicism about those in legal and political office confirmed or extended, there was no automatic conclusion drawn in terms of a systematic alternative. As ever, this was a living and breathing debate with no pre-determined outcome.
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References:
[i] E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed’, Customs in Common, (London, 1993), p337.
[ii] As above, p344.
[iii] Richard Bellamy, ‘The Anti-Poll Tax Non-Payment Campaign and Liberal Concepts of Political Obligation’, Government and Opposition, 29, (1994).
[iv] Paul Bugguley, ‘Protest, poverty and power: A case study of the Anti-Poll Tax Movement, Sociological Review, 43, (1995).
[v] Simon Hannah, Can’t Pay Won’t Pay, Verso (London, 2020).
[vi] D Burns, Poll Tax Rebellion, AK Press (London, 1992).
[vii] Coventry Evening Telegraph (CET), 20 February 1990.
[viii] CET, ‘Social gulf made wider by poll tax’, 21 February 1990.
[ix] Susanne MacGregor, The Poll Tax and the Enterprise Culture, the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, (Manchester, 1988).
[x] Interview with Tracey, 31 July 2001.
[xi] CET, 30 October 1990.
[xii] April 1988, quoted in The Times, 22 March 1991.
[xiii] Interview with Christine, 27 July 2001.
[xiv] CET, 16 April 1990.
[xv] Interview with Jack, 29 June 2001.
[xvi] CET, 12 March 1990.
[xvii] See W Edmundson, (ed), The Duty to Obey the Law, especially R Wasserstrom, ‘The Obligation to Obey the Law’ and J Rawls, ‘The Justification of Civil Disobedience’, Rowman & Littlefield, (Oxford, 1999).
[xviii] CET, 30 October 1990.
[xix] Law Review 4, (March 1991) quoted in D Burns, Poll Tax Rebellion, p144.
[xx] CET, 19 April 1990.
[xxi] CET, 1 May 1990.
[xxii] CET, 25 May 1990.
[xxiii] CET, 1 May 1990.
[xxiv] Interview with Andy, 29 July 2001.
[xxv] CET, 24 May 1990.
[xxvi] As above.
[xxvii] CET, 24 February 1990.
[xxviii] CET, 9 March 1990.
[xxix] TUC annual report, (London, 1989) p230.
[xxx] CET, 14 May 1990.
[xxxi] CET, 8 May 1990.
[xxxii] As above.
[xxxiii] D Burns, Poll Tax Rebellion, AK Press (London, 1992), p168.
[xxxiv] Interview with Tracey.
[xxxv] As above.
[xxxvi] Interview with Jack.
[xxxvii] CET, ‘It’s unfair to blame Labour over riot’, 4 April 1990.
[xxxviii] CET, 22 December 1990.
[xxxix] CET, 7 January 1991.
[xl] CET, 24 March 1990.
[xli] CET, 1 March 1990.
[xlii] CET, 7 February 1991.
[xliii] CET, ‘Why the “ordinary” folk are up in arms’, 13 December 1989.
[xliv] Interview with Pat, 4 August 2001.
[xlv] See Richard Bellamy, ‘The Anti-Poll Tax Non-Payment Campaign and Liberal Concepts of Political Obligation’, Government and Opposition, 29, (1994) and W Edmundson, (ed), The Duty to Obey the Law, Rowman & Littlefield (Oxford, 1999).
[xlvi] CET, 21 March 1990.
[xlvii] D Burns, Poll Tax Rebellion, AK Press (London, 1992), pp12-13.
[xlviii] Richard Bellamy, ‘The Anti-Poll Tax Non-Payment Campaign and Liberal Concepts of Political Obligation’, Government and Opposition, 29, (1994), p30.
[xlix] B.K. Winetrobe, ‘A tax by any other name – the Poll Tax and the Community Charge’, Parliamentary Affairs, 45, n.o.3 (1992), p420.
[l] CET, 8 September 1990.
[li] CET, 15 September 1990.
[lii] Interview with Christine.
[liii] Interview with Gill, 1 August 2001.
[liv] Interview with Jack.
[lv] CET, 10 October 1990.
[lvi] CET, 23 January 1991.
[lvii] CET, 20 August 1990.
[lviii] CET, 5 June 1990.
[lix] CET, 15 June 1990.
[lx] CET, 13 April 1990.
[lxi] Interview with Dean, 23 June 2001.
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