Though Cowards Flinch

There’s a lot of interest at the moment in the anti-poll tax campaigns of the late 1980s and very early 1990s. This has been reflected in various articles in Socialism Today and other publications. Yesterday, the local Socialist Students group held a meeting at which one of the organisers of the Kent anti-poll tax union came to speak about his experiences.

He brought with him some fantastic resources; a book of minutes from the Kent APTU and a collection of pamphlets produced by the group, and newspaper cuttings from the time. Of particular relevance to Canterbury students was a letter he sent from prison, having been jailed for non-payment, to the student newspaper as it existed back then.

Several things stood out to me, through his narrative and through the resources. The first was the sheer weight of opposition to Thatcher and the poll tax. Kent at the time still preserved some heavy industry and in areas like Aylesham, which are unheard from today, 30 out of 43 streets were recorded as sending people to local APTU meetings.

Even in areas considered a little intimidating and no-go by some of the organsiers, in parts of Thanet, a public meeting organised on the off-chance of people showing up was packed out. From Ashford to Ramsgate, Medway to Dover, Kent was represented in force in the anti-poll tax movement; even towns like Deal turned out for protest marches.

If I appear shocked at some of this, I ask the reader’s forbearance. Living in Kent, where Labour strongholds survive only in industrial areas like Medway, South Thanet and Dover, it’s strange to think of the leagues between thronging with angry and embittered workers, prepared to protest, demonstrate and ultimately refusing point-blank to obey the law.

The second thing that stood out was the role of the Labour bureaucracy. At the time, the Labour Party nationally had utterly failed to push for the type of campaign that would have derailed Thatcher’s unjust poll tax, whether her party had occupied six hundred parliamentary seats and Labour none. It was much after Militant had decided to make the centrepiece of Thatcher’s ’87 re-election a target that Labour began to wake up.

Stories from the ground are interesting too. Delegates, chosen by local community meetings under the banner of the anti-poll tax unions, reported to Kent meetings of the country APTU that Labour Party organisers dug their heels in wherever possible, opposing the calling of public meetings, opposing having Labour speakers on the platform and so on.

This was repeated in unions like NALGO, where the Right fought tooth and claw against donating money for leaflets to APTU campaigns, and when that didn’t work, attempted to water down the political content of the material that was published. Yet included amongst the many documents was a NALGO-backed leaflet calling for non-payment.

So much of this seems familiar to our struggles with the union and labour bureaucracy today. The same short-sighted attempt to confine struggle as much as possible to parliament, or at least within the Labour Party, exists today. Neither bureaucracy was overthrown by the poll tax struggle, but at a local level, legions of activists were won over and there are records of majorities in specific streets displaying anti-poll tax signs in their gardens or windows.

This exploded the attempt to confine the struggle to a parliamentary one, and John Major was ultimately forced to admit that the ‘community charge’ was providing too little milk for far too much moo.

Bearing in mind that public service cuts are another attempt to do the same thing – eliminate large chunks of the redistribution of wealth from rich to poor – the anti-poll tax campaign has serious lessons for us today. By patiently agitating and building a campaign, while posing questions of class and solidarity as key to winning the struggle, we can stop the attempt to cut public services. A simple refusal, from millions of voices, will topple the government.

It was significant, therefore, that the meeting went on to resolve that the anti-cuts campaign should continue. No one present believed that the University of Kent’s recent climbdown over the redundancies of eleven staff in Biosciences is an end to the attempt of the university management to inflict the cost of a HEFCE grant cut on to staff and students.

Proposals were also accepted that stalls be organised and staffed on the campus of Canterbury Christ Church University, as they too will likely be facing serious cuts – all the more so since the university is not a dedicated research university but the home of many vocational courses, like a nationally-renowned centre for Initial Teacher Training.

Since it seems that none of the three major parties, including Labour, are prepared to voice on a national level the need to keep public services running, to support benefits especially at a time of mass unemployment and to end and reverse privatisations that are always a prelude to attacks upon workers, we’ll have to do it ourselves.

Hopefully this is just a beginning.