Poll Tax Riots: Ruling Class says ‘NO’ to Violence

The sceptred isles, the notorious home of liberalism, has just been racked by the most violent riots this century. Apart from the occupation and total destruction of Stangeways prison in Manchester because of overcrowding (now spreading to other jails), riots raged in the streets of London during ‘a peaceful demonstration’ to protest about the introduction of the new poll tax, or the ‘Community Charge’ as the government craftily insists on calling it. It is particularly significant that earlier riots over the last ten years have almost always been tucked away in working class, usually ethnic communities, but this one occurred in central London. A considerable number of buildings were attacked and damaged including the South-African embassy in Trafalgar square. For many years now this pseudo-classical edifice has had its windows eyed hungrily by many a ‘trouble maker’ as a tempting target for a brick. Their dreams came true as the ground floor went up in flames after being torched by the rioters. Apart from that, symbols of wealth were attacked, for instance, expensive cars were smashed up and ‘posh’ shoos looted.

Apart from mere symbols of wealth, more obvious targets like the riot police were seen as legitimate targets with 374 injured. There were several battles and hundreds of arrests. As a result, the police have just issued a document in which a their new policy to deal with armed ‘mobs’, is outlined. The ‘Doomsday scenario’ as it is appropriately called, is outlined in the Tactical Oppositions manual of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo). ‘Work’ began on this apocalyptic document after the Broadwater Farm riots in 1985. Discussing the content of this brainchild of the forces of ‘law and order’, a chief constable, quoted in the Sunday Times, helpfully defines for us what ;neutralize’ means. ‘Neutralize means to take out the offender. In essence, it is a shoot to kill policy.’ It appears as though ‘our’ bourgeoisie in the DisUnited Kingdom is getting a bit jittery – hopefully one day the organized and armed working class will give them an opportunity to try out their clever plans.

Meanwhile, the Sunday Times has produced the 2nd annual reckoning of the ‘top’ 200 richest people (see the other article in this issue The Roast Beef of Old England). With all the talk about inflation, cuts, and taxes and now ‘mob rule’, it will surprise some that the top 200 have amassed an incredible £10 billion more than last year! All this will not surprise Marxists who see the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands as inevitable – despite all the rubbish about worker ownership etc.! The biggest cut of this ‘new wealth’ goes to the queen, whose personal wealth is up by an estimated £1,4 billion pounds, partly due to her 25% increase in takings from the stock exchange – God bless your profits ma’am! Mind you, the taxpayer still has to dig deep in its pockets to fork out for the civil list. This ’perk’ for our ubiquitous royals was arranged in a deal with an earlier government when it was agreed that all of ’the crowns’ mining rights (on all of Britains beaches between the low and high water mark) would be exchanged for said civil list – ’you don’t get something for nothing in this world’ as the hypocritical bourgeois will always remind us.

The riots have resulted in a rash of long-faced and serious commentators in the bourgeois media helping us poor ignorant souls to develop the correct way of looking at it all, in other words, to ‘educate’ us about the merits of non-violence. Both the Labour party and the conservatives have been issuing virtually identical proclamations about the ‘rule of law’ in a cacophony of recriminations about ’mobs’ and the curse of violence.

The Labour party was particularly embarrassed as its trotskist fraction, ‘militant’, was one of the main instigators of the demonstration turned riot, working through ‘the Anti-Poll Tax Federation’. They needn’t have worried really, as these ‘working class entryists’ have quickly got the leaderships drift and condemned violence as well! Other M.P.’s, whether militant or not (who gives a damn!), have also openly declared in parliament their support for the non-payment movement. Hairsplitting debates ensued, with both Labour and Tory, as always, seeing the rioting as due to small bands of agitators who have no roots in the real grievances that their laws give rise to.

Thence onto a witch hunt that sought to lay all the blame at the door of aforementioned ’militant’ group. In fact, little silver haired old ladies, war veterans (hang onto your blunderbusses, good sirs!) and even, horror of horrors, Tories have spoken out against the poll tax and were on the demonstration. In the final analysis, the ruling conservatives, with lashings of insinuation and character assassination, were really searching for ammunition to hurl at the Labour party as the popularity of the Tory leader plunges to the lowest a prime minister has had this century. Meanwhile, the labourites set about roundly condemning the ‘troublemakers’ in its midst so as to continue its work of currying favour with bankers, industrialists and assorted other parasites on the body of the working class.

Thus the ruling class teaches the working classes the following: 1/ Violence is bad 2/ If you don’t like the Tories then vote for Labour.

The riots have been because of ‘the poll tax’. This tax is a massive attack on the workers and middle-classes standard of living and adds insult to the injury of the enormous rise in mortgage rates (from about seven percent two years ago to the present 15%), a fact which certainly surprised many who bought their council houses. In fact, if we refer back to the Sunday Times article we find that 50 of the ‘top’ 200 richest people are none other than – yes, you’ve guessed – property barons! What the tax entails is that instead of the old rating system – based on property values – now the rate is per adult in each residence. This adds up to an enormous reduction in rates for the very, and middling wealthy, and an enormous increase for the working class which will be especially affected because of the over crowded conditions in which it lives. A couple with two adult children living at home in a tiny ’two up, two down’ could end up paying four times as much as a duke living alone in a stately home! As a Television game show host night put it: ‘ThaaaaaAAAt’s democracy!!’

But whoops! the conservatives have somehow managed to alienate their traditional support amongst small shopkeepers, and now these ‘pillars of the community’ are all agitated about the ‘Uniform business rate’ which came into force last week. Up to 900,000 firms will be amongst the worse affected. They can see that this new tax along with the poll tax and higher rents could drive them out of business. Gordon Clements a green-grocer who is already £7,000 in debt, and whose shop is half a mile from Margaret Thatchers house in Dulwich, will have to pay £877 more under the new system. He is quoted in the ’Sunday Times’ as saying ’I’ve always voted Tory but I have my doubts about voting for a Tory government again. Mrs. Thatcher has lost touch with small shopkeepers’,

The immediate remedy? You’ve guessed again – to pass the cost on to the customer. Thus the national Licensed Victuallers association which represents pub landlords warned that the price of beer could rise by up to 15pin the pint. Most of the working class was already drinking at home anyway because it was already too expensive, and lets face it, most pubs aren’t as welcoming as they used to be, with most people heartily sick of pandering to the vanity of the landlord with his gang of ‘hard drinking regulars’.

Mind you, the rates on factories have come down so the industrialists will be 0.K.

The working class in Britain is slowly but surely developing a clearer perception of the way forward, and the anti-poll tax movement will bear several immediate fruits as well as long term ones. Thousands of people have witnessed police violence and thousands of people are gaining experience in organizing struggle committees: when this sense of working together assumes a class identity, as it is almost bound to do, the spectre of class war will loom again. Sadly, as has already happened, many of these impressive efforts will become prey to leftist and inter-classist groups which will seek to keep the struggle in a separate department. When the party has mustered more genuine working class militants to swell its minute ranks we can hope that we will be able to put sore positive alternatives.

When that time comes, we won’t attempt to be very original in our riposte to the pseudo-intellectual debate about violence or non-violence, labour or conservative. We won’t try and invent a ‘new’ analysis, in fact we can sum up our analysis in one well-known, but largely ignored watchword of Marxism: A watch word that condemns all the inane drivel of the bourgeois academics to the dustbin of history: ‘DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT’.