The Poll Tax Riots, as they became known, were major acts of civil disobedience carried out in England. They were in protest against the Poll Tax introduced by Margaret Thatcher and her government.

The most prominent riot took place in London, arising from a demonstration which started around 11am, 31 March 1990. The rioting and looting finally ended at around 3am the next morning. This riot is sometimes referred to as the Battle Of Trafalgar, particularly by those opposed to the Poll Tax, because the main battle took place in Trafalgar Square.

Preparations

In November 1989 the All Britain Anti Poll-Tax Federation (ABF) was set up as a co-ordinating forum for a minority of Anti-Poll Tax Unions that had been taken over by the Trotskyite group Militant Tendency. The ABF executive committee called a demonstration in London for March 31 1990 (the day of Poll Tax implementation in England and Wales, it having already been introduced in Scotland); the committee estimated that turnout would be only in the region of 20,000 people. Three days before the event the ABF executive realised that the march would be even larger than the 60,000 capacity of Trafalgar Square. Executive officers of the ABF requested permission from the Metropolitan Police and the Department of the Environment to divert the march from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park. This request was denied, mainly because the police were following misleading intelligence from their Special Branch moles inside Militant Tendency.

In the days before the demonstration two symbolic "feeder" marches had followed the routes of the two mob armies of the Peasants Revolt of 1381. These arrived in South London at Kennington Park on March 31.

The day itself

On March 31 1990, people began gathering in Kennington Park, south of the River Thames, from 12pm to 1.30pm. Turnout was encouraged by the fine spring weather, and it soon became apparent that between 180,000 and 250,000 people were gathering. The official police report, issued a year after the riot, suggested that numbers were close to 200,000. A contributory factor to the size of the demonstration may also have been decision by the Labour Party to abandon plans to stage their own rally on the same day.

The march set off from Kennington Park at 1.30pm, and began moving faster than planned because some anarchists had forced open the main gates of the park, so people were not forced through the smaller side-gates. This meant that the march spilled over onto both sides of the road, and despite police and stewarding efforts, stayed that way for much of the route.

By 2.30pm Trafalgar Square, destination of the march and site of a planned rally, was nearing its capacity.

Unable to continue moving easily into Trafalgar Square, at about 3.00pm the huge march slowed down and eventually stopped in Whitehall. The police, feeling challenged and worried about a surge towards the newly installed security gates of Downing Street, blocked off the top and bottom of Whitehall. The section of the march which stopped opposite the Downing Street entrance just happened to contain a large proportion of veteran anarchists and a group called Bikers Against The Poll Tax, all of whom became annoyed by several heavy-handed arrests, including one of a man in a wheelchair.

Meanwhile, the tail-end of the march had been diverted at the Parliament Square end of Whitehall. Again, quite by chance, a large Class War banner (and the anarchists it had attracted) was at the head of this diverted and unpoliced march. They led the march up the Embankment for a few hundred yards, then turned off up Richmond Terrace , bringing the diverted march out into Whitehall, directly opposite the entrance of Downing Street.

Mounted riot police were brought up, and from about 3.30pm police tried to clear people out of Whitehall, despite both retreat and advance being blocked by further lines of police. Fighting and scuffles broke out and the Whitehall section of the march eventually fought its way out into Trafalgar Square.

From around 4.00pm, with the rally nearly officially over, published reports of events become confused and contradictory. It seems that the mounted riot police (those who had earlier attempted to clear Whitehall) charged out of a side street straight into the packed crowds in Trafalgar Square. Whether intentional or not, this was interpreted by many in the crowd as an unwarranted provocation, further fueling anger among crowds in the Square. At about 4.30pm, four shielded police riot vans drove directly into the crowd (a recognised police tactic in dealing with mass demonstrations, at the time) outside the South African Embassy, apparently attempting to force their way through to the entrance to Whitehall where police were re-grouping. The crowd vigourously attacked the vans with wooden staves, scaffolding poles, and other items to hand, all in an attempt to slow down the vans. The rioting escalated.

By about 4.30pm police had closed all the main Underground stations in the area and sealed the southern exits of Trafalgar Square, thus making it very difficult for people to disperse. Coaches had been parked south of the river, so many people's instincts was to try to move south. At this point, Militant ABF stewards were withdrawn on police orders. Sections of the crowd, apparently unemployed miners, climbed scaffolding and rained debris on the police below. Then, at about 5.00pm builders' portakabins below the scaffolding caught fire, followed by a room in the South African Embassy on the other side of the Square. The resulting smoke from the two fires caused near darkness in the Square and there followed a twenty minute lull in the rioting.

Between 6pm and 7pm the police opened the southern exits of the Square and slowly managed to force people out of Trafalgar Square. A large section was moved back down Northumberland Avenue and eventually allowed over the River Thames to find their way back to their coaches. Two other sections were pushed north into the West End, where looting and vandalism of shops and cars took place. Police ordered all pubs in the area to close which, together with apparently random police assaults on shoppers, onlookers and tourists, inevitably heightened tensions in the whole area by forcing drunken and disgruntled crowds onto the streets. Published and recorded accounts mention shop windows being broken, a few goods looted, and expensive cars being overturned in: Piccadilly Circus, Oxford Street, Regent Street, Charing Cross Road, and Covent Garden.

The original demonstrators rapidly became mixed with drifters and young people. Scuffles between rioters and police continued until 3am. Rioters were selective in their choice of targets: The Body Shop, McDonalds, Barclays Bank, Tie Rack , Armani, Ratners , National Westmister Bank , and Liberty's . As well as such shops and banks, Stringfellow's nightclub, car showrooms, Covent Garden cafés, wine bars and expensive cars such as Porsches and Jaguars were overturned and set on fire. Other potential targets were left untouched: pubs, small shops, older cars and the offices of the Irish airline Aer Lingus. The mob clearly made a political choice in their targets.

Responses

The response of the London police, the far left, the labour movement and every section of the Labour Party was to condemn the riot as senseless and to blame anarchists. The Militant executive committee made statements to the media about their willingness to publish information on the identity of rioters. Some anarchists, especially the high-profile Class War organisation, were only too happy to take the credit, and were the only section of the far left to explicity condone the riot as being largely legitimate self-defence against police attack. Despite this, the 1991 police report on the riot concluded there was "no evidence that the trouble was orchestrated by left-wing anarchist groups".

Afterwards, the non-aligned Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign was set up, committed to unconditional support for all the defendants, and to full accountability to the defendants. The Campaign was able to mysteriously acquire more than fifty hours of police video tapes covering the riot, and these were influential in acquitting many of the 491 defendants, proving that the police had fabricated or inflated charges.

In March 1991, the official police report suggested various additional contributing internal police factors: squeezed overtime budgets which led to the initial deployment of only 2000 men; a lack of riot shields (only 400 "short" riot shields were available); and erratic or poor-quality radio communications, with a time-lag of up to five minutes in the computerised switching of radio messages during the evening West End rioting.

At the time of media coverage of the riot, Prime Minister Thatcher was attending a conference of the Conservative Party Council in Cheltenham. The Poll Tax was the key focus of the conference; but as the coverage of the demonstrations unfolded, intense speculation also developed for the first time about Thatcher's position as Party leader.

Consequences

The fall of Prime Minister Thatcher

It is thought that the demonstrations against the Poll Tax, together with the general opposition to it (which was especially strong in the North of England (Community Resistance and Anti Poll-Tax Unions) and Scotland (APTUs)) strongly contributed to the downfall of Margaret Thatcher, who resigned as Prime Minister before the end of the year.

Changes in policing of demonstrations

The trials of anti poll-tax demonstrators in the months after 31 March served to confirm substantial doubts about the policing styles and methods which had been developed and introduced during the 1980s to deal with mass protests such as those of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the New Age Travellers , anti-Apartheid groups, and the Miners' Strike. The trials also highlighted the ease with which miscarriages of justice could still take place, even after the high-profile compensation and acquittals arising from the Battle of the Beanfield, the New Age Travellers at Stonehenge, the CND at Greenham Common, the miners at the Battle of Orgreave, and the Birmingham Six and the Guilford Four in Ireland.

Illegitimacy of the labour movement

The riot brought into sharp focus the growth in Britain of an underclass, seen in violent collision with everyday symbols of late-1980s wealth and affluence. These media images crystalised a growing mood that "Labour is no longer the party of the working class, nor even of the organised working class; not even Tony Benn can speak to the young working people who ran amok last Saturday." (New Statesman 7 April 1990). This created a vivid image of the labour movement's crisis of legitimacy, just four months after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the near-global collapse of state socialism and its allies.

Abandonment of the Poll Tax

After the resignation of Thatcher, the Poll Tax was eventually abandoned and replaced by the Council Tax, although this, too, bought criticisms of unfairness; while generally less harsh on lower-income earners than the Poll Tax, it nevertheless took no account of the income earned by the taxpayer.

Further reading

• Burns, D. Poll Tax Rebellion. Attack International/AK Press; London, 1992.

• Like A Summer With A Thousand Julys. BM Blob; London, 1992.

• The Poll Tax Riot - ten hours that shook Trafalgar Square. Acab Press, London; June 1990. (12 first-hand accounts of the rioting)

Films

Diverse Productions. The Battle Of Trafalgar. Broadcast on Channel 4, 18 September 1990.

External Links

BBC commentary on the role of the riots in the demise of Mrs Thatcher.

Gallery of photographs from the 31st March riot