Letters from London (10 page)

The old rating system in Britain was the means by which citizens contributed to local government revenue. Each house or apartment was assigned by the local authority a “ratable value” based theoretically on the value of the place if anyone wanted to rent it. It was a rough-and-ready system, made more so by the long periods of time between the revaluation of properties for rating purposes (revaluations that were always unpopular), but it meant, more or less, that
those who lived in large houses paid more toward the cost of local services than those who lived in small ones, and that the poor paid significantly less, or nothing at all. Every so often during the postwar period, there would be grumbles about the rates, but after other systems—such as a local sales tax or a local income tax—were examined, the existing method was concluded to be the least bad. What stirred the Tories into action in 1987 was three things. First, a series of run-ins between central Tory government and “high-spending” (as they were always dubbed) local Labour councils, which in Tory eyes needed bringing to heel. Second, fear that a forthcoming rates revaluation in England and Wales was likely to prove extremely unpopular. And, third, the simple fact that Thatcherism was a doctrine of radical reform, and after a while there weren’t too many things left still in need of radical reform. Mrs. Thatcher took a strong personal interest in the abolition of the rates, and orders were orders. It goes almost without saying that one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the self-mutilating course the Tories now embarked on was Mr. Nicholas Ridley.

The new “community charge” to replace the rates was introduced in Scotland on April 1, 1989, and in England and Wales a year later. Based not on property value but on local citizenship, it was very easy to understand, and its justification went like this: since everyone living in the same area makes roughly the same use of the same amenities (roads, schools, hospitals, policing, refuse collection, libraries, street lighting, and so on), then everyone should pay roughly the same amount to support these services. Under the rating system, some £45 billion was raised from some 14 million electors. Millions paid nothing yet benefited from the services; how much fairer to spread the cost of these services more widely among the 34 million local electors. That was the logic; but importantly close to the surface of the reforming Tory mind lay the following social vignette: decent Tory voters in nasty Labour boroughs being squeezed for unfairly high rates and constantly outvoted by squalid nests of four-to-a-council-flat Labourites who were being featherbedded by rates rebates that acted as an open bribe to carry on voting Labour.
The community charge, as its name implied, was about democratically equal fiscal responsibility within a given area. Opponents said that it was a poll tax, a straight per capita levy. Just as you can tell an Irishman’s politics from the use of
Londonderry
as opposed to
Derry
, so the employment of
community charge
or
poll tax
translates immediately into
pro
or
anti
. Within weeks of its introduction, only members of the Tory Cabinet and diehard loyalists were sticking to
community charge
.

In the summer of 1989, the Tory Reform Group had predicted, “It has all the makings of a disaster. The poll tax is fair only in the sense that the black death was fair.” They were right: the tax was an immediate disaster. One trouble with very simple ideas is that what is wrong with them becomes swiftly apparent to even the dimmest opponent. In the present case, everyone could see what the tax implied: that two street sweepers living in a single room at the most fetid end of the Borough of Westminster would pay the same as a millionaire and his well-salaried wife living at No. 10 Downing Street. The earl in his castle (or Tarzan behind his monogrammed gates) would benefit by several hundred or several thousand pounds; massed farm laborers and their families would bear this cost. Mrs. Thatcher likes to offer patronizing economic homilies to her opponents, and a favorite, oft-repeated line goes “You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer” Here, though, was the starkest possible case of making the rich richer while at the same time, and by the same process, making the poor (and middle-incomed) poorer.

In the first year of the tax in Scotland, £158 million, or 16.3 percent of expected revenue, went uncollected. The next year, it got worse: by September 1990, almost halfway through the fiscal year, £769 million, or 73 percent of the tax, had still not been paid. Attempts at arresting bank accounts and wages proved largely unsuccessful; in Strathclyde, 500,000 warrants had to be issued. Many refused to pay the second year’s tax as a protest against subsidizing those who hadn’t paid the first time round. In England and Wales, the poll tax was no less resented. On March 31, there was the biggest riot central London had seen in decades: a pitched battle in Trafalgar
Square, cars burned out in St. Martin’s Lane, looting in the Charing Cross Road. Three hundred and thirty-nine people were arrested, and 144 needed hospital treatment. Trotskyist and anarchist groups were blamed for hijacking a peaceful demonstration; even so, that protest was itself massive, consisting of 200,000 people.

Complaints came from all political quarters, about both the nature of the tax and the blithe ineptitude of its implementation. The Government had estimated that nationally the average community-charge bill would be £278 (as opposed to the previous year’s average rates of £274); it turned out to be £370. Nor could the Government blame those “high-spending” Labour councils; the Tory tax hit the Tory shires. Government estimates of tax levels in Chelmsford and Dover, for instance, were £180 and £150; the levels set by these Tory councils were, respectively, £397 and £298. In West Oxfordshire, eighteen Conservative councilors resigned en masse in protest against the community charge; when the leader of this group stood for reelection as an independent, he defeated the official Tory candidate by a margin of four to one.

The grumbles and the rumbles continued all year, as a stretched bureaucracy sought to administer an unwelcome tax. Demands sent out to those who had recently died seemed more shocking when the charge was per capita rather than merely on property. A group of soldiers on Salisbury Plain tried to refuse the charge, on the ground that they didn’t use council services; magistrates ordered 389 of them to pay. On the Isle of Wight, there was a mass summons of 4,000 defaulters; the case collapsed in farce, because the reminders had been sent out by second-class post, thus not giving people enough time to pay. In the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, the Liberal Democrat council threatened to cut off refuse collection for those who failed to stump up. Elsewhere, bailiffs did a growing business. “Can’t Pay—Won’t Pay” was the protesters’ slogan. By the end of October, six months after the introduction of the charge, one in seven of the 36 million poll-tax payers in England had paid nothing; a quarter of Londoners were not cooperating; the London borough of Haringey had nonpayment running at 42 percent. Nor could it even be argued
that the tax was efficient to organize: collecting it cost twelve pounds per head, as against five pounds per head for the rates.

The most prominent Tory to campaign against the poll tax—or, at least, against the manner of its implementation—was Michael Heseltine. In May, writing in
The Times
, he linked it directly, if grandiloquently, to Tory chances at the next election: “In many of the marginal constituencies by which the tenure of power is determined, the community charge is perceived to have broken the Disraelian compact upon which Tory power rests,” which translates as “Make it easy on the skilled workers or we’re scuppered, mate.” His three main suggestions were: that local authorities should be free to set whatever level of budget they chose, but that if they exceeded the Government’s calculation by a certain percentage local elections must be called to give the budget a proper mandate; that politically damaging taxes—on students, student nurses, the elderly living at home, and the physically disabled—should be scrapped; and that better-off members of the community should pay more. The lumpy Newspeak for this last, un-Thatcherite concept is “banding upwards by income.”

So the first round of the leadership election, a straight fight between Tarzan and The Iron Lady, was about Europe, the poll tax, the Conservative Party’s chances of winning a fourth successive general election, the notion that the Cabinet should be properly consulted by the Prime Minister, and the notion that Mrs. Thatcher was barkingly out of control and handbagged anyone who uttered a squeak against her. The campaign lasted less than a week, but was nasty enough to gratify the most vampiric Opposition. The natural tactics for a sitting Prime Minister would have been to go about her business as normal, looking serene and efficient, while the impertinent pretender jumped up and down trying to draw attention to himself. In fact, the opposite took place—a clear sign of unease on the part of the Thatcher camp. True, the PM took herself off to Paris a couple of days before the vote, to attend the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the reckless accusations were all coming from her side. These were mainly along the risible line that Mr. Heseltine, the richest man in the House of Commons, the counter-jumping squire, the
committed privatizer, was secretly, deep down under that suspicious blond hair of his, some kind of crypto-socialist. Mrs. Thatcher attacked Heseltine from Paris, while at home her team wheeled out two of her favorite old bruisers, Norman Tebbit and the inescapable Nicholas Ridley, to do a bit of kneeing and gouging on their former Cabinet colleague. Ridley, ironically, was now seen as the official Thatcher spokesman on Europe, although this time he managed to avoid references to uppity Germans and the Poodles of Paris. The chief wicked things alleged against Heseltine were that in economic policy he would be “interventionist” and “corporatist,” while over Europe he would be “federalist.” It was rather too jargonized for true knee-in-the-groin stuff, but at least it allowed Heseltine to take the high, not to say Prime Ministerial, ground. When Mrs. Thatcher accused him of a mixture of “personal ambitions and private rancor,” he could afford a statesmanlike smile, while the rest of us were left to wonder at the concept of “impersonal ambitions,” from which presumably Mrs. Thatcher had been suffering when she ousted the sitting Tory leader Edward Heath in 1975.

The Labour Party, which knows all about political masochism and ruling oneself out of power by internal strife, sat back with rare pleasure as the Tory Party drew the ceremonial sword across its own belly. Tory MPs of an older vintage must have looked back with fondness to the pre-1965 days, when a “magic circle” decided such matters, and when after “the customary processes of consultation” a new leader simply “emerged.” Postulant A would be told to dust off his morning suit for a visit to Buckingham Palace, and Postulant B instructed to walk out into the snow and not come back for some time. Now the whole system had gone open, messy, and uncontrollably democratic. Worse, it had snarled itself up with some quite unnecessary sophistications. To win on the first ballot, a candidate needs to obtain an overall majority but also 15 percent more of the votes cast than his or her opponent. Thus, in the present case, if there were no abstentions, Mrs. Thatcher could defeat Mr. Heseltine by fifty or so votes in a straight fight and yet be driven to a second ballot. At a second ballot, other candidates might come in, complicating things further
and splitting the vote. The 15 percent factor is discarded in this second round, but if no candidate has an overall majority the contest might still be deadlocked, and thus go into a third round. Worse, there are no provisions for candidates to drop out between the second and third rounds, and if no clear majority is obtained at the third time of asking, then a transferable-vote system operates until white smoke finally dribbles from the chimney.

The first ballot approached with the Tories in extraordinary disarray. Nobody knew quite how the voting system worked. Nobody knew who might or might not declare himself in a second ballot. Those who wanted neither Heseltine nor Thatcher would have to decide whether to abstain, and perhaps hand Thatcher a first-ballot victory, or to vote for Heseltine, and possibly give him such a head of steam that their own second-ballot candidate would have no chance. Conservative MPs faced more than tactical problems, too. Should they be loyal to the past, to a Prime Minister who had won three successive elections, or be practical about saving their own skins at the next general election? Polls published over the crucial weekend of the first-round campaign showed that while a Thatcher-led Party trailed Labour by fifteen points, a switch to Heseltine would transform the deficit into a one-point lead. Yet even if the troubled MP persuaded himself into that juicy position where personal, party, and national interests appeared to be the same, there were other, rogue factors. A cross section of the Party at this time would have shown a layer-cake effect: the Cabinet publicly supporting Thatcher, the back benches deeply split, the hard-core constituency workers very pro-Thatcher, the soft core much less committed. If you were an MP in a marginal constituency, Mrs. Thatcher might win you one solid vote from the electorate, while Mr. Heseltine might win you one and a half shaky ones. How to make the calculation? And how to explain it to your Thatcherite Party workers? Mr. Cyril Townsend, MP for Bexleyheath since 1974, decided to vote for Heseltine, though he knew that support among his own grassroots organizers was running four to one in favor of Mrs. Thatcher. The chairman of the Bexleyheath Conservative Association took Townsend aside ten minutes before a meeting
of the local executive committee and urged him to keep his mouth shut about his voting intentions. “His views,” said the chairman, “went against those of the ward committees, ladies’ clubs, luncheon and supper clubs, the businessmen, the local council, and all but one senior member of the executive.” Mr. Townsend declined to keep his mouth shut; worse, he appealed over the heads of the luncheon and supper clubs, the ladies’ clubs, and the businessmen. “I believe I have the support of the majority of people who voted for me,” he declared as he endorsed Mr. Heseltine. The vice chairman of his own organization responded by demanding a new Parliamentary candidate: “I am asking [the chairman] to set the process in motion. Candidates will come forward and one of them will be Cyril Townsend. I hope he loses.”