‘Can’t pay, won’t pay’
With millions unable to afford to pay rising energy bills, many of those looking to fight back are revisiting the experience of the successful movement against Thatcher’s hated poll tax. Steve Score, Socialist Party national committee, discusses the lessons from the mass non-payment campaign led by Militant, the Socialist Party’s predecessor.
At the same time as the chancellor laid out his autumn budget, the Office for Budget Responsibility said living standards – real household disposable income – would fall by 4.3% in the current financial year, the biggest drop since modern records began in the mid-1950s.
The next two years it will see a cumulative drop of 7%. We are also in a recession that is forecast to last for more than a year and lead to the economy shrinking by 1.4% in 2023.
Most Britons’ energy bills will rise by £900 next year. The government’s energy price guarantee (EPG), which is capping ‘typical’ annual energy bills at £2,500 until April, is being extended, but will rise to £3,000 from April and last for another year.
Bills will be more than double what they were before the energy crisis took hold. Some other assistance has been announced, but the £400 payment made to all households in 2022 won’t be repeated. This is all on top of higher mortgage costs and rents, and in the face of food inflation currently running as high as 17%.
Fuel poverty
Even before the latest figures, it was estimated that the number of UK households in fuel poverty could more than double to 12 million in January.
Yet for the energy companies it is a different story. British Gas owner Centrica plans to hand more money back to its shareholders because it expects high profits. BP’s profits were £7 billion in the third quarter alone. Last year, BP boss Bernard Looney said his company was like a “cash machine”.
In the last quarter, Shell paid zero windfall tax in the UK, despite making record global profits of nearly $30 billion so far this year. It used the loophole that meant investment in new drilling in the North Sea supposedly reduced profits in Britain to zero.
Meanwhile, 10,000 households a month are forecast to have more-expensive prepayment meters installed this winter because they are struggling to pay bills, reversing a two-year trend the other way. Already nearly a fifth of households have prepayment meters (7.38 million homes). For those on the lowest incomes, energy is more expensive, and it means you are unable to spread the cost of winter heating over the year.
Most energy suppliers put struggling customers on prepayment meters, often against their wishes, rather than disconnecting them. However, that effectively leads to ‘self-disconnection’ when people don’t have the cash to top up the meter.
But also, 26 million properties now have smart meters (50%) which can be switched to prepayment mode – to act the same as normal prepayment meters. 13% of smart meters are currently in prepayment mode.
There is a mood among many for direct action, with references being made to the victory of the mass campaign of non-payment of the poll tax in the early 1990s when the ‘can’t payers’ were united with the ‘won’t payers’. This, the biggest-ever mass civil disobedience campaign in Britain, was led by the Socialist Party’s predecessor, Militant. Up to 18 million people were refusing to pay at one stage.
Mass organised non-payment resulted in the scrapping of the tax and the end of the Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s career. So, it’s no wonder that comparisons are being made.
However, there are also differences between then and now. The poll tax, officially the ‘Community Charge’, was a brand-new local tax (later replaced by Council Tax) imposed by government decision. Every adult was individually liable, and it was a flat rate regressive tax, replacing the household charge – the rich paid the same (often less) than the poor. It could be imposed even on individuals with no personal income if their partner supported them. Households with several adults had a huge increase in their bills.
Because it impacted everyone at the same time, refusal to pay became seen as a viable weapon to fight back. There wasn’t the complication like today of so many people on prepayment meters who cannot participate in the non-payment of bills without disconnecting themselves.
While there were potential sanctions that could be made against non-payers, it did not carry the danger of not being able to heat your home, cook etc.
‘Can’t pay’
Today, millions will be in the category of ‘can’t pay’. And the lessons of the poll tax battle can be useful for a discussion on how disconnections and forced installation of prepayment meters could be stopped by community mobilisation.
There is a process energy companies would need to go through, including going to court. Even the switching of smart meters to prepayment mode requires court action, although it removes the need to go into your house to physically install a new meter. These things can be opposed by mass struggle as well as detailed attention to the legal process.
In the 1990s, while we did everything we could to get the most powerful organised force in society, the trade union movement, to take a lead – for example in not collecting the poll tax – the union leaders did not support such action.
Today, the organised working class is rising up. The number of strikes against the cost-of-living crisis is on an upward curve. However, at the time of the poll tax battle the trade union movement had been through a series of defeats, not least the miners’ strike of the mid-1980s. Deindustrialisation was impacting trade union membership, and there was a low level of confidence among trade unionists in the face of big retreats by the trade union leaders.
However, we still knew that a mass organised community campaign could win and, unlike those who just echoed empty slogans, we set about organising to make mass non-payment a reality.
The trade union leaders and the Labour Party leadership opposed the tax verbally, but did nothing to fight it, actively opposing the non-payment campaign. Labour councils ultimately sent bailiffs into working-class people’s homes to impound their property and jailed people for not being able to pay.
We had time to prepare the campaign and, when it was introduced a year earlier in Scotland than England and Wales, the Scottish working class showed the way and organised against it. In England and Wales, we followed suit and prepared in advance for what was to come.
Without organisation at every level, from local to national, the outcome would have been different. Anti-poll tax organisations were built locally and connected regionally and nationally in the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation. The leadership at every level was elected and accountable.
These organisations were vital in getting the detailed information we constantly produced out to everyone. Today we have social media and the internet, useful tools we did not have then, but they are no substitute for face-to-face discussion to build mass confidence.
Anti-poll tax federations
To give an example from my own experience, the Leicestershire Anti-Poll Tax Federation had 32 local anti-poll tax unions in estates, villages and small towns affiliated, with a combined membership of thousands. This scale was repeated throughout the country. The most active anti-poll tax unions met monthly and had members on every street, so when they put out leaflets it was a case of dropping a bundle off to someone in every street.
It was through these that we organised the many tactics that were needed at different stages of the campaign, including mass coordinated court attendance, organised bailiff busting, and opposition to jailings.
Mass demonstrations developed around the rate-setting council meetings. On 31 March 1990, the day before the poll tax was introduced in England and Wales, the all-Britain federation organised simultaneous mass demonstrations in London and Glasgow, involving a quarter of a million people.
When the London demonstration reached Trafalgar Square, police actions provoked a big battle later known as the ‘poll tax riots’. Some claim that these big demos beat the poll tax. They were important, but it was organised mass non-payment which was the real reason for its demise.
Before councils could take action against non-payers, they had to go to a magistrates’ court to prove liability. We clogged up the courts by mobilising non-payers to attend their hearings. Sometimes local anti-poll tax unions booked coaches to get local people there. We assisted people by asking questions in court. We used legal tactics as a supplement to mass struggle, using a precedent – the right to have a non-legally qualified “Mackenzie friend” assisting you in court, and we trained up our members to do it.
This legal right was challenged, ultimately going to the court of appeal and, as a spin off from the campaign, is still a recognised right today. In the meantime, while the judicial review and appeal process was happening, millions were getting their cases adjourned.
Court rooms were unable to cope. Official figures show that 40% of the adult population were summonsed to court for non-payment of the Poll Tax.
With a liability order, one of the measures councils could take was to send bailiffs to people’s homes to intimidate them into paying up under the threat of having belongings seized. In Scotland, the equivalent ‘Sheriff’s Officers’ were being stopped by mass community mobilisations when they appeared. In England and Wales, with different legal powers, it was necessary to get information out to everyone that bailiffs didn’t have power to seize property if you didn’t let them into your house in the first place.
Bailiff busting
But in England and Wales we also built confidence by setting up ‘bailiff buster’ groups with contact lists of people who are willing to both attend resistance events and to mobilise others.
We also organised to stop poll tax jailings – the ultimate sanction. The number of jailings compared to the millions who refused to pay was far fewer than would have been if there was no organised campaign. Hundreds were sent to prison, including many Militant supporters. The late Terry Fields, a Liverpool MP and Militant member, was sent down for standing in solidarity with his constituents.
The government announced in March 1991 that they would be scrapping the tax by 1993. We continued to support people and campaigned for the debts to be written off. Many were actually secretly dropped by councils at a later date.
This movement showed that working-class people can win battles. It also showed the critical role that a party with the right ideas can play in the struggle.
Today, working class-organised mass struggle is on the up! Bringing together the growing wave of trade union struggles against the cost-of-living crisis in coordinated strike action is necessary. A one-day general strike as part of an ongoing movement can inflict defeats on this extremely weak Tory government.
It is vital to link the battle against fuel costs with the trade union struggles. It could be linked to mass community resistance to disconnections and forced installation of prepayment meters. Community campaigns could also put pressure on local councils to take measures to partially ease the cost-of-living crisis in their own areas, providing free school meals for all and subsidising free public transport, for example.
But it also raises the need for political action – to cut energy bills by nationalising all the energy companies. A nationalised energy industry, run democratically by the working class, could also plan greater investment in renewable energy production.
The vast and growing inequality in society is a direct result, not just of a sudden rise in fuel and other prices, but of capitalism itself. We need also to fight for the socialist solution, for the nationalisation of the top 150 companies that dominate the economy with democratic working class control, in order to plan for need not profit.
