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In remembrance of Margaret Thatcher. The poll tax riots that brought her down...
The Battle of Trafalgar Square: The poll tax riots revisited
Soldiers! Your labours, your privations, your sufferings and your valour will not be forgotten by a grateful country." The inscription on the plinth below a statue of Sir Henry Havelock, Major General of the British Army during the 1857 campaign in India, is as potent as it is appropriate.
The monument stands guard at the south-eastern corner of Trafalgar Square, casting a steely eye over the junction between The Strand and Northumberland Avenue. It's an unusually tranquil pocket of central London today, as tourists roam around the rare open space, and the fountains drown out the rumbling of the London traffic. And yet it was here, 20 years ago on the final day of this month, that flames sent smoke billowing into the blue skies above the capital as protests against the Poll Tax escalated into some of worst rioting post-war Britain has seen.
Tube stations were closed and much of the capital had to be cordened off as cars and police vans were set alight, shops looted and police and firefighters were pelted. Perhaps the most enduring image from the day is the shocking sight of a woman being trampled by a charging police horse. According to David Maynell, the then deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, trouble sprang from only 3,000 or so protesters out of a total estimated at up to 200,000, but the fall-out was far-reaching: £400,000 worth of damage, 400 arrests, 113 injured and, arguably, the downfall of Margaret Thatcher, who resigned eight months later.
The Poll Tax was a flagship policy of the Thatcher government. It had been implemented in Scotland a year earlier and its deployment south of the border was looming, slated for the start of the new tax year the following month. The tax would see the abolition of rates based on the value of a property, replaced by a fixed charge per adult resident and set by each local government. In practice, critics pointed out, that meant a millionaire living alone in a mansion would pay less than the average family, but Thatcher, defending the tax earlier that month in the Commons, argued that it was "a very much fairer system than domestic rates which preceded it", where, "a single person in one house would pay the same rates as four or five people in the next door house."
Continues here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-battle-of-trafalgar-square-the-poll-tax-riots-revisited-1926873.html
Soldiers! Your labours, your privations, your sufferings and your valour will not be forgotten by a grateful country." The inscription on the plinth below a statue of Sir Henry Havelock, Major General of the British Army during the 1857 campaign in India, is as potent as it is appropriate.
The monument stands guard at the south-eastern corner of Trafalgar Square, casting a steely eye over the junction between The Strand and Northumberland Avenue. It's an unusually tranquil pocket of central London today, as tourists roam around the rare open space, and the fountains drown out the rumbling of the London traffic. And yet it was here, 20 years ago on the final day of this month, that flames sent smoke billowing into the blue skies above the capital as protests against the Poll Tax escalated into some of worst rioting post-war Britain has seen.
Tube stations were closed and much of the capital had to be cordened off as cars and police vans were set alight, shops looted and police and firefighters were pelted. Perhaps the most enduring image from the day is the shocking sight of a woman being trampled by a charging police horse. According to David Maynell, the then deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, trouble sprang from only 3,000 or so protesters out of a total estimated at up to 200,000, but the fall-out was far-reaching: £400,000 worth of damage, 400 arrests, 113 injured and, arguably, the downfall of Margaret Thatcher, who resigned eight months later.
The Poll Tax was a flagship policy of the Thatcher government. It had been implemented in Scotland a year earlier and its deployment south of the border was looming, slated for the start of the new tax year the following month. The tax would see the abolition of rates based on the value of a property, replaced by a fixed charge per adult resident and set by each local government. In practice, critics pointed out, that meant a millionaire living alone in a mansion would pay less than the average family, but Thatcher, defending the tax earlier that month in the Commons, argued that it was "a very much fairer system than domestic rates which preceded it", where, "a single person in one house would pay the same rates as four or five people in the next door house."
Continues here: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-battle-of-trafalgar-square-the-poll-tax-riots-revisited-1926873.html
Excerpt from the documentary "The Battle of Trafalgar"
Full documentary:
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