For younger people, campaigning has sometimes seemed a like a fruitless activity. Many of us marched against the Iraq war, against top-up fees, against climate change. And still the government didn’t seem to listen. Furthermore, ours is the generation carrying the burden of the war debt, student debt, and climate debt, because of the wrong decisions of our elders. It is unsurprising then, that more and more of us are turning to civil disobedience to assert our voice.

But not all of our elders are to blame, and we don’t need to look far into history to see examples of resistance we can learn from. Indeed we only need look back to the last time that a neo-liberal Conservative Government was in charge. One of the key planks of Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 election manifesto in the UK was the ‘Community Charge’ – a regressive, flat-rate local tax. It was calculated that the Thatcher family would save £2,300 per year while an average family in Suffolk would pay an extra £640. It soon became known as the poll tax - a reference to an unpopular tax per head that had helped spark the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.  

Nowadays the word "riots" is almost synonymous with the word "poll tax". But there was another more long standing track to the campaign: non-payment. Following the 1987 general election, radicals in Scotland called on the Labour Party to support a non-payment campaign. When the support was not forthcoming the campaigners decided to fight on regardless. Anti-Poll Tax Leagues emerged across Scotland, with non-payment their preferred method. Thanks to public meetings, mass door-knocking campaigns and pledge-signing the support for non-payment became widespread.

As the date for the extension of the poll tax to England and Wales approached, so the anti-poll tax organisations spread there too. As local council after local council set their poll tax rates, mass protests took place on town hall steps right across the country. Campaigners worked out that that if just 1 in every 37 people eligible to pay refused to do so the court system would be clogged up for 17 years. Campaigners found ways of elongating court procedure by representing themselves and making procedural points. On the first day that non-payers faced the judge, 1,800 summonses were thrown out.

People also joined together in solidarity to resist bailiffs from entering houses. In Glasgow and London, tax collectors themselves protested at their orders to collect the unjust tax. In some areas the police declared that following up all of the defaulters would be physically impossible. However some were not so lucky. Amongst those imprisoned was the Labour MP Terry Fields, who spent 60 days in prison for refusal to pay his £373 poll tax bill.

Despite the eventual victory against the poll tax, Thatcher’s Conservatives still did great damage. They implemented a neo-liberal programme mirrored abroad and continued by New Labour which gave more and more power to big business. By 1999 a majority of the 100 largest economies in the world were corporations rather than countries. In the years between 1983 and 1999, profits at the biggest 200 corporations increased by 362.4 per cent. Since then the trend has only continued in the same direction. It has come at a cost to the poor - through mass privatization, reductions in funding for public services, the restriction of trade unions and the watering down of regulations protecting consumers and the environment.

So now we have Conservatives in government again, and it would seem that they are continuing the neo-liberal project where they left off. This time the call of the movement is calling not for the withholding of tax, but for major companies to pay their share; a logical call in a society where the corporation is the dominant institution. We can learn from the campaign against the poll tax that enough people actively resisting an unjust practice can lead to it being abandoned. We also need to learn that it isn’t enough to only change policy, or even governments. We need to challenge the neo-liberal project as a whole.

Tim Gee was Vice President of EUSA from 2005-6, and has recently written a history of campaigning movements called ‘Counterpower: Making Change Happen’. He will be speaking as a guest of People and Planet in the Edinburgh University Chaplaincy on Monday 31 October at 7pm.