8 Part Eight of ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay’ where CHRIS ROBINSON examines how the anti-poll tax campaign moves on from the aftermath of the magnificent 200,000 strong demonstration in Trafalgar Square that was turned into a ‘police riot’ in March, 1990 giving the media and political establishment the opportunity to smear […]

Part Four of ten articles exploring the history of the grass-roots movement against Thatcher’s infamous poll tax. CHRIS ROBINSON looks at the beginning of the fight back. Thatcher’s Tory government introduced the poll tax a year earlier in Scotland following their rejection of ‘Thatcherism’ in the 1987 elections. An acknowledged ‘Labour stronghold’, yet […]

Continuing with his series on the historic ‘Anti-Poll Tax Campaign’ that brought down Margaret Thatcher, CHRIS ROBINSON looks at how the political left were on the defensive in the face of the 1980s Tory government onslaught to end the post-war social consensus. With the Labour Party moving to the right, only the […]

‘A week is a long time in politics,’ former PM Harold Wilson once said. He wasn’t kidding. Three weeks is even longer, especially when you have three wings of the same party doing battle in the dire hope of winning the ‘centre ground’.  For that is what our mainstream politics has […]

To paraphrase that other disastrous Labour Party ‘leader’, Neil (now Lord) Kinnock: ‘Now we have the grotesque chaos of a Labour leader – a Labour leader! – scuttling around trying to pander to a rightwing press agenda and falling flat on his face!’ Less than two years from the next general […]

After forty years of work within Labour, by 1991 the Marxists of the Militant Tendency were virtually emptied out of the party for fighting Thatcher’s unpopular poll tax.

If ever there was a turning point in British postwar history, it was the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85. When the strike ended in defeat for the National Union of Miners (NUM), the full force of Thatcherite monetarist policies could be more thoroughly unrolled. Without the defeat of the NUM, the […]