POLITICS
Young, Upwardly-mobile Peasants vote for Mrs Thatcher
NOEL MALCOLM
Last month the Labour Party entered into the festive spirit by producing a party political broadcast, about the poll tax, in 14th-century costume. The message was a stern warning against voting Plantagenet. Such is the public's appetite for historical documentaries, however, that many peo- ple may have gained the impression that the poll tax is part of England's rich heritage, something to be lovingly pre- served along with Maundy money, swan- upping and the House of Lords.
Labour is particularly keen on the Peasants' Revolt at the moment — com- forted, perhaps, by the knowledge that it only has to go back 600 years to find that history is on its side. The historical facts, alas, are quite different. The Peasants' Revolt was indeed sparked off by the poll tax, but the real concerns of the rebels were thoroughly Thatcherite in character. Their main demand was for a free market in labour: they were attacking the wage- freeze legislation of the Statute of Labour- ers, and the customary feudal restrictions on the free market.
Even the extremist demands of Wat Tyler sound like radical Thatcherism avant la lettre: his policy of confiscating church estates and dividing them among the laity was surely the mediaeval equivalent of breaking up a nationalised industry, fore- shadowing Henry VIII's Flotation of the Monasteries. When the revolt reached Cambridge the rebels burned the Universi- ty archives; an old woman called Margery cried, 'Away with the learning of clerks, away with it,' as she threw the parchments into the flames. They then drew up a document, curiously prescient of Mr Bak- er's Education Reform Bill, by which the University surrendered its ancient pri- vileges of self-government.
During the second reading of the Local Government Finance Bill last month, Sir Ian Gilmour accused Mrs Thatcher of conducting a campaign against all 'in- termediate institutions', meaning bodies such as the universities, the Church and the barons (sorry, trade unions) which might act as independent sources of authority within the state. If this is true, then the rebels of 1381 were surely on her side: the Kentish petition demanded 'that there be no more lordship save the lordship of the King, all other men to be equal'. Sir Ian was of course right to argue that Conser- vatism has not traditionally been identified with Mrs Thatcher's heady blend of re- forming individualism and administrative centralism. Conservatives have usually been content with the existence of in- termediate institutions, not because they held some theory about checks and ba- lances or the optimum distribution of power, but because they accepted that different areas of human life would natur- ally express themselves in different forms of association, be they clubs, colleges or churches. Local loyalties would also be a powerful force in the forging of these natural bonds.
If the argument is left at this level of generality, Gilmour and Heath cannot be gainsaid. Where they are seriously wrong is in constructing a mythical history in which Conservatism has always been devoted to strengthening the autonomy of local gov- ernment.
The fact is that local government, as we see it today, is a jumbled assortment of powers and duties which has accumulated piecemeal and often unintentionally, the result of a thousand separate acts of administrative convenience. It has never been formed, or consistently defended, by any single party's political philosophy. And throughout this century, local government has been not so much local self government as a lower tier of administration for central government policies.
The whittling away of local powers has happened under Conservatives and Labour alike. (Though perhaps the most concen- trated episode of this was under Attlee's government, when hospitals, gas, electric- ity and water were all removed from local authority control.) A succession of laws, from the 1875 Public Health Act onwards, have authorised ministers to issue com- mands to recalcitrant councils, and if necessary to take over their powers. The activities of councils have always been strictly regulated by statute, and their capital borrowing has been subject to central control since 1888. The manipula- tion of the rating system in accordance with national economic policies goes back at least as far as 1928, when Churchill abo- lished the rates on agricultural land and de-rated industry by 75 per cent. And the proportion of local authority income which derives from national government grants has been steadily rising all the time: in terms of finances as well as policies, local authorities now act predominantly as agents of central government.
It is this simple fact which gives the lie to wishful, romantic theories of local 'auton- omy'. 'If the burghers of Islington want to employ 1,549 people in their council's policy department, why shouldn't they be free to do so?' runs the question; the answer should be, 'By all means let them, provided they pay the full cost themselves.' But the golden age of civic pride, which filled cities such as Leeds with their mag- nificent municipal buildings, has passed and cannot be recalled: it depended on a spirit of mutual self-help and local philan- thropy which could flourish only when local government income derived mainly from the rates and none but rate-payers had votes. (Until 1894, some local author- ities gave as many as six votes to anyone rated at a high figure.) Now local government is essentially an administrative layer of the welfare state, and the local rates which it collects have grown, as no one consciously intended them to, into a substantial major tax for welfare purposes. While the 'unfairness' of the poll tax is on everyone's lips, too little is said about the unfairness of any system which results in the inhabitants of neigh- bouring boroughs paying wildly different amounts in order to obtain basic services (such as policing or education) to which they are equally entitled under national legislation.
The solution to all this is simple and obvious, but it just happens to be political- ly impossible. It is to shift the funding of these basic services entirely onto central taxation, and to leave local taxes responsi- ble only for local amenities such as parks, libraries, museums and refuse collection. If the rates were reduced to this extent, there would be little objection to paying them in the form of a flat charge, just as people do not object to paying in this way for road tax or television licences.
The idea is politically impossible, of course, because it would involve a sharp rise in income tax. Attitudes to this may change after the community charge has been in force for a few years. But in the meantime, the most that Mr Ridley can possibly offer his Tory rebels is a little more mucking about with rebates at the lower end of the income scale — some- thing, perhaps, in the grand English leg- islative tradition of tinkering and mish- mash.
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