The attack on local government has been to the fore of Tory policies over the last 11 years. The ideological offensive against the 'loony left' has been combined with structural attacks culminating in the Education Reform Act, the 1988 Housing Act and the poll tax legislation.
The stakes are now higher than ever, as millions of people are faced with a major assault on their living standards, denied access to cheap and adequate housing and equal and open access to education for their children. Human misery increases day by day - many thousands suffer in squalor and degradation in bed and breakfast or other temporary accommodation; or find themselthe streets as the state fails to ves on provide.
Local government trade unionists face further struggles to defend their basic existence and Labour administrations are faced with stark choices - Kinnockite collaboration at any cost only means coming back time and again with ever bigger cuts. Nowhere is the bankruptcy of Labour's new realism more apparent than in the streets of the inner city where empty houses and piles of uncollected rubbish rot while Labour councils take the hatchet to local direct labour organisations.
STUFF HOSP Defend Tant serpines of fle oviare stale. But he legislation and changes to the rules for council spending. Since 1979 over £27 bil and the metropolitan counties, has concentrated more and more power in the hands of central government. In the era of the poll tax around 75 per cent of all local government spending is directly controlled by Whitehall.
Unprecedented powers have been given to senior local government officers, further reducing the role of elected authorities. Borough treasurers, for example, are charged with a responsibility to report to the district auditor any financial crisis. Section 114 of the Local Government Act obliges officers to freeze spending if an 'overspend' becomes apparent.
To implement the poll tax, the community charge registration officer is entitled to allocate such resources as may be required and
to access such information as s/he sees fit. Poll tax debts can be collected direct from wages and benefits.
The introduction of the poll tax undermines further independence still democracy of local government: As a regressive tax, which takes no account of peoples' ability to pay, it was designed with the aim of making the working class pay more for less and of dividing council the communities they workforces from serve.
Poll tax capping and the swingeing cuts seen in 1990-1 will be followed by self-capping in 1991-2 as councils complain, but comply with financial restrictions and inadequate grants.
The spectacular levels of non-payment must not be allowed to lead to a crisis of local government resources - the crisis must be turned into a political crisis for the Tory This government.
can achieved if the fight against the poll tax goes hand in hand with the fight against the cuts — involving a clear call for the return of the fbillions stolen from local services during the eighties.
Sadly, this has not been the approach of the Labour Party and trade union leaderships. While the Tories have made it clear that competitive privatisation, compulsory tendering, cuts, and attacks on the unions will continue, the Labour Party has refused to support a clear alternative. Should it form the next government, it will not repeal all the anti-union legislation or re-nationalise the public utilities. Nor will it reinstate the money lost through cuts. The Thatcherite individualistic, profit-oriented, competitive ethic will continue. There is no commitment to a reassertion of the provision of local services based on need.
Labour councils have been forced to choose between conflict or compliance. Each siccessive wave of cuts attacks orchestrated by Labour authorities has been taken further and further, until we are left with the tragic spectacle of Labour councils falling over each other in their attempts to maximise poll tax registration and income. Labour councils are in a trap of their own making, as they act as the transmission belt for profoundly unpopular attacks.
In the absence of a clear lead from Labour both nationally and locally, it is vital that unions or the wider community.
The poll tax is a perfect example of how working people cannot afford to sit back and wait for a Labour government, but are obliged to fight now in defence of jobs and services.
The labour bureaucracy has been completely shameless in its capitulation. Legality at any cost and heads down for a Labour government are the only two principles left and local councils vie with each other to see who can implement the tax most 'humanely' (though even this has gone by the board in many places where the pressure is on to collect the tax as efficiently as possible!).
The only serious perspective for fighting the poll tax is to organise campaigns around the slogan 'Don't Collect, Don't Pay' in the community and trade unions, while continuing to raise the demand that Labour councils refuse to implement the tax. A small number of Labour councillors around the country have been prepared to vote against the allocation of resources to establish poll tax units, against the use of bailiffs and wage arrestment and against the vicious cuts imposed in order to set legal budgets. For their attempts to defend the communities who voted for them, many leftwing councillors have been viciously atLabour bureaucracy.
tacked by Witchhunts have taken place all over the country, and local parties such as Brighton have been suspended by Labour's leadership for backing the principled stand of these few councillors against the poll tax. Individual Labour Party members who have been active in opposition to the tax have also been suspended and expelled. Defence of working people from the most vicious Tory attacks is now a disciplinary offence in Kinnock's Labour Party!
With levels of non-payment surpassing all hopes and expectations, the task now is to organise the movement so that it can sustain itself and defend non-payers against the draconian powers to collect which have been given to local councils.
The next election will be fought not over a few weeks in the pages of the national papers and on the platforms of the Labou bureaucracy but over the next year on the estates of our cities and in the workplaces of local councils. The choice is clear: for a system which bleeds the poor for an everdwindling level of services, or for a reverse in Tory cuts and the provision of the resources needed to meet the needs of local communities.
The poll tax was intended as the flagship of the third Tory term - let's turn it into