POLITICS
The doubtful logic of voting against a kick in the shins
NOEL MALCOLM
Poll tax means less money for local services. Vote against it on 3 May.' That is the slogan on two huge and intriguing posters which are now cropping up all over London. One depicts a nest of rats, and the other a miserable collection of what look like vandalised bus-shelters in some God- forsaken municipal wasteland.
The posters are intriguing for more than one reason. Those bus-shelters, for exam- ple: they were photographed, presumably, before the current financial year, so the local authority responsible for them cannot blame the poll tax for their lamentable state of repair. When my colleague Sandra Barwick asked the advertising agency (Boase Massimi Pollitt) where the photo- graph was taken, they were very chary of giving any details at first, but eventually revealed that the picture was snapped at Mosbrough in South Yorkshire. Mos- brough is in the Attercliffe division of Sheffield, an authority entirely controlled by Labour. (A local Tory candidate recog- nised the site from my description of it over the telephone: `It must be where they've been burning the rubbish opposite the gypsy camp — yes, it probably is on local authority land'.) It is intriguing also that these advertise- ments have been funded not by a political party but by Nalgo, the council workers' union, with a £250,000 contribution from their political fund. The slogan they have used is scrupulously non-partisan; it does not even tell you who to vote for. It is also scrupulously correct in what it states: the poll tax does mean `less money for local services', because the cost of collecting it is higher — by £1.5 million for a London borough, or £0.5 million for a non- metropolitan authority. That represents roughly one half of one per cent of their total budgets. Over the whole country it also represents, incidentally, the employ- ment of 15,000 extra members of Nalgo.
But the most intriguing thing of all is that a poster can capture the mood of a large section of the population — probably an outright majority — with a message which, strictly speaking, makes no sense at all. No one in next week's local elections will have any chance whatsoever to `vote against' the poll tax; the tax is a measure introduced by central government, and can be voted against only at a general election. The only choice which faces voters next week is between candidates offering to set diffe- rent levels of tax, with Conservative candi- dates on the whole proposing lower levels than Labour. Yet everyone knows that in these local elections the Tories are going to get their worst drubbing for 20 years.
Earlier this week I followed a young Conservative candidate on his visit to a large block of flats in the Labour strong- hold of Lambeth. Will you be voting for us?' he asked one middle-aged woman. `Not this time', she said. `May I ask why not?"0h, read the papers', she replied, with what was either a smile or a snarl, or possibly both. A bearded young man on the next floor treated us to an eloquent denunciation of the poll tax; when the candidate pointed out that the existence of the tax could not be altered by a local election, he replied: 'Yes, I know that, but I just want to vote the way I feel.'
The omens, in short, were not looking very good for the Conservatives on 3 May. And yet Lambeth is a classic case of a borough where the poll tax was meant to give a heavy campaigning advantage to the Tories. The Labour council there has set a community charge of £548 for the coming year, and the Conservatives are promising to reduce that by a full £200 — yet the electoral drift is strongly in Labour's favour. To those Tory tacticians who de- veloped the original arguments in favour of the poll tax, this is profoundly puzzling. As puzzling as a Labour surge would be at a general election if the Tories were promis- ing to cut income tax by more than a third, and the streets of London were full of posters which compounded the puzzle by saying: 'Income tax means less money for public services — vote against it'.
Are we to conclude, then, that the voters are incorruptibly uninterested in whether they pay less or more poll tax, and that their desire to vote 'against' the tax next Thurday arises only from the most abstract considerations of its fairness? Surely not. A majority of all voters will be paying more in community charge payments this year than they did (in real terms) in rates bills last year. For many of them this coincides with other financial pressures, from high mortgage interest rates and from inflation; and all these pressures can be blamed more or less directly on the Gov- ernment. It is asking too much of human nature to expect people to vote for the Government's party on the specific level of their local poll tax, when they are angry with the Government over a whole range of seemingly inter-related economic issues, of which the sheer existence of the poll tax is one.
Both anecdotal and statistical evidence come together here. The candidate in Lambeth told me that the greatest dis- gruntlement was among young profession- als and skilled manual workers: generally, the people whose mortgages are largest in relation to their incomes. That same day, an ICM opinion poll in the Guardian suggested that skilled workers, whose votes had helped to keep Mrs Thatcher in power, were now deserting her. The three issues on which they registered greatest dissatisfaction with the Government were the poll tax, interest rates and 'the eco- nomy' — in that order. And also published that day was a report on the poll tax from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which calculated that it is the households with net incomes of less than £400 per week that will be worse off under the poll tax. The hardest hit of all will be households on `middle incomes', i.e. £150—£300 per week, which will lose out by roughly £190 a year on average.
Much of the rise in local taxation is the result, of course, of councils smuggling in a huge increase in spending under the cover of the change of systems. Next year, when voters will be comparing like with like, the promises of local Tory candidates may cut some ice; but this year they will receive more blame for the current poll-tax rate than any credit for their promises to reduce it.
Meanwhile, only a rather abstract idea can console the Tory strategists. It is that their basic assumption, that people care most of all about their own economic well-being, still holds true. Those middle- income skilled manual workers could not care less about Charter 88, GCHQ, Clause 28, ERM or EMU. If they ever cared at all, they did so only in the manner of the boy at my prep school who complained to his games master that his little finger was hurting. 'I'll soon cure that', said the master, and kicked him in the shins. 'Can you feel it now?' he asked. The poll tax has given most of the population a mighty kick, concentrating its mind on one thing only. Tory voters are just hoping that matron will find some soothing ointment before the next general election — when, other- wise, the boot will be on the other foot.
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