Poll Tax II: Endgame

Mass unemployment created pockets of pain. The poll tax spread it far and wide

It was considered unthinkable, perhaps even unsurvivable, certainly immoral. On 20 January 1972, the number of people out of work in Britain rose above one million for the first time since the 1930s. And we all know what happened then.

It wasn’t entirely Ted Heath’s fault, of course. The Bretton Woods system had collapsed, the long postwar expansion was running on fumes while traditional industries such as coal, steel and shipbuilding were in terminal decline.

Nevertheless, the government’s deflationary “Selsdon Man” policies, which included cuts to public spending and non-intervention in industry, contributed to the sharp rise in unemployment, which had sat at around 600,000 when the Tories came to power in June 1970.

Four days later, on 24 January, the mood in the Commons chamber was thermonuclear. Labour leader Harold Wilson denounced the one million mark as “shameful”. Neil Kinnock, still very much a man of the Left at this point, called it “if not of a criminal act, certainly of criminal negligence.”

At one point, the Speaker was forced to suspend the sitting for 10 minutes for order to be restored, such was the abuse that greeted the prime minister’s statement. Yet even Heath said he “deeply deplored” the situation. In other words, there was cross-party consensus that mass unemployment was big, bad and politically humiliating.

So how is it that, little more than a decade later, Margaret Thatcher would go on to win two landslide reelection victories, first in 1983 and then 1987, with unemployment not of one million, but three? And what has this got to do with the poll tax?

The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed