Today in Labor History May 30, 1381: Tax collector John Bampton sparked the Peasants’ Revolt in Brentwood, Essex. The mass uprising, also known as Wat Tyler’s Rebellion, or the Great Rising, began because of attempts to collect a poll tax. However, tensions were already high because of the economic misery and hunger caused by the Black Death pandemic of the 1340s, and the Hundred Years’ War. During the uprising, rebels burned public records and freed prisoners. King Richard II, 14 years old, hid in the Tower of London. Rebels entered the Tower and killed the Lord Chancellor and the Lord High Treasurer, but not the king. It took nearly six months for the authorities to suppress the Peasants’ Revolt. They slaughtered over 1,400 rebels. Roughly 600 years later, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher tried again to impose a poll tax on Britain’s working class. It also sparked a revolt which brought an end both to the tax and Thatcher’s regime. Billy Bragg references Thatcher’s poll tax in his song, All You Fascists.
Today in Labor History March 31, 1990: 200,000 people protested against the new Poll Tax in London. The new tax shifted the burden from the somewhat progressive tax based on property values, to an entirely regressive tax.