“Scum! Scum! Police scum!” The woman penned into Trafalgar Square with me and thousands of others that spring afternoon was old enough to be my grandmother. And I’ve left out her robust expletives. This was a day of protest against Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax that had turned into the most serious riot central London had seen for a century. As missiles flew and police horses charged, it was also the afternoon I woke up politically.
On 31 March 1990 I was 19. I had strapped on the obligatory leather jacket and DM boots that were the student uniform of the era and headed out to my first proper demonstration. Up until then, my political education had come more from the lyrics of Dead Kennedys and Public Enemy records than dry lectures about Gramsci. But I was fired up by criticism of the poll tax, the argument that asking a millionaire to pay the same council charge as his cook was a reactionary act by Mrs Thatcher – a reversal of decades of progressive taxation. Also, that this was toxic for her politically, because of that ingrained British sense of fairness. I’d seen documentaries about demos against the Vietnam war and I foolishly thought that this was my generation’s chance to change things by taking to the streets. It wasn’t. But in the chaos of those hours I witnessed how venomous a crowd could become when enraged by a police force that seemed determined to provoke and prolong the disorder.
It might have been different if everyone had obeyed Tony Benn. There had already been a bit of trouble outside Downing Street before he ended the day with his rallying cry against the iniquities of the tax. He told us all that we’d shown the system that we numbered in the tens of thousands but we should now disperse peacefully. He was our dad telling us to go to bed before there was trouble. Not everyone was in the mood. I clocked an anarchist who put on punk gigs in Bristol violently shaking his head. In what seemed like seconds later people around him were lobbing placards at the police.
What happened next has stayed with me for a quarter of a century. For no discernible reason a riot squad van drove from Charing Cross Road straight into the Trafalgar Square crowd and knocked a young woman yards across the road. It was an incendiary moment. The air then filled with bottles and missiles and mayhem ensued. Thousands of non-rioters were trapped in the square and before my girlfriend and I could escape, we saw a photographer’s arm broken by a policeman’s truncheon, people viciously trampled and a scaffolding pole that nearly killed a police officer. There were almost surreal moments of levity too. Huge cheers erupted when a failed attempt was made to torch the apartheid South African embassy.
We rushed home. In my naivety I thought Mrs Thatcher couldn’t survive the next few days with London in tatters. At the very least I thought the TV news would show what had really happened. But viewers were given a police estimate of the numbers in the square that was laughably small. Nothing was reported about police provocation. Politically, the riot temporarily helped the government tarnish its opponents as far-left rioters, but I still think it was a turning point. Years later, on the eve of the Iraq war, I was able to ask John Redwood what the protest felt like from within the administration. I wished then that I had known he was telling colleagues the poll tax was a bad idea. His response is worth repeating. “I was inside government saying ‘you’re doing the wrong thing, can’t you understand’. So one side of me was saying ‘this is marvellous, all these people agree and they are putting pressure on to help me win the argument from within’. But on the other hand it was miserable – as a loyal member of the government I couldn’t say ‘I’m on your side. I’m trying to win the battle’. They didn’t know and so I got the brickbats as well. It was very unpleasant.”
How do I feel, 25 years on? I’m glad I was there that day to observe the carnage. The protest, and finally Tory MPs themselves, put paid to the tax and to Mrs T – so the thousands of us in Trafalgar Square did play our part. And while the super-rich are now richer beyond our 1990 imaginings it still looks politically impossible to introduce a similar flat tax. As for the policing of demonstrations, I’m just glad Boris wasn’t around to deploy water cannon on London’s streets. I’d have been drenched.