Poll tax: Encyclopedia - Poll tax

Poll tax

A poll tax, head tax, soul tax, or capitation is a tax of a uniform, fixed amount per individual (as opposed to a percentage of income). Such taxes were important sources of revenue for many countries into the 19th century, but this is no longer the case. There are several famous cases of poll taxes in history, notably a tax formerly required for voting in parts of the United States that was often designed to disenfranchise African Americans, Native Americans, and whites of non-British descent, as well as two taxes levied by John of Gaunt and Margaret Thatcher in the fourteenth and twentieth centuries respectively.

The word poll is an English word that once meant "head", hence the name poll tax for a per-person tax. However, in the United States, the term has come to be used almost exclusively for a fixed tax applied to voting. Since "going to the polls" is a common idiom for voting (deriving, of course, from the fact that early voting involved head-counts), a new folk etymology has supplanted any knowledge of the phrase's true origins in America.

The jizya is a poll tax that, according to Islamic law, Islamic states must take from adult non-Muslim males.

Poll tax - United States

The capitation clause of Article I of the United States Constitution, requiring apportionment among the states of "direct taxes", makes imposition of a poll tax by the federal government unfeasible.

However, states sometimes made payment of a poll tax a pre-condition of the exercise of the right to vote. After the right to vote was extended to all races by the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment, many Southern states enacted poll tax laws which often included a grandfather clause that allowed any adult male whose father or grandfather had voted to vote without paying the tax. These laws achieved the desired effect of disenfranchising African and Native Americans, as well as whites of non-British descent.

The Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in 1964, outlawed the use of this tax (or any other tax) as a pre-condition in voting in Federal elections. The 1966 Supreme Court case Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections held that the poll tax as applied to state elections violated the Equal Protection Clause of United States Constitution.

Poll tax - United Kingdom

John of Gaunt, the regent of Richard II of England, levied his poll tax in 1380 to finance the war against France that was in progress. Each person aged over 15 was required to pay the amount of one shilling, which was a large amount then. This provoked the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, due in part to attempts to restore feudal conditions in rural areas.

Poll tax - The Community Charge

The abolition of the rating system of taxes (based on the notional rental value of a house) to fund local government had been in the manifesto of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party in the 1979 general election. A Green Paper, Alternatives to Domestic Rates, issued in 1981, considered a flat-rate poll tax as a supplement to another tax, noting that a large flat-rate poll tax would be seen as unfair.

The 1980s saw a period of general confrontation between central government and Labour-controlled local authorities, that eventually led to the abolition of the Greater London Council and the six metropolitan county councils. The commitment to abolish the rates was replaced in the 1983 general election manifesto, replaced with a commitment to introduce the ability for central government to cap rates which it saw as excessive. This was introduced by the Rates Act 1984. However, Thatcher's government thought spending was still generally excessive, and thought that poor voters would be deterred from voting in high spending councils if they had to pay a greater share of the tax.

Although the ratings system was supposed to have regular revaluations in order to minimise discrepancies, the revaluations in England and Wales had been cancelled in 1978 and 1983. The Scottish revaluation of 1985/1986 led to a great deal of criticism, and gave added urgency to rates reform or replacement.

The Green Paper of 1986, Paying for Local Government, produced by the Department of the Environment from consulations between Rothschild, William Waldegrave and Kenneth Baker, proposed the Community Charge. This was a fixed tax per adult resident, hence a poll tax, although there was a reduction for poor people. This charged each person for the services provided in their community. Due to the amount of local taxes paid by businesses varying, and the amount of grant provided by central government to individual local authorities sometimes varying capriciously, there were dramatic differences in the amount charged between boroughs, with Conservative boroughs often charging less.

This proposal was contained in the Conservative Manifesto for the 1987 General Election. The legislation introducing the Community Charge was passed in 1988 and the new tax replaced the rates in Scotland from the start of the 1989/90 financial year and in England and Wales from the start of the 1990/91 financial year. Additionally the uniform business rate, levied by local government at a rate set by central government and then apportioned between local authorities in proportion to their population, was introduced.

The tax was not implemented in Northern Ireland, which continued, as it still does, to levy the rating system, despite some unionists calling for the province to have the same taxation system as the rest of the United Kingdom. That the tax was introduced in Scotland a year before England and Wales was another fatal political mistake for Thatcher - the already low support for her policies north of the border turned into even greater animosity, and planted seeds of distrust towards the Conservatives within the Scottish people which continues to haunt the Conservative Party to the present day.

It was thought to be unfair as the tax burden shifted from the estimated price of a house to the number of people living in it, with the perceived effect of shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor. It did not help that Margaret Thatcher chose to champion the Community Charge herself and apparently chose to be both ruthless in imposing it and adamant that there would be no "U-turns" (reversals in policy).

Additional problems emerged when many of the tax rates set by local councils proved to be much higher than many earlier predictions. Some have argued that local councils saw the introduction of the new system of taxation as the opportunity to make significant increases in the amount taken, assuming (correctly) that it would be the originators of the new tax system and not its local operators who would be blamed.

The charge was bitterly opposed and people sought to protest through mass protests and autonomous local Anti Poll Tax Unions. In Scotland, where the tax was implemented first, the APTU's called for mass non-payment. These calls rapidly gathered widespread support in Scotland and then in England and Wales, even though non-payment meant that people could be prosecuted.

As the charges began to rise, up to 18 million people refused to pay the tax, enforcement measures became increasingly draconian, and unrest mounted and culminated in a number of riots. The most serious of these happened in London on March 31, 1990, during a protest at Trafalgar Square, London, which more than 200,000 protesters attended (see also Poll tax riot). The Labour MP, Terry Fields, was jailed for 60 days for refusing to pay his poll tax.

Politicians of the governing Conservative Party came to the conclusion that their party was doomed to electoral defeat if the tax remained and that there was no prospect of its abandonment while Mrs Thatcher remained leader. This resulted in the success of a leadership challenge by Michael Heseltine in demonstrating the untenability of her position (although in the actual vote of MPs Thatcher prevailed by a margin of 50 votes out of 370). On November 22, 1990 Mrs Thatcher resigned and all three contenders to succeed her pledged to abandon the tax.

The successful candidate, John Major, appointed his defeated rival Michael Heseltine to the post of Environment Secretary responsible for replacing the Community Charge. In 1991 the Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont announced a raise in Value Added Tax from 15% to 17.5% to pay for giving everybody a £140 reduction in their bills. By the time of the 1992 General Election, legislation had been passed replacing Community Charge with the Council Tax from the start of the 1993/94 financial year.

The Council Tax strongly resembled the rating system that the Poll Tax had replaced. The main differences were that it was levied on capital value rather than notional rental value of a property, and that a 25% discount for single occupancy dwellings was introduced.

Poll tax - Canada

The Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 stipulated that all Chinese entering Canada would be subjected to a Head Tax of $50. The act was mostly to discourage the lower class Chinese from entering, since Canada still welcomed the rich Chinese merchants who could afford the head tax. After the Government of Canada realized that the $50 fee did not effectively eliminate Chinese from entering Canada, the government passed the Chinese Immigration Act of 1900 and 1903, increasing the tax to $100 and $500, respectively. As of 2005, there is a campaign in Canada to persuade the Canadian government to pay financial redress for this tax.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Poll tax", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki