The worst riots seen in London in a century, BBC termed the civic uprising. A total of 113 people, including 45 lawmen, were injured, along with 20 police horses, with more than 400 arrests being made.

Businesses were looted by many of the some 100,000 people who marched through the city, with some staging a sit-on close to the Prime Minister’s Downing Street offices. Damage ran into hundreds of millions of dollars. That was on March 31, 1990, when protests against a so-called poll tax in England reached a critical head, following many previous smaller demonstrations across the country. The poll tax is the British variant of T&T’s property tax, now being hotly debated with smatterings of public frustration and dissent. The British levy crashed the heady 11-year Margaret Thatcher administration, and the former Iron Lady, her government in shambles and her legacy in ruins, resigned as Prime Minister in November that year.

Britons were enraged, branding the tax a punitive levy imposed across the board on people in spite of their financial state. Critics demonised the measure as taxing the poor to support the rich. They said the struggling working class was being asked to pay as much as the well-placed millionaire. Thatcher refused to soften the toll despite raging national upheaval, but was eventually un-done by hard-nosed people’s power. Her successor, the more even-handed John Major, dismantled the tax and implemented a council tariff that related to the value of the respective property. The Thatcher tax had been highly divisive and had polarised the British society. Many property owners simply refused to pay, daring the authorities to seize their properties. British analysts now look at the oppressive poll tax, and along with Thatcher’s bid to crush trade unions, including a vicious attack on miners, privatisation of some 20 companies and other economic measures, and come to a common conclusion. Thatcher, they surmise, was not bad for Britain. She was terrible.

None of the above is likely to take place in T&T, of course, Trinis having generally become apathetic and losing their radical fervour. In addition, the jury is still seemingly out on just how severe is the local measure. To be sure, the Patrick Manning Government has done a miserable job in marketing the measure, in spite of a Ministry of Information, a resource-rich Government Information Service, public relations agents at each ministry and a bountiful advertising budget. The ruling regime, is appears, had not prepared for so stinging a verbal backlash, caught unawares by the response to the first really tough tax of the second energy boom era. In addition, administration officials were not all speaking with one voice, and, in some high-profile examples, seemed not fully aware of the technical trappings and various nuances of the measure. An illustration was evident when frontline minister Conrad Enill, in a call to the radio show I co-host, said the levy would yield some $325 million in taxes—a major revision from his previous appraisal of $72 million. Finance Minister Karen Tesheira, for her part, had previously suggested revenues of some $725 million. She has not modified that estimate.

Worse comes from some dyed-in-the-wood critics. One said with straight face that the toll would rake in up to $7 billion—enough to cushion the budget deficit. There are at least three vital conclusions to be drawn from the property tax flap. The Government must properly research and promote new initiatives and be confidently able to quickly answer searching questions and reassure a sceptical populace. Of more significance is the absence of effective and coherent people’s leadership, which is both surprising and regrettable in light of our modern, sophisticated and better educated nation.
There are sporadic and sectional public protests—led largely by inflamed community figures—but these are flash-in-the-pan outbursts, quelled as proponents return to the business of making a living.

Then there is the worrying matter of the seeming return to the era of taxation on a hard-pressed society, in an effort to fund the Treasury “chirrup chirrup,” as Dr Keith Rowley told the budget debate. The pressing issue now is whether T&T is rushing into a George Chambers-type austerity era, of reduced government spending and weighty taxes in the aftermath of a glory period of money gushing through “like a dose of salts.” Is the revamped property tax the first stanza in sweeping new levies on the nation? If so, would citizens respond like Britons did against Thatcher’s repressive poll tax? Perish the thought!