Bernard Ingham: Never forget the lesson of the militants who went to war to destroy the poll tax

It showed us just how far ruthless militants with a blood lust were prepared to go. But what were they protesting about? Not some outrageous infringement of human rights. Not some massive injustice. Not even a dodgy declaration of war as, for example, over Iraq.

No, the Left, their brains addled by Wat Tyler hero worship, went to war over the poll tax, ironically devised to replace the unsatisfactory rating system as a signal advance in democratic accountability. You couldn't make it up.

The history of the community charge – to give the poll tax its Sunday name – is one of the least edifying in our recent history. No policy can have been more debated by Ministers. It went on throughout the 1980s. None has probably been more deliberately misrepresented. None has been more irrationally opposed. I know. I was there.

It also represents one of the great missed chances for improving the governance of Britain.

From my very start as Margaret Thatcher's press secretary in 1979, I was regularly asked by mischievous political correspondents what the government was going to do about rates. After all, Ted Heath had promised to abolish them in 1974. Thatcher had made no rash pledges but disliked them as a tax on improving your own home.

There were persistent complaints about the unfairness of the system. Take, for example, the famous widow paying as much as a family with four young adults living in an identical property and earning far more and making far greater call on council services.

At the same time, local councils were spending money as if it were going out of fashion. This was not surprising. Of the country's 35 million electors, 17 million were not liable for rates.

Of the 18 million liable, three million paid less than the full demand and another three million nothing at all. The minority were asked to foot the bill voted by the majority. It was a clear case of representation without taxation.

No wonder local government Ministers devoted most of their time to devising ways of trying to curb local authorities' regular 1bn a year overspending. It couldn't go on.

The Scots brought things to a head. Their revaluation of homes produced such horrendous bills that the Scottish Office faced a political crisis. Enter those two Fellows of All Souls, Lord Rothschild and William Waldegrave. They devised a system called the community charge where everybody had to pay something towards their town's upkeep. In other words, they gave everybody a vested interest in curbing their spendthrift councillors.

How simple. How neat.

"Get the policy right and presentation will take care of itself", Thatcher used to tell me without the slightest justification. Not, I fear, with the poll tax, as it was soon damagingly dubbed.

I shall never forget telling her in front of Ministers that there were two broad objections: it was unfair – the king in his castle would pay the same as the peasant in his hovel – and it would be expensively impossible to collect.

With a characteristic sniff, she forcibly pointed out that the better off were already paying taxes through the nose to keep local government afloat. Of course, it would cost more to collect – twice as many would be paying it as rates – but why should it be impossible to collect outside bedsitter land?

To cut a long story short, local councils spent even faster before the democratic axe fell and the Government had to devise ways of helping those on whom the bills fell heaviest. The cost was eye-watering. The entire reform seemed to be in disarray. Or was it?

Before John Major killed it for today's present and entirely

unsatisfactory council tax, Thatcher claimed that it was beginning to work. Given time to bed in, she said it would have been seen as one of the most far reaching and beneficial reforms of local government.

Possibly. Certainly the present waste in local government demonstrates that the compelling urge of tin pot politicians to squander our brass is undiminished. Sooner or later, somebody is going to have to stop it –and stop capitulating to the mob. Let it begin on May 7.

But let any bold slasher be warned what anti-democratic forces he might have to cope with. Remember March 31, 1990.