Over the next two months the files reveal a succession of crisis meetings as ministers desperately tried to find a way out of their predicament, including the perceived unfairness of a system in which "Dukes and dustmen" both paid the same.
One idea was to raise more money. Should councils be allowed to use cash from the sale of council houses to subsidise the poll tax? Or should people on higher incomes pay more? That idea was floated by the prime minister herself in an unusual signed "personal minute" to Major on 9 April. And she had another idea: putting an extra penny on a gallon of petrol and distributing the proceeds to councils. She wrote in the suggestion by hand three times on a memo of 10 April listing options.
But none of her colleagues seems to have paid any attention and the idea went nowhere. Meanwhile there was a growing split. Patten and the local government minister Michael Portillo wanted to increase central government grants to local authorities. Mrs Thatcher wasn't having it.
Then she and Major, without apparently consulting Patten, came up with an idea for allowing local councils to levy a higher poll tax than stipulated by central government, provided they first put it to a local referendum a "poll tax poll". Patten was opposed, believing the necessary legislation would be "massive in its political significance" and difficult to get through Parliament.
One of Mrs Thatcher's private secretaries, Barry Potter, suggested that Patten was feeling "bruised" at being ignored. By the end of June Potter told the prime minister that Patten and Portillo, still arguing for more government funds, were now "isolated". Today Michael Portillo says he and Chris Patten really wanted to find a way effectively to abolish the poll tax: "We wanted to take the guts out of it, take the bits that were hurting out of it… but we recognised for her sensitivity that it would still have to be called the poll tax.
They also believed the problem would take central government money to resolve. As to the lessons to be learnt from the debacle, he draws a parallel between the decision to introduce the poll tax "without thinking it through" and David Cameron's decision to hold a referendum on Europe without thinking through the consequences.
But the chances of prime ministers learning that are, I think, slim. But nothing worked. The practical difficulties and the political pressures were too great and Mrs Thatcher's career was foundering. In November Michael Heseltine, an outspoken critic of the poll tax, triggered a leadership contest from which John Major emerged the winner.
He appointed Heseltine as environment secretary, increased VAT to generate extra cash for councils and announced the abolition of the community charge, and its replacement by council tax, in March Poll tax a mistake, says Waldegrave. The National Archives. Image source, NAtional archives. One of the National Archives' specialists says the poll tax files are a "juggernaut".
A major poll tax demonstration in London in March ended in violence. Environment secretary Chris Patten r was charged with introducing the poll tax.
Michael Portillo says he and Chris Patten wanted to "take the guts out" of the poll tax. In the United States, the poll tax has been connected with voting rights.
Poll taxes enacted in Southern states between and had the effect of disenfranchising many blacks as well as poor whites, because payment of the tax was a prerequisite for voting. By the s some of these taxes had been abolished, and in the 24th Amendment to the U. Constitution disallowed the poll tax as a prerequisite for voting in federal elections.
In this prohibition was extended to all elections by the U. Supreme Court, which ruled that such a tax violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. In , Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain introduced a poll tax with exemptions for people with low incomes or disabilities.
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