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Rebel London
Poll Tax to Poll Tax - Potted
History of Rebellion
London's history is littered
with popular uprisings, seditious conspiracies and radical assemblies,
usually ending in the bitter taste of defeat for the change-hungry
multitudes.
The first major uprising to
visit the streets of London was the Peasants Revolt of 1381 when
Watt Tyler marched at the head of a rag-taggle army demanding
an end to the hated Poll Tax, a blanket charge levelled on every
man in England regardless of wealth. More of that later. Tyler's
army had the run of the city for almost a week before envoys
of King Richard II lured him to his death and the revolt soon
petered out.
In 1450 the government of Henry
VI faced down the rebellion of Jack Cade who, like Tyler before
him, was sent to his maker by the country's rulers in suitably
violent fashion.
Parliamentary palaver
The ruling elite itself nearly
succumbed to rebel ministrations in 1605 but Guy Fawkes' plot
to blow up Parliament was foiled at the last moment and the traitor
was torched to death, an event still commemorated with effigy
burnings every year on November 5th.
The role of Parliament was
at the centre of the English Revolution which ran from 1642-49
when Parliament leader Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army overthrew
royal rule in the world's first bourgeois revolution, helped
by the capital's citizenry who blocked a huge Royalist force
at Turnham Green, west London.
Over a century later, the monarchy
long restored and Parliament rife with corruption, the capital
witnessed the Wilkes Riots of 1768 in which large groups of workers
fought for reform of the discredited institution. A simlilar
cry was to be heard during the 1831 Reform Riots as pressure
for large scale change neared boiling point, a point reached
in 1848, the year of revolution throughout Europe, when the Chartists
gathered in their hundreds of thousands in central London.
Fighting for universal suffrage
plus a range of economic demands, the Chartists had planned to
march on the House of Commons but were held back by a huge show
of police strength, a theme that was to become familiar in the
next 150 years.
Police palaver
In 1887 a combination of the
police and the army crushed the Bloody Sunday Riots of unemployed
workers and state forces were again on hand in 1936 to defend
the rights of Facsists to march in Cable Street, part of the
then Jewish enclave of east London. As it turned out anti-fascists
mobilised to defeat the scourge but the pattern of police intervention
against progressive forces was confirmed.
On to the 60s, when student-led
demonstrations first became a feature of life in London. Some
particularly brutal clashes between police and anti-Vietnam war
protestors took place in Grosvenor Square outside the US Embassy
in this era but students were not to be put off and continued
to invade the capital over issues such as nuclear weapons and
animal rights.
While students often favoured
the big moral gesture, black Londoners took to the streets (Brixton
1981, 1985 and Tottenham,1986) to demand changes in their everyday
lives, specifically treatment at the hands and batons of an overwhelmingly
white police force.
Then it was back to the future
in 1990 when Trafalgar Square became the battleground during
the second street disturbances to be casued by a Poll Tax.
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