It was a flat fee per person, locally set, with relatively few exemptions or reliefs. It was also intensely unpopular and, thanks to widespread evasion, an administrative fiasco. Opposition to the poll tax played a big part in bringing down Margaret Thatcher in 1990. The government's retreat over the tax, second only to Britain's ejection from the European monetary system, was the Tories' biggest single setback. The Labour Party believes that it lost the election of 1992, despite great popularity in other respects, because it said it would raise taxes on the higher-paid to finance increases in public spending.
New Labour promises to maintain tight control of public spending.
Responding to the government's most recent budget, in fact, it promised to hold to the Tories' own spending targets for at least its first two years in power. In endorsing them, Labour has tied its hands to an unprecedented degree. No would-be Labour government has ever before gone to such lengths to convince voters that it will not be soft on spending and taxes. Specific pledges to spend more, of the sort that came thick and fast from shadow ministers in days gone by, have been outlawed by Tony Blair. There have been only one or two small exceptions, and in each of these cases the promise to spend a bit more has been tied to a promise to cut spending elsewhere, or else to raise the necessary revenue in some agreeably painless way.