One of the first casualties of violent and frightening events is the ability to draw fine distinctions. It is not surprising if a policeman sheltering from a barrage of rocks and bottles lashes out at whoever is nearest. Nor is it too surprising if the leader of the Opposition lashes out at the members of his party who have been campaigning for a mass refusal to pay the poll tax. Who can blame Mr Kinnock for fearing that riot and mayhem will undo his efforts of the last two years, and provide the Government with the chance to turn attention away from the poll tax towards law and order?
But panic makes bad political philosophy. Britain is not on the verge of civil war; hooligans in Trafalgar Square are not a sign that Britain is about to go the way of the Weimar Republic; and Labour politicians ought not to equate refusal to pay the poll tax with fighting in the streets.
Think, for instance, of Mrs Rosa Parks, the black woman who disobeyed the city ordinances of Montgomery, Alabama, and refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. She started something that well-meaning reformers in Congress had strikingly failed to achieve. Would Mr Kinnock rather she had surrendered her seat?
Think of Gandhi and the tactics he employed to drive the British out of India. It was not achieved by brute force, but by creating a kind of embarrassment in the colonial power; faced with disciplined, non-violent opposition, the British government had either to behave atrociously to secure its authority, or to negotiate independence in some shape or other.
Closer to home, think of the ways non-violent disobedience affected military organization and defence policy. In the course of his very long career in dissent, Bertrand Russell engaged in, encouraged and was jailed for civil disobedience, first when urging the cause of the conscientious objectors during the First World War, and again, briefly, in 1961, when campaigning for nuclear disarmament. He neither stopped the First World War nor persuaded the British government to abandon its nuclear weapons - and having high standards in these matters, he therefore counted himself a political failure.
But he was plainly wrong in that estimate. One effect of the campaign by conscientious objectors in the First World War was the vastly more humane treatment of pacifists in the Second World War. As for nuclear disarmament, it is hard to tell what caused what shifts in public opinion and government policy, but it is hard to believe that there would have been the pressure for such restrictions as the Test Ban Treaty (which persuaded the major nuclear powers to stop atmospheric testing) without Russell's publicity-seeking tactics.
This, of course, raises the question I have been skirting: what is the object of non-violent disobedience? The only sensible answer is that disobedience is a manifestation of majority rule. That is, majority rule makes sense only if minorities are willing to go along with majority decisions. If the majority simply decides to plunder and exploit the minority, one has not democracy, but oppression.
If governments issue orders that no decent person can carry out, the only thing to be said is that we all ought to have the courage to disobey them. That was the message of the Nuremburg Tribunal. The conscientious objector finds his otherwise decent government's demand that he should go and kill other human beings intolerable, and will not do it. But the poll tax is a far cry from these extremes. This is not a tax that no decent person could possibly go and collect, or that no decent person could possibly pay - just a peculiarly bad, and peculiarly misconceived one...
But if we ought to take with a pinch of salt the claims of anyone who claims that he or she is a conscientious objector to the poll tax, we ought also to see that non-violent refusal to pay is a legitimate and not undemocratic reaction to it. Attracting the public's attention is not an unworthy reason for disobedience. If the legislation is ill-conceived, an aroused public is just what a democracy depends on to get it changed. Then, too, it is a way of making the government decide just how determined it is to get its own way. If people who are usually compliant and amenable dig in their heels, the government faces in a small way just the embarrassment that Gandhi inflicted.
Non-payment is a reputable way of making the tax unworkable. It would not take an enormous number of defaulters to clog the courts, and even if many of them eventually pay up, the administrative difficulty of collecting the tax will be an obvious charge against it. It may be said that this is simply a sort of blackmail, since we can make almost all government impossibly expensive by dragging our heels this way. But that is the point: we could, but we don't, so long as we think the government is behaving reasonably.
Politically motivated disobedience in a democracy has limits built into it: essentially it must be a plea to the public at large to side with the disobedient. If they don't, the disobedient will fail. Nevertheless, a readiness to disobey the government as well as to obey it is one of the things the citizen owes his country. Henry Thoreau put it nicely. In jail for refusing to pay his taxes at the time of the US-Mexican war, he was visited by a friend who asked: "Why are you here Henry?" "No," said Thoreau. "The question is, why aren't you?"
The author is Professor of Politics at Princeton University.
From Mr C. A. Rootes
Sir, Your leading article (April 2) on Saturday's riot in central London asserts that "political disorder is not justified in a democracy" and that "no ... tolerance extends to those who perpetrate mayhem and injury in the cause of defying democratic laws".
These remarks clearly presuppose that Britain is a democracy and that the poll tax is a "democratic law". The truth is that Britain is probably the least democratic state in Western Europe and that the poll tax is but the latest in a series of radical measures enacted by a Government which has never been able to command the votes of a majority of the electorate.
The violence perpetrated on Saturday was inexcusable because of its inhumanity, but it was probably inevitable precisely because of this lack of a genuine democracy. The poll tax is just one of a series of measures that are creating in this country an underclass, a section of the population for whom there is no hope of anything beyond grinding poverty and the daily struggle to make ends meet.
Yours faithfully,
C. A. ROOTES,
6 Summer Hill,
Harbledown, Canterbury, Kent
From Mr Robin M. Bevan
Sir, On the evening of Saturday, March 31, I was variously described by newscasters, senior politicians and police officers as "a mindless hooligan", "a stone and bottle throwing youth", "a Marxist agitator", or "a member of either the SWP, Militant, or an anarchist group".
Not one of these descriptions would fit either myself or the majority of people present. No audible request was given at any time by police or stewards to "move on", which given the congestion would have been extremely difficult anyway. At no time in the afternoon, after the first charge by the police, could I perceive anything approximating to a sensible strategy for dealing with the situation. Repeated rushes by the riot police and officers on horseback seemed only to achieve an increase in the injuries amongst both civilians and police and greater hostility from the demonstrators
I do not defend the activities of all the protesters, but I remain stunned by the appalling behaviour of certain police officers, the total mismanagement of the situation by the police strategists, and the complete failure of the media to reflect this sad aspect of the day.
Yours,
ROBIN M. BEVAN,
61 Oakleigh Crescent, N20.
From Sir Alfred Sherman
Sir, Alan Ryan's call for civil disobedience over the community charge ("The right to disobey", April 3) is the height of irresponsibility. The right to disobey unjust laws can be considered only in extremis - e.g., the Nuremberg laws. The community charge is merely a way of distributing the total burden of domestic taxation to finance local government.
The alternative to civic obedience is anarchy, which leads to despotism. If I may choose which laws to break, so may everyone else. All men were created equal; hooligans would be equally entitled to exercise their judgement to steal rape, attack the police, assault coloured people. Alan Ryan's intellectual hooliganism is a threat to our ordered existence, launched from the safety of Princeton.
Yours sincerely,
ALFRED SHERMAN,
10 Gerald Road, SW1.
From Mr K. L. Samant
Sir, I cannot agree with Alan Ryan's analogy of Gandhi and his civil disobedience movement in India. Gandhi was fighting an alien power. The hooligans who participated in Saturday's poll tax riots are trying to overthrow the democratically elected Government of their own country.
Yours faithfully,
K. L. SAMANT,
30 Regency Lodge,
Adelaide Road, NW3.