In 1986, 32 Lambeth councillors were disqualified from political office and fined nearly a quarter of a million pounds for delaying levying the rate. Some have gone to high office; one Sir Stephen Bubb was recently knighted by David Cameron. Joan Walley has been the MP for Stoke since 1987. A number have since died.

The rate capping campaign involved powerful labour councils up and down the country and figures that are today influential in national politics. David Blunkett and Margaret Hodges were closely involved as were the high profile Ken Livingstone and Ted Knight.

Internal Labour party battles were played out in the middle of the rate capping campaigns. Not the least was the struggle to elect non-White Members of Parliament. Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant and Keith Vaz, who were elected to Parliament in 1987, forged their campaigning credentials in the midst of the local government campaigns.

Campaigns against rate capping coalesced with the campaign to save a locally elected strategic authority for London – shut down by Mrs. Thatcher in 1986. Local government campaigns intersected in 1984/1985 with the national miners’ strike that in turn involved trade unions, student mobilisation and involvement from communities way beyond the industrial and coal heartlands.

In 1984/ 1986 Mrs. Thatcher mobilised the police and the law, often in controversial ways, in what was understood by both sides as a war for the future direction of Britain. The modernising, privatising prime minister stood against a coalition of active opposition that Mrs. Thatcher sometimes understood as threat to the British state itself.

The primary documentation

This period has never been seriously analysed by scholars. The sources are only available in paper. Should anyone be interested in researching this period, I have all the internal documentation on rate-capping from Lambeth Council, the Lambeth labour group, the local labour parties, the local government associations, the labour groups of the local government associations, from 1982-1987.

I am trying to find a good home for this primary documentation. 

Please contact me at [email protected] or by phone on 0784 174 5233 if you have any ideas as to where this material could be stored or how it could be used.