The Full Story
In 1921, the entire elected council of an East London borough chose to go to prison to protect the poorest people in Britain. Poplar was one of the poorest boroughs in London: high unemployment, real hunger, and a tax system that forced poor boroughs to pay disproportionately to fund London-wide authorities while wealthy boroughs paid next to nothing.
In March 1921, Labour councillor George Lansbury and the Poplar Borough Council refused to collect those taxes. The High Court ordered them to comply. They refused. On 29 July, thirty councillors marched through Poplar with two thousand supporters, a brass band, and a banner that read: "Poplar Borough Council, marching to the High Court and possibly to prison." They weren't possibly going to prison. They were going to prison.
Twenty-five men went to Brixton. Five women, one of them pregnant, went to Holloway. One of those women was Minnie Lansbury. She was thirty-two. She fell ill and died two months after her release. They held council meetings inside prison. The women were brought from Holloway to Brixton by taxi. George Lansbury addressed thousands from his cell window. After six weeks they were released. Parliament rushed through a new law equalising the tax burden between rich and poor boroughs. Thirty ordinary people went to prison. And changed the law.
Why This Matters
Poplarism is still in the British political dictionary. It describes a council or local authority that puts the welfare of its poorest residents above the instructions of central government. It is rarer than it used to be. It has never quite died. The thirty who went to prison won a fundamental redistribution of London's tax burden. They did it not by writing articles but by walking into a prison for six weeks.