The second major problem was that due to the separation of legal systems between England and Wales, and Scotland it was decided to introduce it in Scotland a year before the rest of the country. This was perhaps not the brightest political maneuvre in the whole of British history.

When it was introduced into Scotland, it was seen widely as an English experiment to see how much you could get away with charging the poor. As an initial stage of resistance, people either didn't register (which took them off the electoral roll, a perhaps not unintentional effect) or registered under false names (at one point the most common registered name in Scotland was Donald Duck). By the end of the first year in operation, the system in Scotland was in chaos, many of the taxes' original supporters had found themselves no better if not worse off, and support was ebbing away.

Activists in England had been looking out and preparing for what was to come. Several of the more left wing and anarchist organisations had sent people to Scotland to study what was happening. (One had gone as far as signing up with a government start-your-own-business scheme as a political researcher, so throughout the year the government were actually paying him to work out how to break the Poll Tax when it came to England!) The government had learned a few lessons as well: putting in place massive fines if you failed to register or registered incorrectly.

Throughout the country, small anti-Poll-Tax groups sprang up, clustered round various groups like Socialist Worker or the Militant tendency mainly (my local one was centred around a bunch of people that went to one of the local pubs). Everyone registered, then basically a large percentage of people just didn't pay. Militant then organised a selection of weekly legal training days with the help of a selection of left-wing lawyers, who turned up with printed advice sheets and ran everyone through how to act to jam up the court system. The plan was to make the entire thing unenforceable.

Individual councils each had their own days in court where hundreds if not thousands of people depending on the size of the session would turn up to protest their charge. The people who had all been to the training days were allowed in as McKenzie friends. Court cases either dragged out over several days (meaning re-issuing of court summonses), or, on rare occasions, the magistrates tried running cases into the night (which was sometimes ruled to be an abuse of process, in that people with children could not be fairly represent themselves). My local court had the dubious honour of running the longest single magistrates court sitting in English legal history, finally finishing at 11:15pm in an attempt to run the entire lot through the system.

The major shock though was after the initial round of court cases. A demonstration was planned for the centre of London, this was to culminate in Trafalgar Square, however, several days before it was clear that the number wanting to attend would far exceed Trafalgar Square's capacity. Requests were put in to the police and home office to change the route to somewhere with a larger capacity, but these were turned down. Riot and looting lasted for twelve hours in the streets around Trafalgar square, after the police tried to break up the demonstration with police horses and riot vans:

The end result after many more dates in court, and smaller protests when people were notified that there would be baliffs coming round to seize property to pay for the unpaid tax, was replacement of the Community Charge with a new replacement tax called the Council Tax. This was a halfway stage between the old and new systems. The other major result was: this was seen as the final straw which ushered Margeret Thatcher into the pages of history. The two years of the Poll Tax had brought back to the surface massive hatred for her as a figure, and the Conservative Party began to see her as an anchor that was weighing them all down at the next election and so changed her in a bloodless coup a few months later for John Major.