"The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate"

Embed from Getty Images

James Hawse's The Shortest History of Ireland reveals that the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful, with its notorious verse

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

was written by Cecil Frances Alexander, the wife of the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh, in Donegal at the height of the Irish famine.

At one of my first meetings as a councillor, Harborough was asked to make its response to the Thatcher government's proposed Community Charge, which was to be universally called the Poll Tax.

It's forgotten now, but the government's original proposal was that the Poll Tax should be phased in over 10 years. If they had kept to that, they might have got away with it. But Harborough was one of many Conservative-run authorities that was so enamoured of the new tax that they wanted it brought in at once.

I remember the debate: you could see the pound signs in some Tory councillors' eyes as they calculated how much the Poll Tax would save them and their neighbours.

In my own contribution, I used some of the approved clichés of the day, calling the proposal "a Robin Hood tax in reverse" and complaining that "the rich man in his castle will pay the same as the poor man at his gate".

One of the later speakers in the debate was Tim Brooks, a Tory and the owner of Wistow Hall. Rather painedly, he pointed out that owning a great house brought with it great expenses.

Anyway, the Conservatives made the mistake of listening to their rank-and file and brought in the Poll Tax at once. Among the consequences of this decision was the fall of Margaret Thatcher.