THE Thatcher government’s plans for social security reform in 1985 occasioned all manner of protest, including a 24-hour hunger strike by benefit claimants in Glasgow, and the opening of a soup kitchen in Edinburgh.

They came as Scotland’s directors of social work spoke out against Social Services Secretary Norman Fowler’s Green Paper proposals as being “out of touch with today’s realities” and called on the government to either abandon reform for the lifetime of that parliament or seek consensus via consultation.

In the Edinburgh protest (right), members of the Edinburgh Benefit Action Group staged a 24-hunger strike of their own outside the DHSS offices in Haymarket and drew attention to the gulf between the haves and the have-nots; some wore Thatcher or Fowler masks, or dressed up as privileged members of the upper classes, enjoying a banquet while the poor had to make do with gruel.

Three months before these protests, Fowler, in the Commons, had moved that MPs endorse the government’s aims of “achieving a better social security system which would direct help to the people who need it most, make the benefit system simpler to understand and run, base pensions on a partnership between the state and individuals, and put social security on a sound basis which the country can afford.”

At the 1987 Scottish Conservative Party conference in Perth, Margaret Thatcher announced that the new community charge would be introduced in Scotland a year ahead of England. The flagship policy, designed to replace the rates as a funding source for local councils, began life in Scotland on April 1, 1989.

Protests had begun even before then, and between 30,000 and 40,000 students in the west of Scotland said they would not pay the controversial new tax.

The tax was expected to be a sure-fire vote-winner, writes Prof T.M. Devine in Independence or Union (2016), but instead "it ignited a political firestorm, provoking widespread anger and protest [main image] in Scotland and then serious rioting south of the border. The fear of a Conservative electoral meltdown in England eventually killed off the poll tax. But the disaster ... became a major factor in [Mrs Thatcher's] own eventual demise. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Secretary of State for Scotland in her government, later judged the poll tax as 'the greatest political mistake of her premiership'.

"The introduction of the poll tax in Scotland", Prof Devine continues, "was the policy more than any other which convinced many Scots that they were being ruled by an alien government".

Yet, "irony of ironies", the tax had been a Scottish invention, much of the original idea having come from academics and former students at St Andrews University, who had formed the Adam Smith Institute, the free-market think-tank.

Read more: Herald Diary