Proposition 13 a Pussycat Alongside British Tax Revolt : Revenue: Thatcher’s plan replaces property levies with service charges for everyone over 18.

A system under which someone such as Harold Brown, butler to the Prince of Wales, is subject to higher local taxes than his boss was never likely to win any popularity contests here.

But little did the system’s promoter, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, suspect that the resulting outcry would turn into a nationwide taxpayer revolt that makes California’s Proposition 13 a dozen years ago look tame by comparison.

The government was described Thursday as in a state of “panic” over a series of sometimes violent protests that have disrupted normally staid deliberations in town halls from Brighton on the south coast to Bradford in the Midlands.

Ruling Conservative Party officials rejected that characterization even as Thatcher’s Cabinet huddled on the revolt and the party’s chairman called in the press to blame the opposition Labor Party for all the trouble.

The revolt is coming to a head as local councils meet to finalize new community service charges, which replace local property taxes with a so-called poll tax assessed on every person over the age of 18 in the country. The money will go to pay for such services as education, local housing, police and fire protection and trash collection.

The bills, which will be in the mail in England and Wales by April 1, are turning out to be so much higher than the central government authorities expected that even the property owners who were meant to benefit from the change will mostly suffer from it instead.

Some of the protests have been relatively good-natured, such as the one in Nottingham the other day where demonstrators dressed as Robin Hood and his Merry Men invaded a council meeting to hurl shaving cream pies at local officials.

But others have turned ugly, resulting in several minor injuries and scores of arrests. Thatcher on Thursday blamed militant leftists for inciting the violence and called their methods “the negation of democracy.” But there was more trouble in the North London borough of Hackney on Thursday night, where young demonstrators hurled eggs, flour and apples at police who then engaged the protesters in running street clashes. Many were reported arrested. In Swindon, about 70 miles west of London, police reinforcements were called in when unruly elements in a crowd estimated at 1,000 protesters tried to break down the doors of the town hall and burned an effigy of Thatcher.

Tommy Sheridan, a Scot and chairman of the Anti-Poll Tax Federation, said Thursday that the trouble has just begun. He predicted that a “human iceberg” of people refusing to pay the tax after April 1 will hand Thatcher the most humiliating political setback of her 11 years in office.

The anti-poll tax backlash has helped drive the prime minister’s Conservative Party nearly 20 points behind the Labor Party in the latest polls, and Tory officials are clearly concerned.

Trying to gain the offensive Thursday, Tory party chairman Kenneth Baker told a London press conference that based on community charges set to date, it will cost Greater Londoners the equivalent of $665 a year each to live in a Labor-controlled borough compared to $480 in a Conservative-controlled borough--a “quite staggering” difference of more than $3.50 per week.

“As more and more councils publish their community charge figures, a clear pattern is emerging,” Baker said. “Labor are the party of high spending, poor value for money and inflated community charges. The Conservative attitude is to get better value for money and hold back spending.”

Labor rejected the calculations as “crude averages” on which it is impossible to base “any meaningful conclusions,” and independent expert Anthony Travers, director of a London School of Economics research study on local government, agreed that “a huge range of factors” including widely varying central government subsidies to local councils make such comparisons virtually meaningless.

What is clear, said Travers, is that contrary to the government’s hopes, millions more voters are going to lose from the switch to the poll tax than will gain.

“This is causing 22 million people or more to take more money out of their pockets this year than last year,” compared with perhaps 14 million who will pay less, the expert said.

The British Broadcasting Corp. reported that the average English household will pay $280 more each year under the poll tax than under the property taxes it replaces.

Thatcher made the poll tax a top priority of this, her third term in office. Its aim was to curb runaway spending at the local government level, where the arch-rival Labor Party remains strong. She depicted the poll tax as fairer than property taxes and more conducive to strict accountability by local authorities to their citizens.

When the first community service assessments started to be published a few days ago, however, they proved to be so much above government estimates that the public was quickly up in arms.

Predictably, the blame fell not on the local councils, but on the woman who championed the change. A cartoon in the Sunday newspaper, the Observer, showed a map of Britain covered with the words: “No to Poll Tax.” The next panel depicted Thatcher with her arms raised in victory and the caption: “There--I said I would unite the nation.”

And the Independent, recalling Proposition 13, editorialized: “The Californian experience might have warned the government how dangerous it is to tamper with local taxation in a way that simultaneously costs the voters money and offends their sense of fairness.”

Meanwhile, Prince Charles is doing his bit. Along with his mother, the queen, he will be “assisting with the payment of poll taxes” for members of his staff, including butler Brown, a Buckingham Palace spokesman told The Times on Thursday.