See query. A character in a Wodehouse story huffs at a (supposedly) bumbling cop “…and for this we pay rates and taxes.”
I don’t have the date offhand, but can get it. Come to think of it, I think I’ve seen the word “rate-payer”–maybe in Wodehouse, maybe in contemporary use–and it must be related.
Extra credit: do Brits still say “copper?” Did they ever? How about “bobbie?” (with a cap “B” maybe?, although less important in conversation; – I actually don’t know the correct orthography).
In Britain, rates are taxes, usually property taxes, paid to the local government or local authority. Taxes are paid to the government of the UK. So Wodehouse’s character is complaining that the money he is taxed by his local authority and the national government goes to hire incompetents.
Oh, I get the point; I think every citizen in the world able to bitch about the government has the same.
US, with one (?) exception, has separate state taxes, and there’s city taxes, and always other taxes like property or rent or investment or anything George Harrelson has enumerated; but we don’t have a common term to lump all the non-national tax.
Which reminds me, I have no idea what a “poll tax” is either. Sheesh.
According to wikipedia:
“The poll tax, officially known as the “Community Charge”, was a tax to fund local government in the United Kingdom, instituted in 1989 by the government of Margaret Thatcher. It replaced the rates that were based on the notional rental value of a house.”
So it’s a replacement for property taxes, to make sure that even the unpropertied and those not of the landed gentry get taxed in full measure.
As for bobbies, it’s “bobby” in the singular; and I can’t say whether the expression is still common. Might be “rozzer” nowadays, but my only source for that is a 1980s Paul McCartney album.
(Waiting for John and Ringo …)
‘Copper’ is definitely still in general parlance, in the south of the UK at least. I am not ‘the yoof’ (mid-40s) but I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at expressions such as:
‘I was just lighting up and this copper came round the corner.’
Or,
‘My brother’s a copper.’
OB
Missed the edit window:
‘Rates’, as has been said, is a alternative term for a tax, usually based on property, or for utility charges. Before such things as meters existed, people in the UK would pay water rates and gas rates, for example.
Although, the term ‘THE Poll Tax’ would generally be taken to refer to the ill-advised Community Charge introduced in the dying days of the Thatcher administration, a poll tax is an individual tax one must pay in order to be added to the electoral register. In the modern example, if you didn’t register to pay the Community Charge, you couldn’t register to vote. This was one of its major sticking points AFAIR.
OB
I think it was the other way around. The electoral roll was one of the sources of information councils used when trying to find people who owed the tax, so many people refused to register to vote.
Not sure about the UK, but in Queensland (Australia) rates tend to include water, sewerage and rubbish charges so they’re not purely “Give us money because we’re the government” (although that is an element) in the same way taxes are.
Hehe. ISWYDT
You may well be right. I was only just of voting age at the time it all kicked off and not particularly politically active.
OB
And, in reply to the question about the term bobby (or bobbies). I’d say this is pretty archaic nowadays (though not as archaic as Peeler or Peelers 
). People don’t use the term in day to day conversation much, though if they did it would still be understood. The only place you generally see or hear it now, is in discussions lamenting the lack of ‘bobbies on the beat’.
OB
Strictly speaking, at the time Wodehouse was writing of, “rates” would have been clearly linked to your own local area’s services, among them policing.
These days, central government has much more control over local government funding, but our bill from the local council for what is now called council tax still includes a named amount for the police and fire brigade, complete with a summary report on what they do with it.
And people still moan about it.
Just to elaborate. “Rates” are the payments that householders pay to local government for local services like Education, police, fire and rescue, refuse collection, local roads and a myriad of other local services. Some local services like major roads and medical services are financed from general taxation. The amount due is calculated from the nominal value of the property as some date in the past. Properties are divided into bands (A to D from memory) which is intended to make those people who live in expensive houses pay more.
Businesses also pay “rates” these are worked out based on a property’s open market rental value on 1 April 2015, based on an estimate by the Valuation Office Agency (VOA). This is multiplied by an amount set by central government.
I think the basis of ‘rateable value’ calculation has varied over the years based on various features of the property such as number of bedrooms, floor (or roof) area, number of windows (people actually bricked up windows in their houses to avoid tax) - but yes - this rateable value was then used to ‘rate’ the consumption of utility services (which at the time were all national public suppliers).
My house only went from flat rate charging to metered water a year or two back.
On a sidenote around here (Northern Ireland) one slang word for the police is ‘peelers’, originating from Sir Robert Peel, in England they tend to say ‘bobbies’ instead.
Of course those are the polite nicknames…
The basis of the calculation did indeed vary over the years but not quite in the ways you’re assuming.
The origins of the system dated back to the 1601 Poor Relief Act. That required all the inhabitants of a parish to be regularly taxed to provide assistance for the poor. But the Act was left it vague as to how those taxes were to be calculated. Like many forms of taxes of that period, the collectors, who were local men themselves, usually just made rough guesses about who could afford to pay what. Not the most sophisticated system, but one that was normally sufficient. Over time it came to be established that valuations should be based on rental value. Moreover, other local taxes, usually for smaller amounts, were introduced to pay for other local services using the same assessments. With reforms to local government, all these ‘rates’ came to be collected by larger authorities and in the nineteenth century they were consolidated into a single local tax. Even then poor relief was often still the single biggest expenditure.
The Window Tax, being a national tax, was completely separate.
I lived in London for a couple of years and I was told that the guys wearing “Bobby” hats were actually a different division of police than the guys with checker hats.
In other words, all bobbies are coppers, but not all coppers are bobbies. Is that true?
The word “poll” in “poll tax” has nothing to do with elections. It is an archaic word for “head”. So a poll tax is a “head tax”; that is, a tax that’s levied on everyone (or everyone who is eligible for it), regardless of individual differences such as property or income.
Ah, that makes sense. Consider my ignorance fought. 
OB