On 15 March 1988, the House of Commons sitting was suspended due to “grave disorder” after a series of MPs furiously protested against the budget delivered by the chancellor of the exchequer, Nigel Lawson.

The disruption occurred as Lawson announced a radical, classically Thatcherite set of tax cuts. The budget included a reduction in the basic rate of income tax from 27% to 25% and the abolition of the top rate of tax, which stood at 60%. The decision meant nobody would pay more than 40% on their earnings.

As the chancellor detailed what would become a landmark Thatcherite budget, several opposition backbenchers voiced their outrage. The protest was led by Alex Salmond, the Scottish National Party (SNP) MP for Banff and Buchan, and Dave Nellist, the Labour MP for Coventry South East.

Salmond, then the deputy leader of the SNP, decried the budget proposals as an “obscenity”.

He declared: “This is an obscenity. The chancellor cannot do this.”

The SNP MP was subsequently named and suspended from the House following a division. MPs backed a motion to suspend Salmond by 354 votes to 19. Those 19 MPs included Labour leftwingers Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn, Bob Cryer and Dennis Skinner.

Following Salmond’s suspension, Nellist, a leading light of the Trotskyist Militant tendency, rose to his feet.

He retorted: “What about the National Health Service?”

Nellist was repeatedly ordered to sit down by the deputy speaker and chairman of ways and means, Harold Walker. He refused.

Faced with persistent defiance and a general uproar from the opposition benches, the deputy speaker took the rare step of suspending the House. After the 10-minute suspension, proceedings resumed and Lawson was able to complete his speech.

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Michael Jopling, the Conservative MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, suggested that Salmond and Nellist should be suspended from the House “for six months without pay”.

Jopling stated: “After this afternoon’s demonstrations, is it too much to hope that the House will at last take a grip of itself and, when people get themselves named in the way in which it happened this afternoon, we shall suspend them for six months without pay?”

Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader of the opposition, responded to the budget on behalf of his party. He referenced the “anger and resentment” exhibited during Lawson’s budget speech.

Kinnock told the House: “The budget that we have heard this afternoon, especially the latter part of it, generated anger and resentment against the immense injustice of the attitude taken by the chancellor of the exchequer in his view of the best off people in our society and the gift, in excess of £2 billion a year, awarded to them in tax concessions.

“We compare that with the fact that he offered nothing at all to the National Health Service. We compare his handout to the richest in Britain with his offer of a puny, marginal and negligible amount to those who constitute the average people of our society.

“In those circumstances, the anger generated is understandable. However, I believe that, faced with that situation, I, my comrades and my honourable friends should take the view: do not get mad, get even. I assert again that in this House and everywhere else in this democracy argument is always superior to the form of action that we have seen this afternoon.”

The House of Commons was not televised at this stage. But Lawson later described the episode as “some of the most amazing scenes ever to have taken place on budget day” and “a particularly loutish display of the politics of envy”.

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In a speech on 19 March 1988, Margaret Thatcher claimed that the budget had written an “epitaph for socialism.”

The prime minister declared: “Nigel’s budget was the obituary for the doctrine of high taxation. It represented the defeat of everything Labour thought was permanent and irreversible in political life. It was the epitaph for socialism.

“Labour is not only horrified; it is mystified. They simply can’t work out how it’s done.”

Shortly after the budget, Kinnock faced a leadership challenge from longstanding left-wing Labour MP Tony Benn.

Benn pointedly described his platform as a “campaign for socialism”.