Tag Archives: tampon tax

Cynical opportunism all round on Tampon Tax deal

By Caron Lindsay | Fri 18th March 2016 - 4:13 pm

And so, the Tampon Tax looks like it’s on its way to the home for ridiculous, misogynistic laws in the sky. And it’s all thanks to George Osborne and David Cameron. Ah, no, say the Brexiteers, the whole idea that we had to go begging to Europe to get it fixed is plain wrong.

Had there not been an EU Referendum coming up in just over three months’ time, I suspect women would have been paying the extra 5% for some time to come. Because of an unlikely alliance between a few right wing Tory outers and Labour feminists, the Government has been forced to take action so that they don’t look like reactionary idiots.

Except they do.

George Osborne is no more a feminist than Brexiteer Steve Baker. If he was, he’d have done something about this long before now. The fact is that the Tory inners and outers are being as cynically opportunistic as each other. The “inners” are saying “Oh, look at this rabbit we’ve pulled out of the hat”, never mind that the rabbit should have been set free decades ago. The “outers” are doing the EU bad thing

And then there’s Nigel Farage, a man who was happy to take money for his party from a man who thinks that trouser-clad women are “hostile” jumping on the anti Tampon Tax bandwagon. He’s using its demise to argue that that we should be setting our own taxes, forgetting that it was a bunch of men in a room, including us, who set it in the first place.