This year there’s been a huge (and deserved) furore over the fact that in the UK sanitary items such as tampons are subject to a 5% tax because they’re deemed a ‘luxury’ item. Thousands of people have taken to social media to mock the ridiculous tax and there’s a change.org petition lobbying the change.
Despite this, during the government’s spending review in November, chancellor George Osbourne announced that the tampon tax was going nowhere but that he was ‘going to use the £15 million a year raised from the Tampon Tax to fund women’s health and support charities’. Which, of course, is problematic on a number of levels.
But today, France took a leap in the right direction with the French parliament voting to cut the tampon tax, taking it from 20% to 5.5% despite the change being rejected in October.
Hang on, that’s still more than our tax, isn’t it? I know what it looks like, but relative to French tax, it actually brings it into line with other non-luxury items, meaning it’s the equivalent of us abolishing the tax all together. In summary: this is really positive and fingers crossed the UK decides to up its game, too.
Earlier on in the week, there was more good news when France’s far-right National Front failed to win control of any regions in the second round of regional elections, despite a record number of votes (6.8 million) and topping the first round of voting.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.