Everyone is wrong about the "tampon tax"

Because our media don't bother with foreign news, they wouldn't have noticed that both Canada and Australia had the "tampon tax" row back in summer. Those who make reference to it at all will claim that Canada abolished the tax. That is not in fact true. It's a clever piece of accountancy but it remains largely unchanged.

Course The Times along with our political class attribute it to the EU, but a quick glance at Google and we see that there is a long list of countries who apply taxes to that strata of produce which suggests it is very much the product of a global convention.

As far as we can tell it relates to how the materials are classified globally and registered with the WTO. The EU has probably done about as much as it can without escalating it to the classification level (World Customs Organisation - Code 19 IHS). The EU applies the reduced rate of VAT - which is as far as it can go unilaterally.

Once you change the WCO classification you can kill the taxes globally, but given that the material classifications apply to many other products - that won't be an easy task and won't be entirely free of politics. The EU may apply an accountancy trick to make it disappear off the agenda, but we need to turn to the global forums to resolve the issue rather than lobbying the EU to look into it.

Once gain the EU obscures the international dimension from view and it shows that our politicians and our media are not remotely equipped to inform us or make decisions on such matters. They are not endowed with the necessary knowledge to tell us how we should vote come the referendum. In this and all such instances, we should ignore them. Period.