Tampon Tax

Political Protest - Tampon Tax

Our group brainstormed different ideas to make a protest - a lot about the NHS being cut and gun crime in the US arose but the one thing that all us women thought would be good to protest about was the Tampon Tax. Any sanitary product is seen to be a "luxury" item and therefore has a 5% tax on all sanitary product products. If you watch the video below: Russell Howard sums up Tampon Tax in a rather amusing way.

So we chose our location to do the protest:

The canteen. 

What we would wear:

Over exaggerated blood stained white leggings.

Activities we are going to do:

Having an auction selling Tampons as if they were Diamond Earrings. 

"and here we have a smashing pair of earrings with 5% extra tax on - - such a luxury ladies you might want to treat your selves to some of them and gentlemen it's a good idea to get the mrs some as they are priceless gorgeous item that will just be spoiling them! Go on treat your self!"

And since cake decorations are seen as a necessity we are going to decorate and sell cakes with bloody tampons on them - just for affect. Usually in the canteen cakes are sold for £1 so we worked out what they would be 5% extra taxed and so we added 5p to the price. 

BBC News Beat Article - Why Tampons are Taxed

This news article above explains why Tampons are taxed and what shocked me was the fact they used to have a tax of 17.5% and now they have resorted it down to 5%? Why not 0%? And this article then clarifies why.

You can't just change the tax rates in the EU, even if that's what every single person in the UK wanted (which it isn't).

"The make-up of the EU Commission means that all 28 countries involved must agree on any changes.

In other areas of the EU there's something called quality majority voting, which means it only takes a few core member states to agree on an idea to push it through.

But this isn't true for taxation.

And in fact the UK government doesn't want it to be either. They would prefer the voting process to stay as it is."

I can understand that the taxation cuts on certain items must have a majority but why don't we try to get the majority? By protesting! Come on let's do it! 

Let's just hope that this Protest get's the message across - tampons are not a luxury item....end of.