This probably reflects very badly on my life, but the best piece of telly I’ve watched all week was an argument over VAT ratings. On Monday, an unlikely alliance of feminists and Eurosceptic men forced a Commons debate about the “tampon tax” – the 5% VAT levied on sanitary products – wringing a promise from the government to raise the issue with the European commission. As Labour’s Wes Streeting joked, it would be nice, at last, to know at least one of David Cameron’s EU renegotiation demands.
The debate at Westminster showed that it still feels transgressive to say the word “vagina” in an institution designed expressly for people without one. But once MPs got started, they couldn’t stop. Paula Sherriff, who proposed the amendment to the finance bill to have tampons exempted from VAT, suggested that the acronym should stand for “vagina added tax”. Stella Creasy refused to yield to harrumphing Tory MP Bill Cash until he’d used the word “tampon” rather than one of those flowery Boots aisle euphemisms such as “feminine care”. Anne Main started talking about how incontinence pad adverts often featured “sassy young ladies and women of a certain age who are still attractive to members of the opposite sex”. It was, by parliamentary standards, a hoot.
The core of the argument was simple: no woman chooses to have the mess and inconvenience of menstruating every month. No woman thinks to herself: “Oh, is it the 27th already? Think I’ll treat myself to a cheeky period!” And so sanitary products should be treated as an essential, like tea cakes, exotic meats or bicycle helmets (all of which have a zero rating). As Sherriff put it in the debate: “A tax system that lets someone dine on crocodile steak on their private jet without paying a penny, when we cannot survive a period without the Treasury taxing us for it, cannot be a fair one.”
The Great Tampon Insurrection has been a long time brewing. From the start, sanitary products were classified at standard VAT rate (which is now 20%) rather than treated as essentials. With few women in parliament, there were two reasons the unfairness passed unnoticed. First, for the male majority, menstruation was simply not part of their everyday experience, and because it was a taboo subject, the women they knew probably didn’t mention it much either. Second, if you were a rare female MP, trying to be taken seriously in a male-dominated world, would you have wanted to become Ms Bloody Tampon, always banging on about periods? Think of the jokes that would have flowed, both to your face and behind your back. Why is the honourable lady so worked up about this issue – perhaps it is the time of the month? (Snigger, snigger.)
Historians, please correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s hard to imagine Margaret Thatcher going in to bat over sanitary towel costs. After all, she had to deal with a political environment where it was considered acceptable for a diplomat to tell a UN general assembly debate in 1982 that her actions over the Falklands were attributable to “the glandular system of women”. In that climate of sexism, I’d keep quiet about my monthlies too.
The Tory MP Bernard Jenkin, who spoke in the debate this week, bears this theory out. He raised the issue in a shadow cabinet meeting more than a decade ago after being berated about it by an A-level student in his constituency. (That teenager would grow up to become one Stella Creasy.) The shadow cabinet, then led by William Hague, gave him “a very frosty and uncomfortable reception for raising such a matter in a semi-public meeting, including from some of our right honourable and honourable friends who are female”.
The big breakthrough came in the New Labour era, after the party’s all-women shortlists vastly increased its number of female MPs. According to former spin doctor Damian McBride’s entertaining memoir Power Trip, paymaster general Dawn Primarolo worried away at the issue, fighting with customs officials who argued that offering VAT relief on a product used by only one sex was, itself, sexist. She eventually triumphed. But even so, the reduction from 17.5 to 5% was not announced by Gordon Brown when he delivered his 2000 budget, because he did not want to say the word “tampon” at the dispatch box. The taboo still had power.
After that success, feminists have moved to ask why sanitary products should incur any VAT at all. At Sky News’s Ask the Leaders event before the election, a young woman flummoxed Cameron, who was totally prepared for tough questions on tuition fees, Syria and welfare, by asking him about periods. He looked exactly as panicked as you would expect a middle-aged man to look when confronted with a confident young woman talking about ladies’ unmentionables, eventually giving an answer about the beastly EU, which prevents an individual member state dropping VAT rates to zero.
That is why Monday’s debate was an unlikely alliance of Labour and SNP feminists and borderline Colonel Bufton-Tuftons from the Tory benches looking to bash Brussels. But that is one of the overlooked joys of parliament, something you rarely hear about amid the buzz of partisan bickering – how the house allows people with very different ideological outlooks to come together on single causes.
Much as it’s tempting to imply that this issue is trivial compared with something more traditionally macho like, say, transport policy, it is important. In the debate, Sherriff mentioned the musician Kiran Gandhi, who ran this year’s London marathon without wearing a tampon, on the first day of her period. She ended the race with leggings soaked with blood – something many women fear on a monthly basis, and something we still regard as horrifying. Gandhi wanted to highlight how many women around the world do not have access to sanitary products, and how this restricts their ability to work and go to school. “This is an issue for all women, but, as with so many things, it hits the poorest the hardest,” Sherriff told the house. Another MP, Liz McInnes, observed that “homeless shelters can request free condoms from the NHS, but not free sanitary products”.
We have an unfair tax on tampons because our political system assumes a male default. But that’s not the case any more – not only do we have an increasing number of female MPs, but the changing atmosphere they have caused means men are shedding their shame about taking on “women’s issues” too. Yes, the tampon debate was largely symbolic, but what it symbolises is progress. A Vagina Added Tax won’t go unchallenged in a Vagina Added Parliament. And that’s something for everyone to celebrate.