September 7, 2008

There's long been an argument that certain items that are currently taxed should in fact be tax free (or, indeed, free full stop). I'm talking about products found in a certain health and beauty section of the supermarket that men feel distinctly uncomfortable standing next to.

You'd have thought, looking back, that under Blair's Government its infamous and not at all misogynistic-entitled "babes" quotient might have looked at that, too.

But they didn't. And now the moment has passed, too, it would appear, given that anything in life that doesn't fall straight from a tree to your mouth (bouncing once on the value added tax branch) is now considered a luxury and, therefore, taxable.

DEFRA's latest suggestion is that anything "disposable" - the catch-all word for "hateful things" by Labour - should now be taxed like such luxurious items as the pariah-making cigarette, 90% banned but 90% taxed, and booze, which is responsible for more crime than the poverty Governments consistently fail to tackle, apparently. And both still available to be consumed in the warm environs of Annie's Bar in the House of Commons, exempt from Parliament's own rules, and all at a subsidised rate.

The price of disposable razors, for instance, if these ideas gain credence, will rocket. Throw-away barbecues - enjoyed by those who can't actually afford to buy a three ring outdoor gas range for the patio at their second home in Tuscany - will get bumped up, too. Nappies, no doubt, because unless your nanny agrees to rinse out the towel ones (what? you don't have a nanny?) you're clearly an environmental terrorist who deserves, if not jail, to at least pay loads more tax.

But as always we will read our newspapers and snarl at the latest interference by this hectoring bunch of desperate failures, spy another claim to be able to save the world when they can't even save their own country, blame it all on the luckless poor who happen to live in the underclass mess they've helped shovel into their Islington and Notting Hill basements (because there are no cellars anymore, comrades), and then do precisely nothing at all.

Because we roll over like pussy cats these days, grumbling, sure, but never actually doing anything about it. Like saying "no".

Surely, now, though, enough is enough? Especially for the sisters that Harriet Harperson claims to represent?

Because it'll be ladies' sanitary products next, too, to take the "disposable" argument full circle:

Under this tax-crazed lot in the future, ladies, if you're not rolling your own, you're on your own.