Insults, sour grapes and the tampon tax

What do the European journos make of Brexit now it is all over? The Graun provides a helpful summary:

 profoundly populist and dangerously dishonest...Brexit is an exercise in emotion, not rationality; in choosing your own facts. And it’s not clear how it will end.”...Brexit … which would never have happened had Conservative politicians not, to a quite unprecedented degree, deceived and lied to their people”....Britain “captured by gambling liars, frivolous clowns and their paid cheerleaders. They have destroyed my Europe, to which the UK belonged as much as France or Germany.”...emotionalisation and over-simplification of highly complex issues... a political vision turned towards yesterday’s world. Ideological. The way the trade deal focused on goods at the expense of services … It’s not the way the world’s going.”

Not much different from 2015 then  really, although then it was impossible for them to believe these populist irrational ideas would ever triumph, of course.

 

Meanwhile, the Graun shows how to turn your own grapes sour (pissing on your own cornflakes? Something like that) before you've even tasted them:

The tampon tax has been abolished after the government honoured its March commitment to remove VAT on women’s sanitary products.

Good news you might think -- a Government promise kept as one of the first things to be done after Brexit. But no...

Laura Coryton, who started the Stop Taxing Periods campaign in May 2014 while a student at Goldsmiths, said the Brexit process had made it less likely that the tampon tax would be abolished throughout Europe...the European parliament had voted unanimously [in 2018] to start the regulatory process to allow any EU country to abolish any tampon tax....“That process has since gone cold, because we then left the EU and we were the ones pushing for it,” said Coryton. “So if anything, actually, Brexit has made it worse, because if we were to have stayed in the EU, then this piece of legislation would have gone through… then any EU member would be able to axe the tax, not just the UK.”

Not only that:

Since 2015 the £15m funds the tampon tax has raised in the UK have been directed to women’s refuges and domestic abuse charities. “The tampon tax has long been a symbol of policymaking based around men’s needs, so removing VAT is symbolically important,”’ said Mary-Ann Stephenson of the Women’s Budget Group. “But the tampon tax money has been an important source of funding for the women’s sector – the government needs to be clear about what will replace it.”