With respect to the French protests we have this from one of the country’s more vocal tax campaigners.

The Guardian discusses protests in France this morning, 8nckuding this comment and quote:

Isabelle, 41, a single mother, had never taken part in a protest movement before. She works at a sandwich stand at Toulouse airport for the minimum wage – less than €1,200 a month – and her daily shifts begin at 3am. She was among many who had deliberately spoiled her ballot paper in last year’s presidential election final round, unwilling to choose between Macron or the far-right Marine Le Pen.

“This is now about so much more than fuel tax,” she said. “We seem to live in a world gone mad where the rich pay next to nothing and the poor are constantly taxed. We’ve had enough of the elite.”

It is fifteen years since tax justice campaigning began. But the attitude of the wealthiest has not changed. They still think tax ‘is for little people’. They are wrong. We said so. Now very large numbers of people are agreeing.

We have for a decade or so been suggesting a solution to this. Raise the personal allowance so that those on low incomes - oooh, say, those earning around the full year, full time minimum wage - are not in the income tax system at all. We’ve even been successful in that the personal allowance is rising to £12,500 a year.

We’d also like to see national insurance payments only start at that level but then no campaign achieves all its objectives immediately.

The most vociferous shouting against this idea has been coming from these very same tax justice campaigners. Making sure that taxation doesn’t fall on the little people opposed by those who will, when it’s foreigners, change their rhetoric.

There’s a line somewhere about how without double standards certain people would have no standards at all. That might be a little harsh but logical consistency certainly isn’t a strong suit now, is it?

Or as we should put it, it’s us classical liberals proposing and carrying to fruition the policies that benefit the poor, the progressive liberals doing something quite different.