What I was trying to point out Smokey is that there are poor who do pay tax and VAT.. who can't afford the rises.... the ones I described are certainly not the whole picture. as you say they are one stereotype... but was only using to show an example of such.

That's all I was doing, Gs. You are right in what you say, there are those people around the threshold who are unfairly affected to a degree, but that's the case with any tax threshold and seems to be unavoidable. I don't think VAT is any less fair than income tax in that respect. They've raised the income tax threshold to try and mitigate the effect, presumably.