Tip of the iceberg

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a EU-US trade agreement now being negotiated in secret, was discussed in Parliament yesterday (January 16) in a highly charged debate.

 
Labour MP Geraint Davies and Lib Dem MP Greg Mulholland tabled a backbench motion which asserted that TTIP, and in particular any associated investor-state dispute provisions, should be subject to scrutiny in the European and UK Parliaments.

 
The debate came in the wake of overwhelming public opposition to the trade agreement on both sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, in December, an anti-TTIP campaign group collected over one million signatures opposing the trade deal, with specific concern over the provisions that enable multinationals to sue governments in secret courts.

 
Particularly contentious during the debate was the notion that the NHS would fall within the scope of the deal and would render privatisation of the health service irreversible.

 
Conservative MPs argued that the European Commission has already given assurances that the NHS would not be affected by TTIP. However, shadow business minister Ian Murray noted that if the health service is not to be included in the trade deal, it should be spelled out explicitly.

 
As Unite general secretary Len McCluskey has argued before, prime minister David Cameron has yet to use his veto power to exclude the NHS from TTIP.

 
“We don’t believe the empty promises coming from the bureaucrats in Brussels but Cameron could act today and protect our health service,” McCluskey said earlier last year. “David Cameron’s silence is deafening. He is refusing to answer a very simple question. Are we going to exempt health from the EU US trade agreement?”

 
Locking in privatisation

 
The most controversial elements of TTIP are the notorious ISDS provisions, which empower corporations to sue governments for loss of profits. While supporters of TTIP say that the public’s fears over the provisions are unfounded, ISDS is nothing new.

 
What the Institute of Directors called in the TTIP debate yesterday “misleading scaremongering” has already come to pass in other trade agreements.

 
In 2012, Dutch private health insurer Achmea sued the Slovak Republic after bringing health insurance back into public control. Achmea won its case, and was awarded more than 20m euros. When the Slovak government refused, the private health insurer seized government assets, where they were deposited in special bank accounts in Luxembourg.

 
Unite assistant chief of staff Adrian Weir says that ISDS effectively locks in privatisation.

 
“ISDS provisions will ‘lock in’ privatisation at the time of signing,” he said. “Whatever is currently in private hands that we may hope to renationalise – for example, railways – will be made impossible after TTIP goes through.”

 
Beyond TTIP

 
Weir argues TTIP is only the tip of the iceberg. Various international trade agreements, such as CETA (a Canadian-EU trade agreement) and TTP (a US-led agreement in the Pacific Basin) are on course to accomplish what anti-TTIP campaigners fear most.

 
He explained how companies, with subsidiaries in different countries, can sue governments through backdoor tactics and so weaken their powers to act in the public interest.

 
Weir gives the example of US tobacco company Phillip Morris, which is now suing the Australian government over potential loss of profits following the introduction of plain paper packaging of cigarettes.

 
The lawsuit is going through even though no free trade agreement between the US and Australia exists. Instead, Phillip Morris has used a subsidiary in Singapore to legitimise the lawsuit, since a free trade agreement between Australia and Singapore, with ISDS provisions, does exist.

 
“It’s important that we recognise that this debate is so much more than just about TTIP,” he said. “None of these new, post-Reagan, post-Thatcher trade agreements are about trade. They’re explicitly designed to lower regulatory standards to the lowest common denominator.”

 
Weir argued that, since tariffs between the EU and developed countries, such as the US and Canada, are already at historic lows, the target in new trade agreements are ‘non-tariff barriers’.

 
“‘Non-tariff barriers’ is coded language for regulatory standards which protect workers, consumers and the environment,” he said. “The ultimate aim of these new trade agreements, which must be opposed in their entirety, is to de-regulate and undo all of these protections.”

 
Although proponents of these new free trade agreements argue that the deals have the potential to raise standards in countries with less stringent protections, Weir disagrees.

 
“They said that would happen with NAFTA, and the exact opposite happened,” he said. “Regulatory standards were most certainly driven downwards.”

 
To find out more about how TTIP and other free trade agreements threaten labour protections, the environment and public services, see Adrian Weir’s presentation here.