What is TTIP and why should we be angry about it?

 

Anti-TTIP graffiti in Brussels, Belgium. Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters


Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian

 “Sometimes,” says a character in David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King, “what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes the important things aren’t works of art for your entertainment.” It is worth bearing that in mind as we consider TTIP, the most boring thing we’re supposed to get angry about since – ooh … was it PFI schemes that nobbled hospitals, eviscerated schools and left Britain £222bn in debt? Or was it the asymmetrical constitutional ramifications inherent in the West Lothian question? Or George Osborne’s incomprehensible pension changes involving auto-enrolment annuities, tax wrappers, pots and draw-downs? Christine Lagarde’s last press conference about the Greek debt crisis? Maybe it was your last mobile phone bill.

Add up the boredom you experienced on each of those occasions, multiply the result by the international coefficient of tedium (which, as you know, is 27.5) and that’s how bored the international trade deal known as TTIP will make you.

The Guardian’s expert on obfuscation by bureaucratese and acronym, Steven Poole, recently argued that TTIP could be a conspiracy to pull some very thick wool over our eyes. We live in an age when we’re so accustomed to being entertained that we haven’t the temperament to do the difficult work of penetrating the wool of boring. So we’re going to take that wool, roll it into a ball and leave it for the cat to play with. No, don’t look at the cat. Look at me. Focus.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Ignacio Garcia Bercero (left), the EU chief negotiator for TTIP, and his US counterpart Dan Mullaney. Photograph: Thierry Charlier/AFP/Getty Images

So, what is TTIP?

Remember when acronyms starting with two TTs were lovely things such as TTFN (ta-ta for now)? TTIP isn’t like that. It stands for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Last month, the European parliament voted to allow the European commission to continue negotiations with the United States to create the world’s largest free-trade zone, which is what TTIP is all about.

Conservative trade spokesman Emma McClarkin said: “I welcome the fact that, following weeks of parliamentary ping-pong and attempts by socialist and protectionist MEPs to derail the process, we finally have a clear backing for TTIP.” Right, stop thinking how much fun parliamentary ping-pong sounds, particularly if a cat joins in.

What McClarkin is looking forward to is greater regulatory harmonisation and a consequent boost for business, some of it, incredibly, British. Today, for instance, the US and EU have different regulations testing the safety of cars, drugs and soft furnishings. That imposes costs on transatlantic exporters of cars, drugs and soft furnishings – especially, you would think, on exporters of upholstery for drug dealers’ cars. One possible consequence of harmonisation could be a boost for British car exports. Imagine: one day Americans will be driving trim little Nissans made in Sunderland rather than ludicrous Hummers concocted in the bowels of hell.

There are other projected benefits. US ambassador to the EU Anthony L Gardner argues that TTIP is, if you’ll pardon the expression, geopolitically pertinent, and that it would “provide an economic equivalent to Nato” that would settle “the rules of world trade before others do it for us”. Think about it this way: right now, Vladimir Putin can, if he chooses, strip to the waist for a photo op in which he turns off the gas pipe from Russia to Europe. That’s not good enough. Instead of being dependent on nasty Russian gas and oil, then, as a result of TTIP, the EU might become dependent on lovely American and Canadian gas and oil. That’s one reason behind the EU’s call for a dedicated chapter in TTIP on energy and raw materials. Instead of Russia isolating the EU, the EU could isolate Russia. Sweet.

We have been invited to pronounce TTIP “tea tip”. Don’t these knuckleheads have any sense of history? The world’s most famous tea tip was in Boston in 1773, and that resulted in the marvellous era of transatlantic cooperation known as the American War of Independence.

TTIP is not to be confused with TPP, which is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, involving 12 countries including the US, Australia and Brunei, and which, like TTIP, is still under negotiation.

There is also, incidentally, something called Ceta, which stands for Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. It is like TTIP but for Canada and Europe and, so far as I understand it, means that Europeans will soon be bathing in maple syrup while reading Margaret Atwood novels. Which is probably nicer than it sounds. Ceta is due to be ratified by the European parliament later this year but the document is currently undergoing a process of what is called “legal scrubbing”, which sounds like the sort of thing Americans do to their chickens, but in fact is another species of the kind of gobbledegook rampant in modern life and means minimising the document’s exposure to legal action.

But that’s not all. There is also Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement. It was established in 1994 and, proponents of TTIP think, demonstrates the kind of inspiring benefits and harmonisation of standards that might result if TTIP comes into force. Think of it this way. Just as, thanks to Nafta, for the past 21 years Americans have been saying “aboot” and forming their own mariachi bands, Mounties have been wearing sombreros and Mexicans putting maple syrup on their quesadillas, so in the future, thanks to TTIP, Americans might drink coffee from cups the size of thimbles, while Europeans might wear 10-gallon hats even though, on average, we’ve only got six-gallon-sized heads and so would look ridiculous.

But seriously. How is TTIP going to affect me?

TTIP will hit Europeans like you in the pocket, critics argue, so you need to pay attention. While the European commission estimates that, by 2027, TTIP could boost the size of the EU economy by £94bn or 0.5% of GDP, an economic study by Jeronim Capaldo of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University argues that the commission’s econometric modelling is jejune and that, in fact, TTIP will clobber Europeans. Capaldo predicts 600,000 European job losses as a result of TTIP, a net fall in EU exports, declining GDPs for EU member states and a fall in Europeans’ personal income.

Why people are so angry about TTIP?

Because Americans are, with all due respect, disgusting slobs always chasing a fast buck and thus very different from us fragrant Europeans who are, like Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way. One worry is that the main goal of TTIP is to remove EU regulations that stop its citizens being poisoned, killed or subject to rampant pollution so that more profits can be made by corporations on both sides of the Atlantic.

Do you have concerns about TTIP?


For instance, critics argue that if TTIP involves, as the EU hopes, a commitment that would guarantee automatic licences for all future US crude oil and gas exports to Europe, that would result in a boom in US fracking to keep Europeans powered with shale gas, not to mention greater exploitation of oil from Canadian tar sands. Such developments, argue critics, would undermine not just the EU’s fuel quality directive but ruin what is left of the planet worth ruining.

Consider one aspect of TTIP that is giving European critics the particular pip. It involves another acronym, so steel yourselves. That acronym is ISDS, which stands for “investor-state dispute settlement”. This procedure would allow companies to sue foreign governments over claims of unfair treatment and to be entitled to compensation. Similar provisions in other treaties have allowed, for example, tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris to sue Uruguay and Australia for enacting anti-smoking legislation, and a Swedish energy company to take legal action against Germany for phasing out nuclear power.

  An American chicken farm … US food is subject to different regulations. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Critics say ISDS provisions undermine the power of national governments to act in the interests of their citizens. According to John Hilary, the executive director of War on Want, leaked documents show that medical and health services, social services, education, post, finance, telecommunications, transport, energy, water, environmental and cultural services are all on the table in TTIP, meaning that American corporations may have full access to them.

That is why there is a big banner outside the US embassy in Berlin that says (try saying this in the whiniest German voice you can muster): “Demokratie ist keine Handelsware,” which means democracy is not for trading.. Of course there is. It is also why there is some unacceptably unfunny graffiti in Malmö that depicts Barack Obama grinning oleaginously as a wooden horse marked TTIP is dragged into Europe.

In the UK, there are fears that ISDS could threaten the NHS because it might allow private firms running hospital services to sue the government if it chose to return the services to the public sector. The French government has already negotiated its film industry’s exemption from these provisions, so why can’t the NHS be, critics ask?

But the idea that ISDS is subverting democracy in favour of wicked corporations is a conspiracy theory, argues the European Policy Information Center, which – unforgivably – is already spelling “centre” the American way. Epicenter (as this group is acronymically known) is made up of groups, such as the UK’s Institute of Economic Affairs, that are in favour of TTIP. It argues that we shouldn’t worry about ISDS provisions. Why? Because the clause is a time-honoured means whereby corporations protect their investments, and does not undermine EU or member states’ right to pursue legitimate public policy objectives.

Or consider food regulations. While the EU has an impressively alliterative “farm to fork” strategy, for instance, regulating each link in the food chain, Americans pump their cattle and pigs with growth-promoting hormones banned in the EU. As a result, most US beef can’t be sold in the EU.

Worse, Americans use 82 pesticides banned in the EU. They wash their chicken in chlorinated water to kill bacteria. Ninety per cent of their soya, cotton and corn is genetically modified, while the EU allows member states to ban GM production. France, for instance, has banned GM, and Gauloises-smoking, beret-wearing toughs now patrol French fields to ensure that the excrescence of GM never sullies la belle France again.

So how could we possibly abandon these glorious European standards? The spectre of what lavishly moustachioed French farmer/anti-globalisation activist José Bové calls la malbouffe Americaine (rubbish American food) lurks behind the fears of this trading alliance. “Yeah?” retort Americans. “So how come you dumbass Europeans got mired in a horse-meat scandal in 2013 if your food regulations are so darn tootin’?” Which, you have to admit, is a good comeback.

Or consider data privacy rights. Don’t Americans realise that us Europeans don’t care to be snooped on by the NSA or have Google peer 24/7 into our very souls? MEPs are worried that TTIP might undermine EU data protection laws, and that’s why they have called for an “unambiguous, horizontal, self-standing provision” in it to guarantee citizens’ right to privacy.

Can something be horizontal and self-standing at the same time, you ask? It seems, I concede, unlikely.

A nurse holds a bag of saline solution … There are fears that trade deals could threaten the NHS. Photograph: Dimitris Legakis/Athena Pictures

Who is angry about TTIP?

Groups as disparate as War on Want and Ukip are united in anger about TTIP, though for different reasons. The Institute of Economic Affairs and the Conservative party are united in not being angry. The Labour party is – surprise! – conflicted.

Let’s consider Labour first. Labour MEP Jude Kirton-Darling, while arguing that ISDS is a “para-judicial and opaque system of private arbitration [that] allows companies to sue governments at great cost to the taxpayer”, also says that TTIP “could present us with a unique chance to regulate globalisation and to promote EU standards”, as well as “providing a much-needed boost to local economies, support to SMEs and new and exciting jobs and training opportunities”.

As for Ukip, Farage and his chums oppose TTIP because they think it’s a smokescreen. It’s not about trade, stupid, it’s about promoting “the political pretensions of a wannabe European superstate” and “setting up a parallel system that undermines national courts and national legal systems”, as the party’s international trade spokesman William Dartmouth MEP said in the European parliament last month.

After the vote went against Ukip’s stance last week, Dartmouth said that the only way citizens can defeat TTIP now is to vote to leave the European Union. But that’s Ukip’s answer to everything.

As for War on Want, its views are more typical of the pressure groups, unions, charities, NGOs and environmentalists that oppose TTIP. There are, for example, 480 such groups affiliated to the Berlin-based Stop TTIP campaign, whose supporting organisations include trade unions like the NUT, NGOs such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace and, my personal favourite, the Pirate Parties of Greece, Germany, Slovenia and the Netherlands, which have no leaders but a splendid flag. The campaign has a 2.3 million-signature petition calling on the EU to “stop these sinister trade deals”, by which it means both TTIP and CETA.

One of War On Want’s major concerns is that TTIP is being negotiated in secret. And with good cause: what nobody seems to have pointed out yet is that if TTIP negotiations do continue, as expected, until next year at the earliest, often in secret with (I suspect) all sorts of complicated car switcheroos, dead letter drops and tooled-up security johnnies in shades talking furtively into their wrists, the costs of negotiations might outweigh any supposed benefits of what they’re negotiating about.

But are TTIP negotiations being conducted in secret? Giacomo Lev Mannheimer of Istituto Bruno Leoni argues that is another conspiracy theory. And, indeed, he points to the dismal truth that there are lots and lots and lots of TTIP-related documents about its benefits, impact on public services, food and agriculture rules. Mannheimer makes a good point, though critics argue that the real meat of negotiations takes place elsewhere and ordinary European citizens don’t get a say in them.

What Mannheimer doesn’t consider is the more disturbing truth that there is an inverse relationship between the number of funny videos on YouTube and the user traffic on European commission websites relating to TTIP.

Indeed, if TTIP is about liberalising the parameters of boring, there are some of us who are prepared to fight back. And when I say “fight back”, I mean kick back on a sofa watching kittens get tickled.

How to take back the NHS, before it’s too late

The coalition’s 2012 health reform act was disastrous. It can be overturned – but time is running out

• 
• • David Owen
  • The Guardian, Monday 1 December 2014

National treasure: the NHS as celebrated in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Photograph: Clive Rose/Getty Images

The Health and Social Care Act 2012 – engineered by the former health secretary Andrew Lansley – was a massive blunder, and even senior Conservative ministers now admit the scale of its disastrous repercussions.

The main thrust of the Lansley project was to take the NHS down the American healthcare route, creating an external market and mandating the compulsory marketisation and commercialisation of services.

Michael Gove, now government chief whip, has claimed that no privatisation of the NHS has taken place but this is plainly wrong. A deplorable example was the sale in July 2013 of Plasma Resources UK which turns plasma into blood products, a particularly sensitive area in healthcare, to the US private equity company Bain and Company. Another example: when advertising for a new chair for NHS Blood and Transplant it was made clear that candidates should have privatisation experience.

Having now established a clear-cut precedent for further privatisation, there is every expectation among private contractors that when contract renewals come up they will be able to tender proposals for a transfer to private ownership. Some of these contracts are massive, such as the 10-year contract in Staffordshire for vital cancer services and end-of-life care worth £1.2bn.

These acts of privatisation will not, unfortunately, be the last if the Conservatives continue in government after the next general election. The companies competing for contracts may even hope to invoke the controversial investor state dispute settlement procedures being negotiated as part of the next big EU-US trade agreement, theTransatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which was championed by the present NHS chief executive when in America, which could enable them to challenge the law in order to hold on to their contracts.

For 68 years, the NHS has provided the level of healthcare that our parliament has decided we can afford. The truth is that healthcare, whether public or private, in a very real sense is infinite: unlimited sums of private money can be – and in many countries are – poured into healthcare by those who can afford it. Money for the NHS is determined by public choice, and relative to what we choose to spend on education, housing, welfare, defence, all of which are legitimate demands on the public purse.

George Osborne is to announce another £2bn for the NHS on Wednesday, a welcome move, which should be used to create a new NHS investment fund with charitable status to centrally handle PFI contracts.

But healthcare, if publicly provided, inevitably has to be constrained. Traditionally, that rationing process within the NHS is flexible, professional and democratically accountable to parliament. British voters could have chosen a different system – they exist in many parts of the world – but no major political party has ever felt brave or foolish enough to put such a choice to them. Nor was it a choice put to the electorate in 2010 by either of the coalition parties.

Yet we know of David Cameron’s close involvement with Lansley before the election. Nicholas Timmins – in Never Again? The Story of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, a study for the Kings Fund – writes: “It is far from the case that the senior Conservatives – Cameron, Osborne and Letwin, for example – were ignorant about what Lansley was up to … He and Oliver Letwin helped write the green papers.” Guilt may be the explanation for Cameron’s current attempt to give the former health secretary a job running humanitarian affairs in the UN.

The far more expensive model based on the US is, after just two years, already having a deep and damaging impact on behaviour in the NHS and depressing standards of care. It is challenging the very nature of the vocational aspect of medicine for nurses, doctors and everyone who works in the NHS. It may be happening slowly, but the dynamics of this market model over the years will carry their own momentum.

Despite much-publicised scandals, such as that which enveloped the Mid Staffordshirehospital, the NHS remains extraordinarily popular among the public, and the only explanation I have is that people know that all demands for ever more expensive healthcare cannot be met. They understand that there have to be financial disciplines; that we cannot abolish all charging or market elements or private contractors in such a large concern.

People do believe, however, that an organisation that carries the brand name NHS has to practise under a fair trade description, and that means that the preferred provider should be the NHS. They like the NHS because they sense that its care choices are broadly fair and they prize its comprehensive cover. Most families have their own reasons to bless the NHS. They can complain, they can get angry with it and they are demanding, rightly, to be better able to influence its rationing process. But what they are rightly fearful of is that, once the service is driven by market principles, the rationing will cease to be fair and their care will become determined by profit.

Such a grave mistake as Lansley’s reform must be corrected. A reinstated NHS would be far better placed to provide a comprehensive, cost-effective healthcare service for England, which is similar, although not the same, in all parts of the UK. Repealing the 2012 act is not a realistic political option but its worst aspects can and must be excised, and the best opportunity to secure a commitment to doing that is before the 2015 election.

As individuals we can exercise our democratic rights over the NHS in ways that would have been impossible before the internet. Using www.nhsbill2015.org we are already opening up old-style political campaigning to new means of persuasion. This is not about money. No, what is required is a vast commitment, in terms of time taken to convey the complexities of the NHS, time taken to lobby MPs and parliamentary candidates, and the persistence not to let candidates escape behind generalised party political messages and manifestos devised by talking to focus groups. There is a new democratic way of exercising the power of the people and we saw its beginning during the Scottish referendum.

We must not forget that in September 2014 the Scottish independence referendum brought the UK perilously close to splitting apart. Those elements that we share, that help create a sense of common purpose, should become ever more precious as we try to unify our nation.

The end of the NHS as we have known and understood it in England will take place before 2020 if the 2012 legislation is not changed. The exact moment of its passing may not even be clear, because it will go with a whimper not a bang, to borrow from TS Eliot. The NHS is not a “religion”, as has often been claimed, nor is it the preserve of one political party, nor one country within our United Kingdom. It belongs to all of us and we let something of ourselves go if we don’t fight to save it.

Economic Growth: the destructive god that can never be appeased

The blind pursuit of economic exapansion stokes a cycle of financial crisis, and is wrecking our world. Time for an alternative

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 18 November 2014 19.41 GMT

'Perhaps it’s inaccurate to describe this as another crash. Perhaps it’s a continuation of the last one, the latest phase in a permanent cycle of crisis.' Photograph: Tyrone Siu/Reuters

Another crash is coming. We all know it, now even David Cameron acknowledges it. The only questions are what the immediate catalyst will be, and when it begins.

You can take your pick. The Financial Times reported yesterday that China now resembles the US in 2007. Domestic bank loans have risen 40% since 2008, while “the ability to repay that debt has deteriorated dramatically”. Property prices are falling and the companies that run China’s shadow banking system provide “virtually no disclosure” of their liabilities. Just two days ago the G20 leaders announced that growth in China “is robust and is becoming more sustainable”. You can judge the value of their assurances for yourself.

Housing bubbles in several countries, including Britain, could pop any time. A report in September revealed that total world debt (public and private) is 212% of GDP. In 2008, when it helped cause the last crash, it stood at 174%. The Telegraph notes that this threatens to cause “renewed financial crisis … and eventual mass default”. Shadow banking has gone beserk, stocks appear to be wildly overvalued, the eurozone is bust again. Which will blow first?

Or perhaps it’s inaccurate to describe this as another crash. Perhaps it’s a continuation of the last one, the latest phase in a permanent cycle of crisis exacerbated by the measures (credit bubbles, deregulation, the curtailment of state spending) that were supposed to deliver uninterrupted growth. The system the world’s governments have sought to stabilise is inherently unstable; built on debt, fuelled by speculation, run by sharks.

If it goes down soon, as Cameron fears, in a world of empty coffers and hobbled public services it will precipitate an ideological crisis graver than the blow to Keynesianism in the 1970s. The problem that then arises – and which explains the longevity of the discredited ideology that caused the last crash – is that there is no alternative policy, accepted by mainstream political parties, with which to replace it. They will keep making the same mistakes, while expecting a different outcome.

To try to stabilise this system, governments behave like soldiers billeted in an ancient manor, burning the furniture, the paintings and the stairs to keep themselves warm for a night. They are breaking up the postwar settlement, our public health services and social safety nets, above all the living world, to produce ephemeral spurts of growth. Magnificent habitats, the benign and fragile climate in which we have prospered, species that have lived on earth for millions of years – all are being stacked on to the fire, their protection characterised as an impediment to growth.

Cameron boasted on Monday that he will revive the economy by “scrapping red tape”. This “red tape” consists in many cases of the safeguards defending both people and places from predatory corporations. The small business, enterprise and employment bill is now passing through the House of Commons – spinelessly supported, as ever, by Labour. The bill seeks to pull down our protective rules to “reduce costs for business”, even if that means increasing costs for everyone else, while threatening our health and happiness. But why? As the government boasted last week, the UK already has “the least restrictive product market regulation and the most supportive regulatory and institutional environment for business across the G20.” And it still doesn’t work. So let’s burn what remains.

This bonfire of regulation is accompanied by a reckless abandonment of democratic principles. In the Commons on Monday, Cameron spoke for the first time about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). If this treaty between the EU and the US goes ahead, it will grant corporations a separate legal system to which no one else has access, through which they can sue governments passing laws that might affect their profits. Cameron insisted that “it does not in any way have to affect our national health service”. (Note those words “have to”.) Pressed to explain this, he cited the former EU trade commissioner, who claimed that “public services are always exempted”.

But I have read the EU’s negotiating mandate, and it contains no such exemption, just plenty of waffle and ambiguity on this issue. When the Scottish government asked Cameron’s officials for an “unequivocal assurance” that the NHS would not be exposed to such litigation, they refused to provide it. This treaty could rip our public services to shreds for the sake of a short and (studies suggest) insignificant fizzle of economic growth.

Is it not time to think again? To stop sacrificing our working lives, our prospects, our surroundings to an insatiable God? To consider a different economic model, which does not demand endless pain while generating repeated crises?

Amazingly, this consideration begins on Thursday. For the first time in 170 years, parliament will debate one aspect of the problem: the creation of money. Few people know that 97% of our money supply is created not by the government (or the central bank), but by commercial banks in the form of loans. At no point was a democratic decision made to allow them to do this. So why do we let it happen? This, as Martin Wolf has explained in the Financial Times, “is the source of much of the instability of our economies”. The debate won’t stop the practice, but it represents the raising of a long-neglected question.

This, though, is just the beginning. Is it not also time for a government commission on post-growth economics? Drawing on the work of thinkers such as Herman Daly, Tim Jackson, Peter Victor, Kate Raworth, Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill, it would look at the possibility of moving towards a steady state economy: one that seeks distribution rather than blind expansion; that does not demand infinite growth on a finite planet.

It would ask the question that never gets asked: why? Why are we wrecking the natural world and public services to generate growth, when that growth is not delivering contentment, security or even, for most of us, greater prosperity? Why have we enthroned growth, regardless of its utility, above all other outcomes? Why, despite failures so great and so frequent, have we not changed the model? When the next crash comes, these questions will be inescapable.

The British government is leading a gunpowder plot against democracy

This bill of corporate rights threatens to blow the sovereignty of parliament unless it can be stopped

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 4 November 2014 20.16 GMT

Illustration by Sébastien Thibault

On this day a year ago, I was in despair. A dark cloud was rising over the Atlantic, threatening to blot out some of the freedoms our ancestors lost their lives to secure. The ability of parliaments on both sides of the ocean to legislate on behalf of their people was at risk from an astonishing treaty that would grant corporations special powers to sue governments. I could not see a way of stopping it.

Almost no one had heard of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the US, except those who were quietly negotiating it. And I suspected that almost no one ever would. Even the name seemed perfectly designed to repel public interest. I wrote about it for one reason: to be able to tell my children that I had not done nothing.

To my amazement, the article went viral. As a result of the public reaction and the involvement of remarkable campaigners, the European commission and the British government responded. The Stop TTIP petition now carries more than 750,000 signatures; the 38 Degrees petition has 910,000. Last month there were 450 protest actions across 24 member states. The commission was forced to hold a public consultation about the most controversial aspect, and 150,000 people responded. Never let it be said that people cannot engage with complex issues.

Nothing has yet been won. Corporations and governments – led by the UK – are mobilising to thwart this uprising. But their position slips a little every month. When the British minister responsible at the time, Ken Clarke, responded to my first articles, he insisted that “nothing could be more foolish” than making the European negotiating position public, as I’d proposed. But last month the commission was obliged to do just this. It’s beginning to look as if the fight against TTIP could become a historic victory for people against corporate power.

The central problem is what the negotiators call investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). The treaty would allow corporations to sue governments before an arbitration panel composed of corporate lawyers, at which other people have no representation, and which is not subject to judicial review.

Already, thanks to the insertion of ISDS into much smaller trade treaties, big business is engaged in an orgy of litigation, whose purpose is to strike down any law that might impinge on its anticipated future profits. The tobacco firm Philip Morris is suing governments in Uruguay and Australia for trying to discourage people from smoking. The oil firm Occidental was awarded $2.3bn in compensation from Ecuador, which terminated the company’s drilling concession in the Amazon after finding that Occidental had broken Ecuadorean law. The Swedish company Vattenfall is suing the German government for shutting down nuclear power. An Australian firm is suing El Salvador’s government for $300m for refusing permission for a goldmine over concerns it would poison the drinking water.

The same mechanism, under TTIP, could be used to prevent UK governments from reversing the privatisation of the railways and the NHS, or from defending public health and the natural world against corporate greed. The corporate lawyers who sit on these panels are beholden only to the companies whose cases they adjudicate, who at other times are their employers.

As one of these people commented: “When I wake up at night and think about arbitration, it never ceases to amaze me that sovereign states have agreed to investment arbitration at all … Three private individuals are entrusted with the power to review, without any restriction or appeal procedure, all actions of the government, all decisions of the courts, and all laws and regulations emanating from parliament.”

So outrageous is this arrangement that even the Economist, usually the champion of corporate power and trade treaties, has now come out against it. It calls investor-state dispute settlement “a way to let multinational companies get rich at the expense of ordinary people”.

When David Cameron and the corporate press launched their campaign against the candidacy of Jean-Claude Juncker for president of the European commission, they claimed that he threatened British sovereignty. It was a perfect inversion of reality. Juncker, seeing the way the public debate was going, promised in his manifesto that “I will not sacrifice Europe’s safety, health, social and data protection standards … on the altar of free trade … Nor will I accept that the jurisdiction of courts in the EU member states is limited by special regimes for investor disputes.” Juncker’s crime was that he had pledged not to give away as much of our sovereignty to corporate lawyers as Cameron and the media barons demanded.

Juncker is now coming under extreme pressure. Last month 14 states wrote to him, privately and without consulting their parliaments, demanding the inclusion of ISDS (the letter was leaked a few days ago). And who is leading this campaign? The British government. It’s hard to get your head around the duplicity involved. While claiming to be so exercised about our sovereignty that it is prepared to leave the EU, our government is secretly insisting that the European commission slaughter our sovereignty on behalf of corporate profits. Cameron is leading a gunpowder plot against democracy.

He and his ministers have failed to answer the howlingly obvious question: what’s wrong with the courts? If corporations want to sue governments, they already have a right to do so, through the courts, like anyone else. It’s not as if, with their vast budgets, they are disadvantaged in this arena. Why should they be allowed to use a separate legal system, to which the rest of us have no access? What happened to the principle of equality before the law?

If our courts are fit to deprive citizens of their liberty, why are they unfit to deprive corporations of anticipated future profits? Let’s not hear another word from the defenders of TTIP until they have answered this question.

It cannot be ducked for much longer. Unlike previous treaties, this one is being dragged by campaigners into the open, where its justifications shrivel on exposure to the light. There’s a tough struggle to come, and the outcome is by no means certain, but my sense is that we will win.