Very good post from Peter Brett (see below). Think about what will happen if this goes through. https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/eu-ttip-petition#petition An unusual political rant for a Friday night, sorry. But this one meets my main facebook criteria: 1) its not really a left wing-right wing issue, a 2) something can be done about it (not just we need a revolution etc etc). Tomorrow is the European Day of Action on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) - the deal between the U.S. and the European Union. This is one of the most important political questions but it gets talked about less than how Nick Clegg eats a sandwich. TTIP is bad for a number of reasons. The most important is that if they sign the agreement, a European or American government that decides to regulate something more strongly than the other government can be sued for often HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of pounds of taxpayers money. This has happened many, many times around the world in the last twenty years. I didn’t just read this on a dodgy lefty website. I’m happy to provide court judgements etc. to anyone who doubts it (part of my Phd was on investor-state disputes). One of the worst was CME/Lauder v. Czech Republic (2001), when the Czech government had to pay some company the equivalent of its whole health care budget (!!) because it wanted about half of TV programmes to be in its own language (imagine if it was like that over here). Philip Morris is planning to sue the Australian government for BILLIONS of Aussie dollars because it wanted plain fag packets. This deal will probably include chemicals, cosmetics, information communication technologies, medical devices, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals. These will have to be regulated in the same way on both sides of the Atlantic or governments will be sued. (Imagine the differences between say French and U.S. views on pesticides and genetic-modification of foods. Why can’t countries decide for themselves on this? This should be up to us.) This is definitely not about good Europeans vs bad Americans though. The Buy American Act means U.S. school canteens have to buy local produce. With TTIP European companies would get the right to bid for these contracts. This should up to them! That’s one reason why this not a left-wing issue. Another reason is that the right-wing is supposed to care about national sovereignty. Who runs this country? This is much more important for that question than 99% of the fights about the ridiculously tiny details of what some European Courts can do. A third reason is that if ‘we’re all in this together’ then there is no way that we should be giving away whatever tiny amount of money is left in the bank to opportunistic foreign businesses. Finally why can something be done about it? Because luckily the Lisbon Treaty will give the European Parliament a vote on this – sometime next year. So far they’ve been trying to push it through. I know no-one really cares about the European Parliament but since they’re the only hope we have to put pressure on them, email them, sign petitions. (https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/eu-ttip-petition#petition) etc etc. No-one ever contacts these people so they will think this is the biggest thing ever!
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 20:40:06 +0000
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