Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)

The TTIP is a free trade deal currently being negotiated between the European Union and the United States. The implications of the TTIP are as follows:  The most insidious threat is Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), under which corporations would be able to sue governments in secret international tribunals run by corporate lawyers for any measure the government had enacted causing them loss of profits.  Private providers of public services would have recourse to the tribunals. This would make it impossible for future governments to reverse the privatisation of the NHS set in motion by the Health and Social Care Act.

Regulations would be harmonised between the EU and the USA, and we would be left with:
- weaker American standards on workers' rights, food, the environment, animal welfare, health and consumer safety
- weaker European regulations on banks, removing the American Dodd Frank Act, which was implemented in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, making further banking crises more likely.

Existing copyright laws would be greatly strengthened by the TTIP, threatening our freedom of speech and severely limiting our use of the internet.

Those promoting the TTIP claim it would bring jobs and prosperity, but historical evidence suggests otherwise. Firstly, these claims are remarkably similar to those made before the North American Free Trade Agreement between the USA, Canada and Mexico was passed in 1994, and the reality then was very different. Far from gaining 200,000 jobs as had been promised by President Clinton, the USA lost 680,000 as corporations moved their operations to Mexico to take advantage of cheaper wages.  Secondly, the EU Commission has claimed that a typical family of four in the EU will receive 545 Euros annually as a result of the TTIP.  This is simply not true - the study on which the claim was based stated that this would be the cumulative benefit from 2017 to 2027 - a figure calculated over a decade, not annually, and even this was based on the most optimistic assumptions. In reality the most generous assessment of the benefits of TTIP would amount to one extra cup of coffee a month for each of us.

Of the major political parties in Britain, only the Greens and the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists are opposed to the TTIP - an agreement which hands significant power to private corporations, and which threatens our economic stability and freedom of expression.  The Tories, Labour, Liberal Democrats and UKIP are all in favour.

TTIP negotiations began in July 2013 and the aim is to complete them late in 2015, after the UK general election but before the US presidential election, though this is highly ambitious.

Thanks to John Matthissen www.midsuffolk.greenparty.org.uk