Scottish Independence Archive 2014-2015: TTIP and ISDS

The airwaves are full of it. The NHS: under threat, heroes of every political colour riding to its rescue…

“We’ll spend £2.5 Billion!”

“Streamline frontline services!”

“Safe in our hands!”

The argument ensues in a “mine’s bigger than yours” kind of way. The mainstream UK parties are squabbling among themselves to convince us each is better for the NHS than the others.

None of them, but none, have said a word about TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the EU and the USA. TTIP will open the door, among other things, to handing healthcare corporations in the US the right to bid to provide services in the NHS here in the UK.

I’ve heard references to it from the SNP, the Greens and other progressives in Scotland*. It came about as we argued for a Scotland where protection for health was enshrined in statute. The Big Three, the Westminster Triumvirate, for all their rhetoric say nothing about it.

This masquerade is consistent with the mentality of the London Bubble. It’s the lopsided agenda of cartel politics where the elected conspire with the city, big business and the media to mould the world into their imagined reality. In it their prattle disguises the awful silence surrounding the secret talks about TTIP they are part of in the EU, talks rolling on underneath the hot air.

Why this silence? Is it because an open debate would seriously polarise public opinion? It would certainly damage all those who glibly promise a benign future for the health service. Conveniently, they can put failures in the future down to austerity, the incompetence of other parties, whatever.

Of course it may just be they are complicit, utterly deceitful, not even ignorant but willfully blind.

I don’t have the answer. I certainly never had one from Labour when I asked about it through the Scottish Labour website before the referendum. The Tories are on record (through Hugh Pym on the BBC ) saying health must be included in the TTIP talks.

Deafening silence, then, in the media. On the internet, on Facebook, petition sites and sundry blogs the pressure is building. The issue is out there. Meanwhile, the deaf, dumb and blind kids in Westminster go on distracting us with their political pinball.

So what’s their game? The Tories I can almost understand. Their big business—small government dogma would support such a thing and hang democracy. A small sacrifice for an ideal… so long as its sham cousin, give us a mandate, shut up and let us rule, can keep on papering the cracks.

I wonder at the Lib-Dems. They maintained a gloss of their former (if wishy-washy) fairness. They always did hand-on-your-heart, for-your-own-good, honest-joe, politics rather well. And now they’ve learned to fake sincerity, they’re on a winner. Except, the Orange Book is in the ascendancy. Seen through that prism, the cosy coalition makes sense. Orange Book liberalism is the same big business—small government ethos as the Tories follow, the light hand of government that deregulates and sets us all as free as we can afford to be.

And Labour, oh my God, Labour. I despair at the game they play. They will out-Tory the Tories while vaguely leaning to the left. They have sold out their working roots for a suit and a tie and snouts in the trough. They have joined the Establishment while all the working class heroes of their history go spinning in their graves into oblivion.

TTIP, the enormous threat of it, is being negotiated as we speak and they all say nothing. Not why it should be, nor why not. There’s just a vacuum. No attempt to debate it, influence it, or protect services we want protected, or else remove them completely.

In the middle of it all is the insidious ISDS, the Investor-State Dispute Settlement. There’s no discussion of this, whether to include it or not. ISDS gives corporations recourse to law to settle disputes with governments. It means corporations, once they have bid and secured contracts, can sue governments if their profits are later affected by government decisions. Effectively, a democratic mandate to, say, bring a sector back into public ownership could result in litigation. The tribunals in which this is tried are not necessarily in the public domain.

Perhaps most startling of all, this is an EU negotiation. As we approach the 2015 election with David Cameron talking up how he wants to renegotiate the terms of our EU membership, I wonder why he’s not prepared to take TTIP on in that spirit. UK sovereignty has slipped down the agenda suddenly. And Farage, he’s astutely silent on it too. Perhaps UK sovereignty in this matters so little to him as well. Oh, and Vince Cable is the man in Westminster on whose desk this weighty process sits.

So we get to Labour, champions of the NHS. Surely they must raise their voices. No. Ed Miliband has promised £2.5 billion for the NHS if elected. By then it’ll be too late. TTIP could be ratified by the end of 2014, certainly in 2015, before the election. Then the £2.5 billion could be spent lining the pockets of corporate shareholders in the USA. It’s not easily reversible so there would be huge fines and penalties if an attempt is made in the future and I don’t trust Ed and his cohorts to even bother.

Now, you must see why Scotland wanted an acknowledgement of the scale of the threat to the NHS before September the 18^th. None was forthcoming. In the aftermath we hear the threat is real but still the measures to protect the NHS are lost in the rhetorical limbo. The reality of TTIP and ISDS is swept under the carpet, maybe till later…

Except there is no later.

TTIP-related links

*Scottish Progressives