The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will affect everyone in the UK, but the Ipswich Spy blog have declined an article on this because there is no "hook" to Ipswich.
MP's will discuss an Early Day Motion today proposing that the UK Parliament should have the chance to scrutinise TTIP proposals.
At the moment all the decisions are being made purely between the EU and the USA which means that only MEP's can have any direct input; once the proposals are voted through the UK Parliament will be completely powerless to do anything about them and another large piece of democracy will be undermined.
TTIP will give large corporations the weapons to sue Governments through the Investment-State Dispute Settlement arrangements embedded in the trade agreement. The settlement process will be secretive. Profits will be placed before people's welfare.
See War on Want's article
http://www.waronwant.org/campaigns/trade-justice/more/inform/18078-what-is-ttip
Wednesday 14 January 2015
Secretive TTIP will give huge corporations far-reaching powers and put profits before people.
SECRETIVE TTIP WILL GIVE HUGE CORPORATIONS FAR-REACHING NEW POWERS
Tomorrow on Thursday 15th January our MP's will
debate a motion put forward by Labour MP Geraint Davies: EDM (Early Day
Motion) 202 tabled in July 2014.
This is about a trade agreement known as
TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) which is currently
under negotiation between the EU and the USA.
However, the governments of the individual EU countries are not getting an automatic right to debate TTIP
The TTIP agreement will heavily favour
profits over people because corporations will be able to secretly sue
Governments if they feel that their profits are being affected by
measures like food standards regulations, workers' rights, environmental
protection rules and safety regulations.
Big corporations will be able to sue
governments because the agreement will include ISDS: Investor-State
Dispute Settlements and these settlements will be held in secrecy,
further undermining our democratic rights.
Geraint's EDM runs as follows:=
That this House notes that the
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership includes investor-state
dispute settlements that are being designed in secret, so enabling
multi-national companies to intimidate and sue governments for lost
profits due to Government policies designed to protect the public as
consumers or workers or to change the level of public ownership, that
such settlements will be decided in private by arbitration panels, not
in open court, that such actions and arrangements threaten to compromise
the UK's established democracy, human rights and the rule of law and
that the shared fruits of trade should not be at the expense of the
social and economic justice that democracy demands; and therefore calls
on the Government to ensure that all proposed arrangements are fully
scrutinised by Parliament and that no arrangements are made which
compromise established standards of democracy, human rights and the rule
of law.
Basically Geraint Davies is calling for all
proposed arrangements in connection with TTIP to be scrutinised by our
own MP's here in the UK Parliament and not just by the EU, otherwise the
agreement will be made and Parliament will be helpless to change it.
38 Degrees are asking people to petition their MP's ahead of the vote on Thursday 15th January 2015
Put people before profits and contact your MP today
Sally Wainman
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