TTIP — who would benefit? - Scepticism is justified on trade deal

When voices as diverse as Greenpeace, the Irish Farmers’ Association, and some of Britain’s most eccentric Colonel Blimp champions of Brexit agree, and when Europe’s trades union and France’s Front National’s Marine Le Pen find common cause, it is time to sit up and take notice. 

When that concern is amplified by very significant Dutch, German, and French public opposition, it is time to properly engage with the issue at hand — only 17% of Germans now back this game-changing, all-embracing project.

This growing opposition is, according to one of Britain’s most conservative and pro-business commentators, based on the fear that the deal is a “secretive stitch-up by corporate lawyers, yet another backroom deal that allows the owners of capital to game the international system at the expense of the common people”. The alarm bells are indeed ringing loudly.

When that issue is a trade deal that may exacerbate the democratic deficit eating away the credibility,accountability moral authority and, most of all, the potential of the European Union, it is certainly time to engage, judge and maybe call for a pause.

That some of those opposed to the as-yet- unfinalised Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), warn that it may usurp our courts and have the capacity to set aside legislation enacted by already tottering parliaments it deepens those concerns.

When those negotiations are focused on further empowering the free market and globalisation — the Hydra destroying blue-collar and middle class incomes and security in Europe and America — it is time to consider TTIP through social, as well as economic, values.

The extremely complex and often secretive negotiations on the unfinalised trade deal suggest a wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee moment is long overdue.

It would be impossible, and probably foolish, to try to encapsulate the issues in a sentence, but the core of European opposition is that American tooth-and-claw capitalism may win legislative authority to safeguard profits, even if that means casting aside the consumer and worker protections fundamental in European societies. As issues go, that seems a deal-breaker any day of the week.

It may be a heresy in this Davos age of free markets to, despite Government and business support for TTIP, look at the bigger picture. The European Commission’s Spring forecast records an incendiary rise in inequality.

Youth unemployment in Greece stands at 51.9%, 45.5% in Spain, 36.7% in Italy, and 24% in France. It hovers around 20% in Ireland.

Those with incomes below 40% of the eurozone median have suffered a 14% drop in net receipts since the Lehman crisis.

This is fertile ground for the horrors of the past to reinvent themselves. In America, this divide fuels the Trump ascendancy, in Europe it drives extreme politics and, partially, the Brexit campaign.

The migration crisis is a symptom too. TTIP may be framed as an economic deal, and it may even, its advocates would argue, help end inequality, but the credibility of the international capitalist system is so very tattered and threadbare every line of any deal, if there is one, must be treated with the greatest scepticism if not reticence.