Hi John,
The trade scene is heating up at the moment, and I wanted to update you on what is happening and what we can do to respond.
US trade deal - talking behind closed doors
The first formal round of trade talks has now taken place. Building on the earlier six rounds of preparatory talks, over 200 officials dived straight into negotiations on all the chapters of a future deal at once.
This means they’ve been talking about rules that will affect climate action, food standards, medicine prices, workers’ rights, health services, the power of digital platforms, corporate courts, climate action and financial regulation. These are complicated, controversial areas of public policy, with high risks of getting things wrong. Yet the secrecy with which the talks operate means the government can simply get away with telling parliament and the public nothing more than a bland reassurance that the talks were “positive” and that “objectives” and “next steps” have been agreed.
However, media stories reveal more about what is going on behind the closed doors:
- One leak shows that the trade minister, Liz Truss, is preparing a package of concessions on agriculture to offer the US in order to sweeten the deal.
- Another report highlights why Truss feels the need to do this - 47 members of the US Congress have written to the US negotiator, calling on him to get rid of the UK’s ban on chlorine chicken ‘once and for all’.
- Agriculture industry lobby groups are also pushing US negotiators to ‘seize the opportunity’ to get rid of protections for terms like Cornish pasty, stilton cheese or Scottish wild salmon.
We can already see that these talks are playing out as we had feared. This is going to be a corporate-driven trade deal that will sacrifice standards to big business profit. At a time when coronavirus has revealed how broken our global systems are, this deal would tie us into more of the same. We need to come together and build a movement that can stop this trade deal, and instead call for a radical reset.
To help in building the movement there are two things you can do right now (if you already did this when I wrote to you a couple of weeks ago, thank you):
The return of the Trade Bill
Over the past couple of years we’ve done a lot of campaigning on the Trade Bill in the previous parliament. From the start, we’ve said there is a gaping hole in the bill where there ought to be a modern democratic framework for trade policy. Instead the bill entrenches the government’s power to do deals behind closed doors without needing to tell parliament or the people what it is doing.
With your support, we worked with MPs and Lords from all parties, and last year together we had an amazing success: the bill was amended. That amendment would have ensured that trade deals were debated in public and decisions made democratically. That was too much for the government though, and they dropped the whole bill.
Now they have brought it back, without the amendment. While the numbers in parliament are very different this time round, there are still a lot of MPs who want to stand up for the need for democracy in the Trade Bill, and many of them spoke out this week when the bill had its first debate in the House of Commons.
MPs will be able to propose amendments to the bill at a later stage, and we’ll be in touch then to ask for your help in getting your MP to support measures to allow parliament and the people to have a say on trade.
Covid - the beginning of a boom for corporate courts?
Lastly I wanted to alert you to a hidden danger of the Covid-19 virus: the likelihood that it will lead to a wave of corporate court cases.
We’ve also been campaigning on corporate courts (formally known as investor state dispute settlement or ISDS) for several years. Corporate courts are written into many trade and investment deals and allow transnational corporations to sue governments in secretive tribunals outside of the national legal system for millions - sometimes billions.
Government actions to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic are unprecedented in recent years. The need for these actions to save lives, stem the pandemic and protect jobs is clear, but from a very narrow corporate perspective, they could give rise to corporate court claims. Law firms are already advising clients of the possibilities, and that this may be the “beginning of a boom”.
The damage from corporate court cases can be immense, especially for countries in the global south. They impose massive financial burdens on governments at the best of times, and when countries are struggling under the burden of devastating health and economic crises, this could be overwhelming.
We’re calling for governments to urgently suspend the operation of ISDS before the first cases are brought - and to start working out how to end the unjust corporate court system entirely. Leading human rights experts have already called for a moratorium, and we’re talking to global allies and MPs here about further action. We’ll be in touch with more on this, hopefully soon.
in solidarity,
Jean Blaylock
Campaigner at Global Justice Now
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