This EU-US trade deal is no ‘assault on democracy’

ARCHIVES 2013

By admin-s On Nov 12, 2013

Ignore George Monbiot’s polemic – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is an astonishingly good deal for the UK economy

Ken Clarke, The Guardian

On Monday, EU and US negotiators are meeting in Brussels for the second round of negotiations over what has become known as theTransatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Despite its byzantine name, the TTIP is in fact a trade deal between the EU and the US: an astonishingly bold project which aims to create a free market encompassing the 800 million peoples of Europe and America, potentially boosting our collective GDP by £180bn.

Not that you would know that if you read George Monbiot’s contribution on these pages a week ago. In one of the more conspiracy theorising polemics I have read in some while, he described this wealth-creating, free-trading, economic stimulus simply as “a monstrous assault on democracy” by institutions, “which have been captured by the corporations they are supposed to regulate”. Monbiot is entitled to his view, but even on a highly selective reading of the facts, I cannot see how his argument stands up.

Take the effect we hope that the TTIP will have on the UK economy alone. According to the best estimates available, an ambitious deal would see our economy grow by an extra £10bn per annum. It could see a rise in the number of jobs in the UK car industry of 7%. British companies – of all sizes – currently pay £1bn to get their goods into the US – this cost could be removed altogether. Perhaps most importantly in the long-term, such a deal would safeguard the liberal trading rules which we British depend on – but which the growing economies of the east are less keen on – or generations to come.

I have never had Monbiot down as an ungenerous character, but to ignore all of this in favour of blowing up a controversy around one small part of the negotiations, known as investor protection, seems to me positively Scrooge-like. Investor protection is a standard part of free-trade agreements – it was designed to support businesses investing in countries where the rule of law is unpredictable, to say the least. Clearly the US falls in a somewhat different category and those clauses will need to be negotiated carefully to avoid any pitfalls – but to dismiss the whole deal because of one comparatively minor element of it would be lunacy.