Heard about TTIP? No? Nor have most people. That’s because it’s a secret. Its full title is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. I only heard about it recently, and I was worried enough to rouse myself to write to my MP about it. Here’s the letter, and when you’ve read it you might want to write to your MP too:

“Dear Alan Johnson, I am writing to ask you about Labour Party policy on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), currently being negotiated in secret between the EU and the US. I am concerned that TTIP, posing as a traditional trade agreement, has as its goal the removal of regulatory barriers which, even now, serve to protect us in a number of ways, e.g. with regard to workers’ rights, food safety rules, toxic chemical use, digital privacy laws and the banking safeguards introduced after 2008. I am particularly concerned, however, about TTIP’s potential effect on public services. TTIP apparently wants to open up public services and government procurement contracts to competition from multinational companies. This threatens even more privatisation in areas such as health and education. This is particularly worrying in the case of the NHS since TTIP wants foreign investors to have the right to sue sovereign governments before ad hoc tribunals for loss of profits resulting from public policy decisions. So it looks as if, for example, Virgin could sue the Department of Health in certain circumstances if, say, it didn’t get the contract for STD services in a particular area. In truth, nobody knows how this “investor-state dispute settlement” mechanism would work. But however it might work it seems set to throw any democratic control out of the window. I also understand that, while the European Commission claimed that public services would be excluded from any TTIP agreement because they are “supplied in the exercise of government authority”, it has also recently said that it wants to see public services included in EU trade agreements. This contradictory stance can give no comfort to those of us who fear that our public services are soon to be entirely private – taken out of our hands. What is your view on these matters? And what is your view, and indeed the Labour Party’s view, on multinational companies’ rights to sue governments for loss of profits? And what would Labour Party policy be on TTIP if it won the 2015 election? From what I’ve read, I think that TTIP, and the secret negotiations to get it, should be abandoned entirely. Yours sincerely, … …”

See what I mean? Also look at this link: http://www.waronwant.org/campaigns/trade-justice/more/inform/18078-what-is-ttip