The Free Trade Delusion

Since the UK Brexit referendum result and Trump's win in the US Presidential election, the liberal polity on both sides of the Atlantic have been wringing their hands and pronouncing on the surprise (to them) of both results. The cause, they have repeatedly declared, was the anger and ignorance of the "left behind", the detritus of society they hadn't noticed from the confines of their comfy, evidence-based neoliberal bubble until the ingrates turned up and spoilt their party.

Liberal democracy, of course, is about little more than the unwashed turning up every four or five years to confirm the Great and Good's right to rule via very flawed ballot box processes. Democracy should validate the status quo, maybe with a little nudge leftwards here and rightwards there, especially under the mind-numbing post-ideological consensus in place since the fall of the Communist bloc.

So, when the electorate goes off-script, we soon see just how thin-skinned liberalism truly is: the voters were misled, didn't know what they were voting for, are bigotted racists/sexists/homophobes, etc. They have voted against their own interests as well as wider society because of their moronic stupidity and so in Britain we should rerun the Euroreferendum, or find some variant that will ultimately let us stay in the EU, while in the USA, liberals are fantastically speculating about California seceding or joining up with Canada.

Yes, Trump will do nothing to help most of the people who, disillusioned with the US capitalist system, voted for him in response to his divide and conquer tactics of blaming foreigners and migrants for their lost jobs and deep poverty. And Brexit may well mean that British workers lose some of the meagre employment protections conferred by the EU. But neither a Clinton Presidency nor a so-called soft Brexit would do anything to resolve the deep-seated inequality and accompanying alienation that has led us to this pass.

At the heart of western economics in the post-war era and codified in the institutions created by the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, the rich nations have pursued an aggressive commitment to so-called free trade and movement of capital. As globalisation has take grip over the last two and a half decades, this ideology, often called neoliberalism, has been applied as the orthodox economics across virtually all the planet. The G20 summit in 2009 explicitly stated that it remained committed to these principles and to rooting out all forms of protectionism wherever these are found. Indeed, in recognition of this dubious aspiration, many free trade agreements, including the recently passed CETA between Canada and Europe, have included Investor-States Dispute Settlement mechanisms. Under this, multinationals could sue national governments and their taxpayers for any measures that reduce or deny them profits, from health and safety rules or environmental legislation through to any refusal to privatise public services.

Proponents of free trade repeatedly argue that its advantages can be seen by a rise in wealth around the world and claim that removal of trade barriers, quotas and tariffs creates a virtuous circle of economic growth and prosperity. The International Monetary Fund has put this central to its rescue packages to developing nations when they have needed financial assistance - in return for loans, they have had to remove any protections on or subsidies to domestic industries. This has been done while ignoring the fact that the rich economies all have long histories of protectionism when they were growing their own early industrial infrastructure. Indeed, many rich nations still run a range of protectionist measures - and trade blocs such as the European Union do a fine job of keeping any manufactured goods from poorer states out of their domestic markets, but they of course are far less likely to be in thrall to the IMF or World Bank.

Yet even within rich states, free trade has had massively damaging effects, especially where the ideology has been adopted as part of an international trading system such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (and more recently the Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty aggressively pursued by the Obama administration) and within the European single market. Removal of trade barriers and tariffs certainly makes international trade more profitable for companies and being able to relocate their manufacturing and service bases to poorer areas with a lower paid workforce makes their products cheaper (and their profit margins bigger).

However, this has come at a huge cost to the workforces laid off in developed economies as part of  corporates' pursuit of competitive advantage via cheap labour abroad, while in developing states it has favoured big business at the cost of the destruction of small scale local enterprises. As a self-employed textile trader in Lima told the BBC World Service this week, "They talk about Peru growing, but it is just the rich growing richer." Economists such as Paul Krugman cite the obsession with trade liberalisation as central to this.

The deceit of rightwing populists like Trump and UKIP of course is to blame foreigners and migrants, attacking one of the symptoms rather than the true cause - something these buddies of big business will never honestly do - and very much designed to buttress rather than challenge the elite. At most, they are "Opposition by Appointment to the Establishment" -  a tool to neuter the anger of the public and incorporate it into the continuing narrative of a hierarchical, globalised economics. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has railed at Trump and UKIP's Nigel Farage as voicing nothing more than "the fake anti-elitism of rich white men".  Like in the old Czarist Empire, pogroms will come long before any genuine reforms.

All the more reason then for the Left to articulate genuine change, to advance a vision of a very different world and the economics needed to achieve it. And yet, on this, quite the opposite seems to be happening.

While Labour's Chancellor John McDonnell called Brexit an opportunity for Britain rather than a threat this week, he neither developed what  opportunities he foresees, nor was he speaking to the prevailing mood among British socialists and progressives. Corbyn himself has set continued access to the European single market as a priority for Brexit negotiations, and Green co-leader Caroline Lucas echoed this sentiment when she attacked McDonnell for apparently giving succour to hard Brexiteers.

Yet, rather than blindly clinging to some sort of soft Brexit which continues to focus on free trade arrangements, isn't this precisely the time for greens and socialists to challenge the status quo? Why would we want to cling onto a single market, removing as it does the ability of a democratic government to protect its industries and the well-being of its people where and when it chooses? Why cling to something that removes the revenue from tariffs on imports, reduces the public purse and bans the ability to subsidise enterprises which may be commercially unprofitable but socially or environmentally beneficial? How can we build a fairer, sustainable world on a template carved out to enable the very worst of capitalism?

Given the racism that has accompanied both Trump and Brexit, there is clearly a need to counter the nationalism and xenophobia of their faux revolts. But we can have freedom of movement and culture without embracing free trade: indeed, perhaps ending free trade would be the best way to ensure continuing cultural diversity around the world, given multnationals' drive to commodify and homogenise the entire planet.

Lucas and Corbyn have both said they accept the UK is leaving the EU. Yet, while the silent secrecy from the Tory Bexiteers is clearly frustrating and undemocratic, their insistence on making such a totemic issue of access to the single market is baffling and a major strategic error. For if there was ever a time to be forging a path to a more sustainable world founded on a fairer, co-operative and localised economics, it is now. That inevitably means a rejection of free trade and embracing instead economic intervention by the state, new forms of community and mutual ownership, regulation and, yes, protectionism.

The vast majority in our rampantly unequal societies across our troubled planet face ever greater difficulties to make ends meet and live their lives as they might have hoped in a world of great abundance. If the Left does not rise to the challenge to show how we can create a different paradigm and instead leaps to knee-jerk reactions to populists' lies, only tragedy awaits us. To quote Gramsci, writing of a similar age of chaos in the 1920s, "The old world is dying, but the new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."

TTIP - Treaty To Increase Profiteering

Green MP Caroline Lucas and anti-TTIP protestors

The TransAtlantic Trade & Investment Partnership plans for a massive free trade area between the European Union and the USA reach a critical stage next week with a vote in the European Parliament. Negotiated in secret, with MEPs having to go pre-booked into a special room to quickly read updates on the talks, the treat masquerades as a wealth-expanding, job-creating measure. In truth, it delivers what is left of democracy and public services into the hands of profit-seeking multinational corporations, unaccountable to anyone and disinterested in anything other than the company's bottom line. The environment, the people who work for these companies, the people who buy from them and the communities they live in - what protections they have now will be either stripped away outright or whittled away by a process of attrition in the years to come.

Check out BIG BAD LAW on Facebook and Twitter

Few free trade schemes have worked to the genuine, lasting benefit of the populations they cover - and this one is no exception. It will reduce public income from taxes by reducing and removing tariffs on imports; it will push governments to privatise public services, including the NHS in Britain, and open up those that do not to endless, costly law suits from companies seeking compensation for denial of profits in secret courts through the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). US tobacco giant Philip Morris has just invoked similar free trade rules to sue the British Government for billions of pounds in compensation for plans to force cigarettes to be sold in plain packets - just a taste of what is to come if TTIP is adopted.

It is also likely to have a big impact by forcing down European standards on public safety, employment rights and consumer protection to the much lower US standards so that it is "fair" to big companies - no thought to European (or American) workers or consumers. Everything from safety protection in the workplace to food standards and mobile phone tariffs could be affected to the disadvantage of ordinary people.

In the European Parliament, and at Westminster, Conservatives, Lib Dems and most Labour politicians have signed up to the TTIP. Opposition has mainly come from the Green Party and, in the EU, its allies in the Greens/EFA, which includes SNP and Plaid Cymru, as well as from the Nordic Green Left. UKIP have been absent from most debates on it - they tend to favour free trade agreements in most circumstances though they may dislike this one purely because of its connections to the EU.

Millions of Europeans and Americans have been working to oppose TTIP, with international days of action in recent months and many previous demonstrations. Trade unions, including the AFL-CIO in the USA, have been vocal in their concerns. However, with the negotiations going on in secret and the Governments of nearly all member states signed up to the mantra that all trade is good trade, only the members of the European Parliament are likely to be able to put any block on its passage.

This week may be our last chance to stop this dangerous and potentially irreversible treaty. Green MEPs including England's Molly Scott Cato and Jean Lambert have produced a series of short videos outlining why TTIP matters and why we should be concerned.

If you agree,
- please share the videos (click through to Youtube on each video for the share button)
- please sign the petition on this link HERE (it is now close to the two million signature mark)
- and please write/email/contact your MEPs - details HERE

If you are on Facebook, take a look at Big Bad Law, a Green page taking a slightly satirical but urgent swipe at the TTIP.

Big Bad Law on Facebook

999 for the NHS - "The Spar of Sickness"

 

Patients & staff wave to marchers at Pinderfields in Wakefield

After spending two days on a "feeder walk" from Halifax and Huddersfield through Dewsbury, I joined the Jarrow to London People's March for the NHS at Wakefield last Saturday. Then on Sunday, in blazing sunshine, we moved on along city streets and country roads to Barnsley, ending with a rally at the hospital. Green colleagues who did the next leg the following day met grey skies and rain, but the crowds appeared to have grown and today saw the marchers exit Yorkshire after a rousing send off from Sheffield on their way out of the county towards Chesterfield.

The march was set up by some mothers from Darlington in north-east England, who had grown increasingly concerned about the deterioration of the NHS over the last few years. Through the 999 Call for the NHS, they are retracing the steps of the 1936 March for Jobs from Jarrow to London to highlight the health service crisis engulfing England.

Darlo-Mums: the founders & organisers of the People's March

It was especially powerful to walk for a time with Jo Adams, one of the Darlington Mums who told me about her family's terrible experiences recently with an increasingly chaotic, disjointed health service and her fears for the future. And it was very moving indeed as we went through Barnsley with people coming out of their houses to cheer and applaud us on, and cars sounding horns in support. Following the route of the original march, Jo and her group will reach London on 6 September - if you are near the route, please go and join them, even if just for an hour or mile or two. Find out where you can meet them at http://999callfornhs.org.uk/ and follow them on Twitter via @999CallforNHS.

There was a huge mix of people taking part - disabled activists, current and past patients, councillors, parliamentary candidates, health workers, GPs, Greens, Left Unity, Communists, Labour, parents, children, citizens - and even some Americans. Balloons proclaimed our love of the NHS, its visceral hold on what is left of community in modern Britian self-evident as was the obvious fact that in spite of the paramount importance of our public health service, it is symbolic of a wider campaign to restore genuine public services in areas now so frequently sold off or leased out to profit-seeking
privateers such as education, social services and transport.

Among the most frequently cited concerns among people on the marches were the deliberate underfunding and privatisation of health services at all levels in England. Under the "Nicholson challenge" set by the Blair/Brown Government, and gleefully continued by the current one, the NHS is required to return £2,000 millions from its budget each year, supposedly in efficiency savings. The result is hospitals in crisis - our local Mid-Yorkshire Trust is £17 million in debt and running down services accordingly.

The Coalition Government has removed the duty to provide universal care free at the point of use and so we now see an ongoing debate to charge up to £25 for GP visits and possibly more for the apparent crime of going to the A&E department. The latter is often used by the Coalition as a supreme example of wasted resources, conjuring up the image of drunken chav teenagers descending on A&Es across the country from Friday lunchtime to the final effusions on a hazy Monday morning. Notwithstanding the brave struggle of medics and paramedics with the byproducts of our neoliberally deregulated entertainment industry and its excessive focus on flogging as much booze as possible, the truth is somewhat more prosaic - research by the College of Emergency Medicine shows that fewer than 15% of A&E visits could be dealt with by GP intervention; hardly enough to justify charges to deter alleged timewasters.

The Stockport Undertakers bear the NHS cake cruelly cut & carved by the Coalition

Even worse, as required by the 2012 Health & Social Care Act, NHS services - even cancer care - are being put out to tender and since April last year 70% of the contracts have been awarded to the private sector, to companies like Virgin and Vanguard, Spire and Specsavers. The NHS is fast becoming a brand name for a profit-seeking franchise rather than an integrated public service: a sort of Spar of Sickness, if you like.

But to me personally this crisis is as strikingly in evidence in some small but nevertheless important ways. My father-in-law passed away last year after a long illness with cancer. During his treatment, I recall one evening visiting him in hospital and having to go out to a local supermarket to buy pillows for him as the hospital did not have any spare. On the way back, in the lift, I met a woman who had brought a duvet for her husband because they had run out of clean blankets. Even the ward toaster was not replaced when it broke.

We are the sixth richest country on planet Earth. But, depending on which measurements you use, we are also the second or third most unequal. Our Governments have sold off public asset after public asset, telling us the private sector will run them more effectively in spite of its ever growing need and ability to take out more and more for profit. Energy, telecommunications, the railways, the bus service, huge swathes of our universities and colleges, the post office, the probation service, Job Centres, the passport agency, and now the NHS have been or are being sold off or leased out at often bargain basement rates to the very people who are funding our political parties and/or in whom our politicians hold substantial financial interests. Even opposition politicians like Labour's former health secretary Alan Milburn and former Chancellor Alistair Darling have taken contracts of one sort or another from private health firms.

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt - a tragi-comic target

And now, if they have their way, the three Westminster parties want to sign the TransAtlantic Trade & Investment Partnership treaty, part of which will require states to put public services out to tender - if they don't or if they bring in regulations to protect employees or consumers, even via the ballot box or a referendum, the State-Investor Disputes mechanism will allow big companies to sue for compensation for loss of profits. As blogged previously, some examples of these from existing "free" trade agreements around the world have seen governments having to pay corporations hundreds of millions of dollars as reparation for such heinous acts as wishing to protect forests and put health warnings on cigarette packets.

Some Government Ministers and Labour MPs (Labour are almost as keen on TTIP as the Tories and Lib Dems) have suggested the NHS could be exempted from the TTIP. However, the agreement covers all commercial enterprises and by marketising and contracting out NHS services, the NHS is subject to commercial law and, as such, can not be exempted from the TTIP. Any attempt to do so would almost certainly lead to legal cases running into the hundreds of millions in terms of costs to the Exchequer as well as possibly years of uncertainty. Besides which, when did the Tories really not want to sell off the NHS in any case?

We can and must do better than this. There is no real need for austerity - only for redistribution: of wealth and of ownership. The 999 Call for the NHS is a brave and imaginative initiative: it reaches deep into the hearts of tens of millions who have always assumed we live in a society where you will be cared for if you fall ill. Terrifyingly, under our very noses, duplicitous politicians are taking all that away, replacing the motive of public service and community with the selfish drive of profit. It is time to purge ourselves of this parasitical class of professional legislators and, in its place, create genuine democracy far beyond the simplistic notion of five yearly trips to the ballot box; democratic ownership is absolutely central to a society that uses its resources for the common good.

And such a society is still possible, even essential. Perhaps the journey towards it began a couple of weeks ago on the streets of Jarrow.

Just to confirm what they won't tell you - the National Health Service IS being sold off, right now, under our noses.

Professor Ray Tallis, author of NHS SOS, spoke to the rally at Barnsley Hospital.

Death Wish Lib Dems

Registering now regularly below 10% in the national polls, the Lib Dems are showing increasingly frayed nerves as The Reckoning of the 2015 General Election gradually draws into sight. And looming large between now and then, the Slaughterhouse of the Euro-elections also beckons so very terrifyingly - even their own President, Tim Farron, concedes they may be completely wiped out in the Euros. Hurriedly, northern Lib Dem MPs have issued a report attacking austerity a mere four years and hundreds of Commons votes too late. Meanwhile, shaken by the rise of UKIP in the polls, Eurofanatic leader Nick Clegg is to face his opposite number among the Eurosceptics, Nigel Farage, in a debate that is likely to be about as compellingly memorable viewing as the final episode of BBC Eurosoap El Dorado. (remember?)

Against all this, they remain unapologetic for their years enabling the Tories to change Britain perhaps for a generation if not forever: in the stealth privatisation of the health service, the emasculation of local government via death by a million cuts, the stigmatising of disabled people as a drain on society and a host of tax cuts and regulatory changes to support big corporate business. They've made tough decisions, they claim - all too often rather too eagerly and proudly to sustain their facade of reluctance for long.

And now, today, their hubris, their delusion and their death wish stand naked before us all.

The Green Party received a leaked memo from the Lib Dem Head of Campaigns setting out their plans to target the Greens at the Euroelections.

First of all, it is a perhaps sound acknowledgement of the very real threat the Greens pose to the Lib Dems in the elections: with 2 sitting MEPs and strong chances of adding at least a further 4 or more to their total, they stand poised to overtake the junior Coalition partner in both seats and votes, making in effect as big a story as any rise in UKIP support. The Lib Dems nervousness is well founded here.

Less well founded is their target for their "smearing" of the Greens as "dinosaur left-wingers that are more red than green." It seems that the Lib Dems (whose constitutional name is still the Social & Liberal Democrats) view the Greens commitment to social justice and a more equal society as Jurassic age communism. So be it. It is far less of a commentary on the Greens than on just how far the Lib Dems have travelled in their power-seeking odyssey and how pathetically desperate they are to cling onto the privileges and office-troughs they have their snouts so firmly stuck in.

For the appalling truth the Lib Dems plan to reveal about the Greens is the party's opposition to TTIP; the Trans-Atlantic Trade & Investment Partnership currently being (secretly) negotiated between the EU and the USA. This treaty sets up a free-trade zone between these two areas, allegedly to help harmonise commercial standards on each side of the Pond, but also to facilitate the accumulation of wealth by large business corporations. Not only will trade duties be relaxed (denuding public treasuries of much needed tax revenue) but large American companies will be able to participate in public procurement in Europe (including the UK). Crucially, if the Governments of any European countries impose any restrictions through public policy that might reduce the profits of these predators, they will be able to sue that country for damages. Secret abritrators rather than public courts will decide such cases, making the whole process ever more opaque and undemocratic.

India and Australia have already come unstuck with similar treaties where companies have successfully sued over public health regulations at a cost of hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars to the taxpayer. Meanwhile, under its free trade treaty with Canada, Costa Rica faces paying out to Canadian gold mining interests for stopping them prospecting in environmentally sensitive areas of its country - no wonder some call the TTIP the BAD law: Business Against Democracy.

So this is what the Lib Dems will stand for against the Greens: they will plant their flags firmly in the dung heap of corporate capital. Pitching themselves against a party that stands for the interests of ordinary citizens and communities,  they will claim that the TTIP will create some jobs generously brought to us by here-today-gone-tomorrow multinationals chasing the lowest paid round the planet (even although most of the evidence of such deals points quite clearly in the opposite direction). Clegg and his Orcs think this will stir up such resentment that the public will turn away from the Greens' ideas for a living wage, a transaction tax, clampdowns on tax avoidance and extension of the public sector.  Judging the electorate by their own standards, they apparently believe voters will prefer their own slavish adherence to corporate Europe over the Greens' aspiration for a transformed social Europe working for people not profit.

Fine. Let them. The sooner they do, the better. It's getting boring now watching the long, lingering demise of this hubristic ragbag of puffed-up careerists: let's get it over with in time for the next season of The Walking Dead. Please.

Green Party Eurocandidates offered help for Lib Dem conference delegates troubled by their guilty consciences at a special Field Hospital in York last week. There were no takers.