Transatlantic Trade negotiations (TTIP) and their effect on health

This is a speech for the World Development Association Day of Action on TTIP July 12th

The proposed international trade partnership agreements TTIP and TISA have the potential to damage our health as well as our economy and environment. But you have to peer through a load of sliding windows, shifty statements and economic pie in the sky to find this out.

Let’s start off by debunking two myths. First of all there are arguments that population health will improve because we will all be better off. This increase in wealth – estimated at something like 9.7% change in real per capita income (Bertelsmann Foundation) - is what seems to bind the Labour leadership into the overall concept of the TTIP. What on earth makes people think that this sort of benefit will happen?

1. First of all the figures for economic benefit are grossly inflated because they are based on the assumption that all aspects of trade will be brought into the treaty – which they won’t be.

2. Secondly, even if there is an economic benefit, what makes anyone think it will be distributed evenly? This average trades off the losses – of jobs, job protection and freely available public services – the losses for ordinary people against the very considerable gains that will be made by the rich, the 1%, the business leaders with their golden hellos and golden handshakes, the shareholders and celebrities with their offshore accounts.

3. Thirdly the potential downgrading of regulation in other spheres – the loss of environmental protection, certain food measures, drugs and advertising, workers’ health and safety all have the potential to make our health a lot worse.

4. Fourthly there is the threat of the ISDS – the secret court where companies can sue governments which threaten competition. Philip Morris are suing Australia under an obscure international provision to try and prevent them going ahead with blank cigarette packets. Hardly good for our health?

So let’s call on the Labour leadership to take off their primrose spectacles and look at the real needs of the people they are supposed to represent.

On the other hand some TTIP opponents give the impression that the NHS will fall to pieces because under the TTIP, healthcare services will be brutally exposed to takeover by international corporations. Well this isn’t quite true either. The NHS as we used to know it even up to 2006 and even just about before the 2012 would have a significant degree of protection either because it was a publicly funded service or because it can be excluded during negotiations – and this is what is made a clear in a letter issued yesterday by the senior EU TTIP negotiator, Sñr Bercero, to one of our local MPs John Healey.

But since the opening up of NHS provision to the private sector, tried by Thatcher, then insinuated into the NHS Plan by Labour from 2001 to 2006 and since then legally institutionalised by the Coalition government, this protecting veil becomes full of holes. Every specialist service which is opened up to tender by NHS England, every CCG which goes out to private tender for NHS services, and, most alarmingly, every decision by the holders of the new personal health budgets to enter the healthcare market, puts that service into the competitive arena and vulnerable to TTIP.

And it’s not just TTIP. As part of the WTO a separate negotiation called TISA is progressing among 20 developed countries including the UK about liberalising the service sector. Here the dangers for a part privatised NHS are even worse especially if the Tories get in next time and especially if Andrew Lansley were to achieve his ambition to become an EU commissioner.

TISA will lock in the rights of private services. Take the example of Bolivia – before Morales was elected president a previous government placed Bolivia’s then pretty awful healthcare system into the WTO system, trying to encourage foreign investment. Of course this hardly produced a service which met the needs of the Bolivian people but when Morales tried to take it out to encourage the growth of an indigenous public service, WTO members like the USA refused to allow the return of hospital services to public control. Good article about TISA in the Big Issue.

Can healthcare be excluded from the TTIP? Of course it can as Sñr Bercero has made clear. The French, right from the beginning, fought hard on one of their perennial bottom line issues – protection from US cultural influences. Paris refused to be involved, exercising a virtual veto, unless cultural issues (mainly films and audio-visual media) were excluded. And they won. Last year the USA and Canada updated their trade agreement. Canada, which has much more publicly funded healthcare, despite cuts there too, refused to include healthcare and the USA was forced to agree. Ironically this has led some liberals in the US to press much harder for healthcare to be included in the TTIP in order to bring more competition into their own appalling system. But not at the cost of our own NHS! No thanks Uncle Sam.

Cameron has dodged all requests for healthcare to be excluded. All the supposed assurances given by government ministers have been equivocal. Sñr Bercero says public services can be protected not that they will be protected. Why this reticence from Cameron? Could it be because of the money given to the Tories by private healthcare interests? Could it be because of the number of Tory and Lib Dem MPs and peers with significant investments in private healthcare? 65 Tory Lords; 12 Lib Dem Lords, 37 Labour Lords, 31 cross benchers, not to mention 63 Tory MPs. (Social Investigations) Surely this can’t be the case. And yet….maybe it could.

Recently the EU halted negotiations in order to start an elaborate public consultation on ISDS which suggested that public provision in areas like health could be excluded from litigation provided government actions were not manifestly unfair. Well who decides what manifestly means? The ISDS secret court no doubt. It is quite clear that any government which was seeking to bring services back into the public sphere, would, at the very best, have to invest considerable resources into protecting itself from litigation.

Let’s be clear, this is not particularly about the EU. There are campaigners against the TTIP like the Greens who are in favour of the EU and others from the Left who are against it. UKIP have nothing to say. A UKIP government would not only be cutting and privatising the NHS but looking for a bilateral agreement between the UK and USA to deliver exactly the same sort of deals for business. So people should not be gulled into looking to UKIP for protection.

So what’s to be done?

First it is clear that the EU negotiators, despite all the fences, are susceptible to pressure. They have already been shamed into delay and attempts at consultation and transparency. So keep it up, locally, nationally and internationally.

1. The campaign needs to carry on right the way through this year and up to and including any EU parliament vote. Our MEPs must be held to account on this.

2. Secondly don’t take any half-baked assurances that our health services are safe. Healthcare needs to be formally exempted and no weasel words from the government can be tolerated. Take every opportunity to press your elected representatives either directly or through organisations like 38 degrees.

3. Finally we need to stop the privatisation rot in the NHS. Even under the present system commissioners need to understand that if they put services out to tender, they are potentially damaging not just the present but the future of the NHS as a publicly owned, publicly provided and publicly accountable service.

For more information, come to the SSONHS meeting on 24th July 2014, 7pm at the Quaker Meeting House. Leading local experts will discuss the issues facing the NHS.

To show your dissent to government policy on the NHS - Join the People’s March for the NHS organised by the Darlington Mums. We hope to see you on August 25th or 26th on the march or at Weston Park. Look out for more details