The TTIP of ALEC's Anglosphere

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is what the Eurofederalist project has always been about.

 

Their support for it will and does expose the NHS-hating Anglospherists who would conform this and at least three other Commonwealth countries to their own fantasy version of the American Republic.

 

(There is also no NHS on the Continent, just as there is, for example, no council housing, something of which Hilary Armstrong was forever reminding some of us when, as Tony Blair's Minister for Local Government, she wanted to abolish local government.)

Not only does the EU offer the TTIP, but it also gives a platform, and more than a platform, to the American Legislative Exchange Council. 12 MEPs from the Group of European Conservatives and Reformists, seven of whom are British Conservatives, are members of that Council.

 

There is also a UKIPite who was elected as a Conservative, a Swedish Moderate who is therefore a member of the European People's Party, and a Flemish separatist whose party's roots are in the Flemish Division of the SS.

 

ALEC, you see, claims to be "federalist" but seems to have adopted the European rather than the American definition of the word. It is a body of State Legislators who undertake to ensure that their respective states all adopt identical legislation drafted by that body's corporate backers. How very Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

A handful of Democrats does belong to this thing, raising serious questions about the limits of the diversity of the Democratic Party, the Republican Party having arrived at the opposite extreme, with club rights extended only to those who subscribe, and that with sufficient fervour, to each and all of dozens of shibboleths.

But all except two of the State Chairmen are Republicans, and those two hold the office jointly with members of the other party. What was once the GOP provides all of the "Public Co-Chairs" of ALEC's policy task forces that write the legislation, on which they enjoy no veto power, since that attaches only to the "Private Co-Chairs" who not merely come from, but explicitly represent, their own corporations.

The one for International Relations, which are constitutionally outside the province of State Legislatures but on which work is clearly being done, has as its veto-wielding Private Co-Chair a senior executive of Philip Morris International. To ALEC, the whole of foreign policy is subordinate to the interests of big tobacco.

ALEC contains one Australian Senator, as well as one Georgian MP and one Pakistani Assemblywoman. But all of its other "International Delegates" sit in the European Parliament, seven of them as British Conservatives and an eighth as a member of UKIP.

 

There to enact legislation written by giant American corporations, as if the European Parliament were an American State Legislature, with the United Kingdom having much the status of an American county.

 

Although she would be lucky to retain even that if the TTIP went through. Daniel Hannan's appearences on Fox News, wholly the consequence of his membership of a body which he affects to despise, would be unlikely to decrease as a result.

 

Yet so much for his theory that his preferred economic model was inseparably bound up with features peculiar to the English-speaking countries. In fact, it has always been easier to implement on the Continent than in the United Kingdom.

 

That implementation has been the whole point of the EU since its inception, and subjection to it has the whole point of British membership since accession, indeed since accession was first suggested. That was precisely why accession was ever suggested.