Managing Transparency

George Monbiot writes:

Panic spreads through the European Commission like ferrets in a rabbit warren.

Its plans to create a single market incorporating Europe and the United States, progressing so nicely when hardly anyone knew, have been blown wide open. All over Europe people are asking why this is happening; why we were not consulted; for whom it is being done.

They have good reason to ask. The commission insists that its Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership should include a toxic mechanism called investor-state dispute settlement.

Where this has been forced into other trade agreements, it has allowed big corporations to sue governments before secretive arbitration panels composed of corporate lawyers, which bypass domestic courts and override the will of parliaments.

This mechanism could threaten almost any means by which governments might seek to defend their citizens or protect the natural world. Already it is being used by mining companies to sue governments trying to keep them out of protected areas; by banks fighting financial regulation; by a nuclear company contesting Germany's decision to switch off atomic power.

After a big political fight we've now been promised plain packaging for cigarettes. But it could be nixed by an offshore arbitration panel. The tobacco company Philip Morris is currently suing Australia through the same mechanism in another treaty.

No longer able to keep this process quiet, the European commission has instead devised a strategy for lying to us. A few days ago an internal document was leaked. This reveals that a "dedicated communications operation" is being "co-ordinated across the commission".

It involves, to use the commission's chilling phrase, the "management of stakeholders, social media and transparency". Managing transparency should be adopted as its motto.

The message is that the trade deal is about "delivering growth and jobs" and will not "undermine regulation and existing levels of protection in areas like health, safety and the environment". Just one problem: it's not true.

From the outset, the transatlantic partnership has been driven by corporations and their lobby groups, who boast of being able to "co-write" it.

Persistent digging by the Corporate Europe Observatory reveals that the commission has held eight meetings on the issue with civil society groups, and 119 with corporations and their lobbyists. Unlike the civil society meetings, these have taken place behind closed doors and have not been disclosed online.

Though the commission now tells the public that it will protect "the state's right to regulate", this isn't the message the corporations have been hearing.

In an interview last week, Stuart Eizenstat, co-chair of the Transatlantic Business Council – instrumental in driving the process – was asked if companies whose products had been banned by regulators would be able to sue.

Yes.

"If a suit like that was brought and was successful, it would mean that the country banning the product would have to pay compensation to the industry involved or let the product in." Would that apply to the European ban on chicken carcasses washed with chlorine, a controversial practice permitted in the US? "That's one example where it might."

What the commission and its member governments fail to explain is why we need offshore arbitration at all. It insists that domestic courts "might be biased or lack independence", but which courts is it talking about? It won't say.

Last month, while trying to defend the treaty, the British minister Kenneth Clarke said something revealing: "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."

So what is it doing in an EU-US deal? Why are we using measures designed to protect corporate interests in failed states in countries with a functioning judicial system? Perhaps it's because functioning courts are less useful to corporations than opaque and unjust arbitration by corporate lawyers.

As for the commission's claim that the trade deal will produce growth and jobs, this is also likely to be false. Barack Obama promised that the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement would increase US exports by $10bn. They immediately fell by $3.5bn. The 70,000 jobs it would deliver? Er, 40,000 were lost.

Bill Clinton promised that the North American Free Trade Agreement would create 200,000 new jobs for the US; 680,000 went down the pan. As the commentator Glyn Moody says: "The benefits are slight and illusory, while the risks are very real."

So where are our elected representatives? Fast asleep.

Labour MEPs, now frantically trying to keep investor-state dispute mechanisms out of the agreement, are the exception; the rest are in Neverland.

The Lib Dem MEP Graham Watson wrote in his newsletter, before dismissing the idea: "I am told that columnists on the Guardian and the Independent claim it will hugely advantage US multinational companies to the detriment of Europe."

We said no such thing, as he would know had he read the articles, rather than idiotically relying on hearsay. The treaty is likely to advantage the corporations of both the US and the EU, while disadvantaging their people. It presents a danger to democracy and public protection throughout the trading area.

Caroline Lucas, one of the few MPs interested in the sovereignty of parliament, has published an early-day motion on the issue. It has so far been signed by seven MPs.

For the government, Clarke argues that to ignore the potential economic gains "in favour of blowing up a controversy around one small part of the negotiations, known as investor protection, seems to me positively Scrooge-like".

Quite right too. Overriding our laws, stripping away our rights, making parliament redundant: these are trivial and irrelevant beside the issue of how much money could be made. Don't worry your little heads about it.

Independence From Russia, Indeed

I am pleased to see Newsnight as balanced as ever.

For a view on Ukraine, ask ... a Pussy Riot husband!

Not even a Ukrainian.

All Wrapped Up

Congratulations to Baroness Rawlings, who says that the way to save money on your energy bills is to use an electric blanket.

China Not In Our Hands

David Cameron is backing China in her territorial dispute with Japan, a dispute in which no other country ought to take any part.

The absolute imperative to remain out of these things is no small part of the absolute imperative to have no part in any pretence that that thing holed up on Taiwan is the Government of China, or that Taiwan is a country (those two are in any case mutually exclusive propositions), any more than something holed up on the Isle of Wight at the end of a British Civil War would be the Government of Britain, or would make the Isle of Wight a country, likewise mutually exclusive propositions.

The self-styled Republic of China has had extremely few Western partisans since Nixon and the UN faced up to reality, but it had friends among the Crazies around Bush the Younger, and it would have them in and around any Administration headed by Hillary Clinton. Michael Gove and Liam Fox are probably fans.

It has no aspiration to Taiwanese independence, which is an absurd idea. Nor does it claim jurisdiction only over China as she now exists. Rejecting the authority of the present Chinese Government to resolve territorial disputes, it lays claim to most of Mongolia, as well as to parts of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Burma.

Have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with it.

Cameron is also seeking a “Free Trade” Agreement between China and the EU, so as to do to European workers what Most Favored Nation Status for China has done for American workers. Labour has already made as clear as need be that it intends to vote against the “Free Trade” Agreement between the US and the EU, so this is just another one to add.

In both cases, there might have to be um-ing and ah-ing about how some other Agreement would have been acceptable, but regrettably not the only one on offer. So what, though? The effect would be exactly the same.

We are told that the only alternative to this approach, an approach which old hippies actively prefer, is sucking up to the Dalai Lama.

Rubbish.

The present Dalai Lama was born hundreds of miles outside Tibet. The Tibetans themselves migrated to what is now Tibet from further east in China, but huge numbers of them never did and never have done. The Dalai Lama comes from one such family.

Before 1959, Tibet was not an independent state ruled benignly by the Dalai Lama and given over almost entirely to the pursuit of spirituality. Tibet was certainly ruled by the Dalai Lama, by the lamas generally, and by the feudal landlord class from which the lamas were drawn. “Dalai” is a family name; only a member of the House of Dalai can become the Dalai Lama.

Well over 90 per cent of the population was made up of serfs, the background from which the present rulers of Tibet are drawn. That system was unique in China, and existed only because successive Emperors of China had granted the Tibetan ruling clique exactly the “autonomy” for which it still campaigns from “exile”. Life expectancy in Tibet was half what it is today.

There has never been an independent state of Tibet. Likewise, the presence of large numbers of Han (ethnic Chinese in the ordinary sense) and other Chinese ethnic groups in Tibet is nothing remotely new. The one-child policy does not apply in Tibet, so the Han majority there is the ethnic Tibetans’ own fault, if they even see it as a problem.

It is totally false to describe the Dalai Lama baldly as “their spiritual leader”. Relatively few would view him as such. In particular, Google “Dorje Shugden” for, to put at its mildest, some balance to the media portrayal of the present Dalai Lama.

Moreover, he has never condemned either the invasion of Afghanistan or the invasion of Iraq. For more on Buddhism as no more a religion of peace than Islam is, see Sri Lanka, Burma, Mongolia, Japan, Thailand, and beyond.

In fact, an examination of the relevant texts shows that violence in general and war in particular are fundamental to Buddhism, admittedly a difficult thing to define, in the way that they are to Islam and at least arguably to Judaism, but simply are not, as a first principle, to Christianity.

Tibet is particularly striking for this. It is also more than worth noting that the Sri Lankan war criminals were among those on whose behalf Liam Fox was treasonably running a parallel foreign policy out of his office and via his fake charity.

Just as pre-Communist Russia always remained the country’s true character, so very pre-Communist China remains the country’s true character.

That character reveres tradition and ritual, upholds government by moral rather than physical force, affirms the Golden Rule, is Agrarian and Distributist, is now thoroughly Classical and Patristic in taking Africa seriously, and has barely started an external war since China became China five thousand years ago. It is especially open to completion by, in, through and as classical, historic, mainstream Christianity.

China has already moved from Maoism to the equal repressiveness of unbridled capitalism. While economic, or any other, dependence on a foreign power remains totally unacceptable, a further shift, the reassertion of her own culture, is to be encouraged by every means of “soft” power. Which, in reality, is truly hard power.

This Massive Market Fix

Completing today's hat-trick of Labour Eurosceptics, the only real kind and the only ones with any influence within or over their own party, Michael Meacher writes:

The latest revelation  that Goldman Sachs advised floating the Royal Mail at £3.30 a share, but now puts a price target on the shares 6 weeks later of £6.10 per share, is clear cause for a public inquiry.

Either Goldman should be forced to pay back the fee they received for this sham exercise or, if they were simply following government pressure to underplay the price in order to ensure the IPO was fully taken up, the government should be held to account for knowingly under-selling a prized and treasured public asset by no less than 85%.

The government’s determination to fix the price as low as reasonably possible in order to give maximum boost to the privatisation, regardless of the enormous loss to the taxpayer, is shown by the announcement just now made that Royal Mail’s operating profit doubled to £283m in the first half of the year, a fact that both the government and the financial advisers must have been aware of.

It was large enough to raise the Stock Exchange value of the company to £5.7bn.   The share price, already at over 70% above flotation, has been further massaged by a £45m VAT credit and lower depreciation charge plus £50m lower transformation cost than last year.

Now the government has rigged the market further.

On Thursday they announced that, on top of the £1.34bn public funding already committed for Post Office ‘modernisation’, they were now making available an additional £640m for the 11,500 post office branches – though the CWU believes that some 4,000 postmasters will be compulsorily made redundant as a result of their service being transferred to a local supermarket or other retailer.

Altogether this £2bn plus the £2.8bn under-pricing suggests that the government, so short of money that they resort to the bedroom tax and using Atos to deprive disabled people of benefit even when they patently can’t work, can nevertheless find up to £5bn to bolster their ideology.

Ominously, however, the government and the privatised company have already, just 6 weeks after pre-sale promises that the universal service would unquestionably be preserved, begun to row back on any such commitment.

Moya Greene, the chief executive, no doubt with government clearance, has warned that ‘unfettered’ expansion of competition in delivery could render the universal service unsustainable.   She gave notice of her (and the government’s) intention after TNT Post UK had already extended its delivery network from West London to Manchester, though this could well have been expected in advance anyway.

The one quiet voice in all this has been the Labour Party which in the light of this massive market fix should be making clear it will bring the Royal Mail back into public ownership, which is what a substantial majority of the public wants, and at a price which reflects the initial IPO offer, not the windfall gains manipulated by the government for its own ends.

Good Company

The man who first told me, it must have been 15 years ago, that there would be an all-women shortlist for North West Durham when Hilary Armstrong retired, Mark Seddon, writes:

Is it madness to want to save a 60-year-old restaurant, the Gay Hussar in London's Soho, because of fond memories of goulash, fierce argument and good humour – and to want others to have similar experiences?

The late Tom Driberg tried famously to persuade Mick Jagger to stand as a Labour candidate there; Victor Sassie, longtime maître d', whose claims to Hungarian parentage were diluted by his less trumpeted familial links to Barrow-in-Furness, witnessed libidinous former foreign secretary, George Brown, fall outside in the gutter.

Even in my time, Tribune dinners were attended by among others, Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Kenneth Clarke and the late Lord Rothermere, who, having been kissed by journalist Nick Cohen, took himself and Foot off for a nightcap at the Ritz.

A group of us, call us devotees, have formed a co-operative to buy the restaurant, having invested time and money in the place – the latter often courtesy of our employers – over many years.

We think we are in good company.

At the back end of 1994, I met Tyrone O'Sullivan, the now legendary south Wales miners' leader, who had a plan to save his colliery from closure.

He took me to the pit face under the Rhigos Mountain, and outlined his plan – to get the workforce to invest their redundancy payments in what became known as the Tower employees buy-out (TEBO) – a glorious co-operative venture which virtually everyone apart from Tyrone said could not be done.

But it was done, brilliantly successfully, and still to this day, as new plans are made now the deep-mined coal has finally run out.

The Gay Hussar restaurant in Soho is not really comparable to a mine in south Wales, save that its larger owners want to divest themselves of it and a group of us, mindful of its rich history and the loyalty of staff and customers alike, fancy that it too has a future as a diners and staff co-operative venture.

A helpful endorsement from a Guardian editorial spurred a group of us under the tutelage of experienced co-operator, John Goodman, to form the Goulash Co-operative.

The directors of this venture also include this newspaper's award-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson, and a former editors club, which includes Bill Hagerty, Julia Langdon (ex Guardian political staff), Chris Kaufman and me.

Our honorary president is that scourge of the Murdoch media empire, Tom Watson MP, who has been known to have enjoyed one or two dinners at the Gay Hussar over the years.

We are urgently selling shares in the co-operative in order to be able to submit our sealed bid by this Thursday.

And since the Gay Hussar has not only been a canteen for Tribune over the years, but the Guardian as well, we hope that some of the Guardian's staff and readers who agree with us that the restaurant's rich reputation for rebels and Rabelaisians is worth encouraging further, will consider taking shares or parts of shares.

You can read more about doing that here.

In recent weeks there has been an attempt – predictably by some in the Murdoch media and in the Tory party – to batter the co-operative movement and mutuals, so as to link the Reverend Flowers' predicament to the Labour leadership.

Never mind that the Co-operative Bank really began to founder once it had dropped its tried and tested ways and opted for the bad habits manifested so painfully and globally by the Anglo American banking system.

The Goulash Co-operative, should we be successful in our bid on Thursday, will not be employing the Reverend Flowers as a consultant, but we do have plenty of ideas for making the Gay Hussar every bit as successful as other similar ventures.

Our bid must have some merits, for not only have many of the usual suspects taken out shares, but so has former Conservative party chairman, Lord Ashcroft. So we wish him more success in plotting against David Cameron in the upstairs rooms of the Gay Hussar, than some of us ever had against Tony Blair.

And lest it be forgotten that while Tyrone and the Tower miners were launching their successful buy-out bid, Messrs Blair and Mandelson were pedalling the nonsense that Labour's historic commitment to common ownership meant "nationalising the corner shop".

So if we are successful, could this be a model – as the Guardian suggests – that could be adopted elsewhere by Ed Miliband and the Labour party? Well, we could always encourage those nascent energy co-operatives couldn't we – or get Lambeth council to desist from selling off its housing co-operatives to developers?

The EU: Making NHS Privatisation Permanent

Providing yet further illustration that the only people who are permitted to criticise the EU do not in fact have any objection to it, while the people who do and who have always done so are excluded from the debate, Benedict Cooper writes:

No doubt the launch of Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) in June was cause for much celebration in Brussels. The European Parliament is in the process of enabling a historic shift in world economics with countless, far-reaching consequences.

A key part of the TTIP is 'harmonisation' between EU and US regulation, especially for regulation in the process of being formulated. In Britain, the coalition government’s Health and Social Care Act has been prepared in the same vein – to 'harmonise' the UK with the US health system.

This will open the floodgates for private healthcare providers that have made dizzying levels of profits from healthcare in the United States, while lobbying furiously against any attempts by President Obama to provide free care for people living in poverty. With the help of the Conservative government and soon the EU, these companies will soon be let loose, freed to do the same in Britain.

Linda Kaucher is a leading expert on trade agreements. She has written and spoken extensively on the topic, most recently in an article in Chartist. In it, she lays out a disturbing truth about what is going on behind the scenes in Brussels, arguing that while on the surface the EU is a bastion of protections and rights, its true agenda is far more tenebrous.

It is, she says, to "permanently fix corporate-driven neo-liberalism, within the EU and internationally, via trade agreements. Any reassertion of democracy within the EU structure or member states is prevented by legally binding international trade law." She also states that the agenda is "driven and effectively controlled by transnational corporations, especially transnational financial services corporations."

How does this affect the NHS? It’s painfully simple. The agreement will provide a legal heavy hand to the corporations seeking to grind down the health service. It will act as a Transatlantic bridge between the Health and Social Care Act in the UK, which forces the NHS to compete for contracts, and the private companies in the US eager to take it on for their own gain.

Kaucher says: "[The Health and Social Care Act] effectively enforces competitive tendering, and thus privatisation and liberalisation i.e. opening to transnational bidders - a shift to US-style profit-prioritised health provision."

The TTIP ensures that the Health and Social Care Act has influence beyond UK borders. It gives the act international legal backing and sets the whole shift to privatisation in stone because once it is made law, it will be irreversible. Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) laws, fundamentals of the agreement, allow corporations legal protection for their profits regardless of patient care performance, with the power to sue any public sector organisation or government that threatens their interest.

Once these ISDS tools are in place, lucrative contracts will be underwritten, even where a private provider is failing patients and the CCG wants a contract cancelled. In this case, the provider will be able to sue a CCG for future loss of earnings, thanks to the agreement, causing the loss of vast sums of taxpayer money on legal and administrative costs.

Even more worrying is that, once the TTIP is enacted, repealing the Health and Social Care Act in the UK will become almost impossible. As Kaucher explains: "Even if outcomes of the NHS changes are disastrous, ISDS will effectively disallow any attempts by any future UK government to reverse the changes."

'Harmonised' standards favour private companies over public sector providers and the coalition government, the standard bearer of big business, is tirelessly working away to deliver a privatised system to its sponsors. The government claims that in privatising the NHS it will be its 'liberator'. The term even made it into the title of Andrew Lansley’s now infamous report laying out the Conservatives’ plans for the NHS: Liberating the NHS.

This is just more euphemistic language masking sinister intentions. In a 2010 speech Dr Jacky Davis, co-founder of Keep Our NHS Public, said: "Liberating the NHS really means unprecedented cuts, job losses, deniable of accountability and privatisation.

"It means liberating the NHS budget to hand it over to the corporate sector; and among those companies waiting like vultures around a dying animal are the very same companies that spent a million dollars a day in the States lobbying against Obama’s healthcare reforms."

The public need to be aware of this landmark shift and the way it affects them. So why has nothing about the TTIP appeared in the British press and why is the work of the European Parliament and Commission carried out in such a murky, underhand way?

The public has the democratic right to contest the agreement, and fight for a health service that protects them. But how can they when MEPs do nothing to inform opinion or gather support back home? The NHS is in a very precarious position. It seems that soon, with the help of Brussels, its fate will be sealed.