Trade threat

I WRITE to alert your readers to one of the biggest threats to face public services and our health service in particular, in decades. It comes in the form of an international trade agreement currently been negotiated without any reference to the electorate. The agreement is called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Negotiations for this trade agreement (which were initially held in secret) would allow the wholesale incursion by the private sector into public services and public procurement. If passed, this agreement would make it nigh on impossible to bring poorly performing privatised services back under public ownership and threaten those already under public ownership.

TTIP is purely about increasing the power of multinational investors and reducing regulation on these bodies. TTIP would establish in law the right of 
multinational companies to sue nation states in a special court – the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) – if the nation’s regulatory framework were deemed a barrier to free trade. Campaigning bodies including War on Want, the People’s Assembly and trade unions are alerting people to this threat.

People should contact their councillors, MSPs, MPs and MEPs demanding that they act before it is too late.

William Thomson

Camnethan Street
 Stonehouse, Lanarkshire

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