THE campaign to stop the anti-democratic Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership becomes all the more urgent following the weekend’s G20 summit, where US and European Union bully-boys vowed to push it through.

British Prime Minister David Cameron assured impatient business tycoons that he could easily defeat “very weak” arguments against the trade deal.

But the arguments against TTIP are anything but weak. This is a treaty that undermines safety regulations and standards, allowing our shops to be filled with dodgy and possibly genetically modified produce from the United States.

It opens up all public services to private-sector “investment” — ie takeover — allowing transnational corporations to buy up assets belonging to the British, European and US peoples and exploit them for a profit.

Worse still, the secretive talks — the public is not allowed to know what our government is negotiating on the grounds that it might “weaken its hand” in diplomatic deal-brokering — include an Investor State Dispute Settlement clause (ISDS). This allows corporations to sue the public if their government passes legislation deemed to harm their profits.

ISDS clauses exist in certain bilateral treaties already. The threat they pose is clear from the way they are already being used to undermine workers’ rights.

As the Morning Star’s political editor John Haylett told delegates to the Communist Party’s 53rd congress at the weekend, the clause has been invoked by French multinational Veolia — perhaps familiar to readers for its complicity in the illegal occupation of Palestine — to sue Egypt’s government for daring to introduce a minimum wage.

It has been used by oil giant Occidental to demand nearly $2 billion from the people of Ecuador in compensation after it was stripped of its oil concessions in the country — because the company had breached its contract.

It’s even been used to force the besieged government of Libya to pay up $935 million (£595m) to Kuwaiti firm Al-Kharifi for cancelling a contract for constructing a tourist complex.

No matter that Al-Kharifi had broken a pledge to provide a 10 per cent deposit on an agreed investment sum, or that construction work never even began.

Al-Kharifi was still able to claim the staggering compensation sum based on its hypothetical losses from not running the contract over the next 83 years.

TTIP is an existential threat to the public sector, including our National Health Service, which the government refuses to exempt from it.
It will tie the hands of all future governments — because once invited in, private companies will gain the right to sue if they are ever booted out by a programme of nationalisation.

Britain’s people are overwhelmingly against private-sector involvement in running NHS services. They are also overwhelmingly in favour of renationalising our railways and energy companies.

But once TTIP is in place, even if a government was elected on promises to extend public ownership it would be forbidden to do so.

On top of that, US experts have concluded that TTIP will cost every British worker more than £3,000 in lost wages and destroy 600,000 jobs across Europe.

In September the TUC voted unanimously to reject TTIP — not merely to call for an NHS exemption, but to oppose this pernicious treaty in its entirety.

But little has been heard on the subject from the TUC since, and all Britain’s major parliamentary parties remain committed to signing away our right to run our economy as we see fit.

Stopping TTIP must be the priority of all trade unionists and progressives in Britain and internationally. We have to beat this treaty.