LORD Livingston’s pathetic defence of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) answers none of the concerns raised by its critics.

The Tory trade minister rejects calls for Britain to exclude the NHS — or any other public service — from the free-trade deal. 

Why? Because it “won’t be affected.”

If TTIP goes ahead, “the NHS will look like it does today,” the minister opines.

He presumably means starved of funds, its workers denied a decent wage, more and more key services outsourced to incompetent private-sector operators?

That’s what we’re afraid of — the permanent imposition of this government’s warped ideology on our health service with all future governments unable to do anything about it.

The investor-state dispute settlement clause, which allows companies to sue over laws that might harm their profits, has been “misrepresented and misunderstood,” pleads the laughable lord.

Apparently we have nothing to fear from such mechanisms because Britain has already signed up to similar clauses.

Indeed we have. And last month the public were forced to swallow a £224 million fine for terminating a border-monitoring contract with US firm Raytheon.

The tribunal which looked into that case stated explicitly that it did not consider whether Raytheon had met the terms of the contract nor whether the government was justified in ending it. 

Such considerations are, it seems, irrelevant — we had to cough up regardless. 

This entitlement without responsibility attitude is a feature of private-sector leeches grown fat on government contracts. 

We heard it from former G4S boss Nick Buckles back in 2012, when he insisted his company had a right to be paid in full despite ballsing up its Olympics security commitments “because that’s what a contract is.”

To be fair to Mr Buckles that’s a pretty accurate description of government contracts in the era of outsourcing. We pay for a service, they fail to deliver it.

Faced with calls to declassify the original TTIP mandate, Lord Livingston tells us this is “unnecessary” since it’s already been leaked.

And asked to declassify further documents relating to a treaty being negotiated away from the public eye, he says No because this would weaken the EU’s bargaining position.

Leave aside the fact that we don’t know exactly what the EU is trying to bargain over, because it won’t tell us. The pettifogging peer is wrong.

If the EU is trying to defend its public services from competition — its record suggests it is not — or seeking to safeguard health, food and environmental standards that are generally tougher than those in the United States, it would massively strengthen its hand to make this public.

Attempts by the US to undermine such commitments would cause a public outcry in Europe. EU leaders do not tend to pay much attention to public outcry, since they are unelected, but politicians in member states would be forced to commit to resisting unpopular US demands.

Public exposure would only weaken the EU’s negotiating team if they know that what they want out of this treaty will be deeply unpalatable to the public. 

Lord Livingston’s comments yesterday will only heighten suspicions that this is the case.

On one point only did the bumbling baron strike home. “This is the most open thing the EU has done,” he says.

Yes, we know the European Union is famed for a total lack of transparency and accountability in everything it does. Unlike the Con-Dem Cabinet, we don’t find that reassuring.