LEADING actors, musicians, writers and producers united yesterday for a new campaign against the hated free-trade deal TTIP.

Dozens of people are backing the Artists Against TTIP campaign, launched at London’s Young Vic Theatre, to oppose the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) which is being negotiated in secret by the EU and the US.

The deal would enforce privatisation of public services.

It would also hand multinational corporations powers to sue governments in a special court if they enact legislation deemed to affect the corporations’ profits — issues such as health and safety or working hours.

It was set up in collaboration with campaign groups War on Want and Global Justice Now.

Artists Against TTIP founder and director Carrie Cracknell said: “As soon as I heard about TTIP and the scale of its potential impact I was horrified.

“I kept asking people I knew if they had heard about it and nobody had. It dawned on me that a deal was being negotiated, in secret, which could radically alter the balance of power between democratic governments and big multinational corporations and there was virtually no public dialogue about it.

“That was the impetus for founding Artists Against TTIP, to try to use the public profile of the artistic community to alert people to this issue, and the rapidly escalating public opposition to it.”

Artists backing the campaign include Dominic Cooke, Lily Cole, Jeremy Hardy, Mike Leigh, Helen McCrory, Tobias Menzies, Mark Rylance, Yusuf Islam aka Cat Stevens, Juliet Stevenson, Sam West, Vivienne Westwood and Ruth Wilson.

Actor Mark Rylance added: “TTIP is an attempt to bypass our English laws, and control our ability to change our minds in the future. We must resist this.”