The Green Party is the only party to completely oppose TTIP, the ‘partnership’ which puts corporate profit over people and will lead to more NHS services being privatised.
TTIP is not a 'partnership'—it is a corporate power grab that threatens our public services, environment and democracy. TTIP would grant corporations the power to sue governments, locking in the privatisation of public services including the NHS.
However, there is worse. It could also see the unpicking of regulations that protect workers and the environment. The imposition of 'harmonisation' on food safety and standards could mean that food not meeting EU standards could be forced on us here anyway. Such products include chemically washed poultry, livestock treated with growth hormones, and genetically modified crops.
At a more fundamental level, it is 'light-touch' regulated global corporate power (and debt-fuelled global finance) that drives the growth agenda, which in turn is a primary driver for climate change. The only hope for putting the brakes on runaway, resource-hungry, climate change-inducing growth is robust and visionary political leadership that brings global corporate power under control. TTIP represents the exact opposite—political capitulation.
The grey parties and UKIP are all wedded to the resource-hungry growth agenda. They seem to think that salvation lies in the boardrooms of global corporations, and do not sense the underlying danger. This is the key divide between the Green Party and the rest.
As an illustration of this, Oxford City's Green group of six councillors recently put forward a motion opposing TTIP, but the Labour group pushed through an amendment that watered it down by singling out only the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism element of it for criticism. The whole deal needs to be stopped, in the interests of human survival on the planet, and Green activists worldwide are working to do just this.
Stop TTIP dead.
