A Trump trade deal with Britain will unleash a bonfire of
regulations
Nick Dearden
The desire of Liz Truss and other Tories for a post-Brexit
alliance will deliver the UK into Washington’s pocket
"The US wants Britain to allow food produced in
enormous animal factories, pumped with steroids, hormones and antibiotics, into
our markets."
(…) “This should alarm us, but will doubtless be music to
the ears of Truss, who believes we are “a nation of Airbnb-ing,
Deliveroo-eating, Uber-riding freedom fighters”. She has criticised any attempt
to control the overwhelming power of these corporations. When people have
raised concerns about Airbnb in the tourist industry, or on the cost of
housing, her answer is simple: cut all regulations in those sectors.”
Mon 29 Jul 2019 10.00 BST Last modified on Mon 29 Jul 2019
10.39 BST
‘Given the beliefs of Liz Truss it’s impossible to imagine
she would stand up to Trump’s negotiators.’ Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty
Images
Boris Johnson’s ruthless reshuffle makes one thing very
clear: Brexit is about giving the right wing of the Tory party “the chance to
finish the Thatcher revolution”. Johnson filled his government with ultra-free
market ideologues such as Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Liz Truss and Kwasi
Kwarteng, who in 2012 vowed to give a good kick to the great British public,
who they described as “among the worst idlers in the world”. Their plan to
“unchain Britannia” by declaring war on the “bloated state, high taxes and
excessive regulation” is actually a plan to unchain big business, which they
believe, astonishingly, has suffered from masses of overregulation on the part
of successive governments from Tony Blair to David Cameron.
Right at the ideological heart of this group is Liz Truss,
founder of the Free Enterprise Group of Conservative MPs. Truss is a turbo-charged Thatcherite who has now
replaced Liam Fox as international trade secretary. She has repeatedly spoken
of her desire to drive down taxes, cut back public spending and strip away
regulations on everything from housing, to education, to the workplace. In
Truss’s mind, it would be a “complete contradiction of the Brexit vote” if it
isn’t used to impose “fiscal discipline and economic liberalisation … [to] give
people power over their own money and their own lives”.
Through the post-Brexit trade deals she now hopes to sign,
she has been handed the perfect vehicle to inflict some of these policies on a
deeply divided Britain. The trade deal that most excites Truss’s brand of
Conservative is, of course, one with the US.
Many Brexiteers have looked longingly across the Atlantic
for decades, to an economy where business is free from the shackles of tax and
regulation, which they see as a product of the European Union – an entity that
competes with the Soviet Union for their disdain. Brexit gives them the
opportunity to emulate that US model. And because modern trade deals are
concerned less with tariffs, and more with how a country is allowed to regulate
food standards, run public services and treat overseas investors, a trade deal
with the US would be a powerful mechanism for transforming our economy.
Truss will see eye to eye with Donald Trump’s
administration. We know this because Trump’s administration, unlike our own
government, has told us exactly what it wants from a trade deal. It wants
Britain to allow food produced in enormous animal factories, pumped with
steroids, hormones and antibiotics, into our markets. It wants us to accept
even greater monopoly rights for big pharmaceutical corporations, meaning
higher prices for medicines and more strain on the NHS. It wants us to allow
the Silicon Valley tech firms from Amazon to Facebook to Google to have greater
power to use and abuse our data. And it wants to extend the rights of US
corporations to enjoy “regulatory stability”, even giving them the right to sue
the British government in secret “corporate courts” for daring to do things
such as introduce a sugar tax or pass a law to stop fracking.
Two weeks ago, documents were leaked from the US trade talks
that neither we nor our MPs had been allowed to see. They show that the US is
streets ahead of us in negotiating ability and fully prepared to use a trade
deal to prise Britain away from the standards and protections we enjoy in the
EU. Negotiators have been clear that we will not be able to introduce the sort
of special tax on Silicon Valley corporations that Philip Hammond proposed, and
which is being introduced in France, if we want a US trade deal.
This should alarm us, but will doubtless be music to the
ears of Truss, who believes we are “a nation of Airbnb-ing, Deliveroo-eating,
Uber-riding freedom fighters”. She has criticised any attempt to control the
overwhelming power of these corporations. When people have raised concerns
about Airbnb in the tourist industry, or on the cost of housing, her answer is
simple: cut all regulations in those sectors. She’s called for sweeping cuts to
regulations in the workplace, too, boasting about making it easier for
employers to sack the idlers and make the country more efficient and
productive.
The problem with the railways isn’t, for Truss, that they
are run for profit, but that they haven’t been privatised enough. The problem
with austerity isn’t that it’s gone too far, or that it wasn’t necessary, but
that it was nowhere near radical enough. And anyone who disagrees must be part
of that “blob of vested interests” seeking only their own protection to waste
the country’s resources.
Given that trade deals now focus extensively on regulation,
they will give Truss a mechanism to drive forward this deregulation agenda. They are particularly useful mechanisms for
politicians like Truss because they are also highly complicated agreements with
almost no transparency or accountability to parliament.
During his time
at the department for international trade, Liam Fox, once an advocate of
parliamentary sovereignty, refused to give MPs any right to amend or stop trade
deals, or even to see the texts being negotiated. When parliament tried
to give itself the power to stop trade deals earlier this year, Fox simply left
his trade bill to die in the House of Lords. So Truss will be operating under
royal prerogative. What’s more, as international treaties, these deals take
precedence over domestic law and can be difficult and time-consuming to
extricate yourself from.
Given the beliefs of Truss, as well as her new colleagues in
cabinet, it’s impossible to imagine she would stand up to Trump’s negotiators
even if Britain had the ability to do so. Rather, Truss will seek to collude
with Trump to unleash a bonfire of regulations, and clear away any impediment
to the big businesses agenda.
• Nick Dearden is director of Global Justice Now
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