It was a fallacy that withdrawing from the EU would save us from the corporate power grab symbolised by TTIP. This week we’ve discovered that not only might another massive EU trade deal be imposed on us before we Brexit, but our whole trade strategy could be handed over to big finance, egged on by true believers in the free market within the Tory party.

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TTIP is short for the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership, a US-EU trade pact that declares war on environmental protection, workers’ rights and public services, and would allow big business to sue governments in secret tribunals for taking reasonable policy decisions such as putting cigarettes in plain packages.

Thanks to one of the biggest pan-European campaigns in history, TTIP is facing a very uncertain future. Supported by nearly 3.5 million Europeans, the campaign has made TTIP “the most toxic acronym in Europe”. Negotiations have stalled, while politicians on both sides of the Atlantic lob verbal hand-grenades at the agreement to shore up their domestic support.

But what we definitely haven’t managed to do is kill off TTIP’s sister agreement known as CETA – a deal between the EU and Canada. CETA does everything TTIP threatens to do, giving big Canadian corporations (and US subsidiaries in Canada) huge power to take on European governments when they fail to toe the line. Unfortunately CETA is well progressed and could pass into law before Britain exits the EU.

You might assume that when we Brexit we leave that all behind us, but according to advice from the legal expert Sam Fowles this week, CETA would remain in force for 20 years after we leave the EU. That’s 20 years of corporations taking British governments to task for passing laws and regulations designed to protect people and the planet.

What’s more, our government has been working away behind the scenes to push CETA into effect before parliament has even had a chance to discuss the pact. No need to worry about the Brussels bureaucrats when you’re ruled by the most extreme free-trade government in Europe. We now need to keep fighting to make sure they don’t get their way. CETA needs to be halted now – for our own sake and for our friends throughout Europe and Canada.

But life gets scarier still. Newspapers and the airwaves are now filled by free-market fundamentalists who have waited decades to design a trade system unhindered by government: a true free market. If TTIP as a thing is close to death, TTIP as a way of thinking is alive and well and residing in England.

TTIP has been kicked into the long grass … for a very long time Read more

Why grow food when they can grow it for us more cheaply in Africa? Why keep all these consumer and environmental protections when they simply obstruct the functioning of the market? A bonfire of regulation and taxes can begin post-Brexit. It will be TTIP on steroids.

It’s even being floated that we don’t need to worry about TTIP – we should just join straight up to US-dominated deals such as Nafta, which has seen Canada sued dozens of times in TTIP-style secret courts for daring to enact environmental or health protection.

Britain doesn’t have the trade officials to take forward this agenda – having only 20 trade negotiators compared with the EU’s 600. Not a problem – the government is reported to be considering paying top dollar to financial sector consultants such as PwC, Deloitte and KPMG to do it for us. The ultimate “contracting out”, the privatisation of government decisions. The result is unlikely to be anything that resembles the British people “taking back control” of their country.

Of course trade could be made to work to create a more equal world – supporting small producers, incentivising higher-quality products, facilitating a transfer of technology and skills necessary to meet human needs and fulfil human rights. But the only way to do this is ditch the Victorian-era ideology that the market knows best, and embrace a world that exists for the maximisation of human welfare, recognising that this is the 21st century, not the 19th.

But that won’t happen without one hell of a fight, and we are starting on the back foot. So let’s not put the TTIP placards in the storeroom just yet. The campaign against TTIP was just a dress rehearsal.