French ministers clash with Cameron over TTIP

Jonathan Lindsell, 18 November 2014

At the G20 meeting this weekend, David Cameron promised to reinvigorate European commitment to completing the Transatlantic Trade and investment Partnership (TTIP), a free trade deal with the USA. Specifically, Cameron pledged to put ‘rocket boosters’ on the deal.

This blog, and many others, have voiced criticisms of TTIP, noting that it raises serious questions over democratic legitimacy, bureaucratic accountability, food safety standards, environmental protection, the privatisation of the NHS, undermining labour laws, and all for intangible benefits that look to accrue unequally.

The Prime Minister, however, does not credit these concerns. He declared that TTIP is ‘a deal we want’ and dismissed questions, requests for transparency or calls for amendments as ‘weak’. On health, he said ‘[P]eople argue in some way this could damage the NHS, I think that’s nonsense. It’s our National Health Service. It’s in the public sector, it will stay in the public sector…it will remain free at the point of use.’ This brush-aside does not really address the complex question of how an investor-state dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS) will interact with the competitive private tendering brought in by the Health and Social Care Act.

Still, Cameron was confident that ‘There’s no threat (to the NHS) and we should just knock that on the head as an empty threat’. His enthusiasm for TTIP did not seem to persuade French or German leaders, however. German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel told the Bundestag in September that he opposed ISDS in the impending trade deal with Canada, the ‘little brother’ of TTIP.

Yesterday Emmanuel Macron, France’s young ‘copy-and-paste Tony Blair’ economics minster, discussed plans for growth with Vince Cable, Chuka Umunna and George Osborne. Macron was conciliatory, promising ambitious structural reforms to France’s labour market to bring business closer to Britain’s model. On the EU, he told George Eaton:

[T]he UK is a sensible nation with rational people…Unless it wants to be Jersey or Guernsey, I don’t see how the UK can succeed outside Europe…There should be no scaremongering.

His assessment of Britain’s chances outside might be objectionable, but he certainly presented them plainly. Meanwhile his colleague Matthais Fekl, Secretary of State for Foreign Trade, asserted:

France did not want the ISDS to be included in the negotiation mandate…We have to preserve the right of the state to set and apply its own standards, to maintain the impartiality of the justice system and to allow the people of France, and the world, to assert their values.

He told the French senate that he couldn’t see France ratifying TTIP for over a year. Their parliament, like ours, will have a veto. This is a brave stance from Paris, which usually supports EU moves: it’s in a tricky enough economic situation that a lucrative trade deal must be hard not to compromise over. Likewise, in an early appearances before the European Parliament, new Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced his opposition to external limitations on member states’ industrial policies, another TTIP nod. So much for rocket boosters.