‘Take back control’? With this Pacific trade deal, Brexit Britain has just signed it away
Last night, the government announced that Britain has joined a trade deal so contentious that it united Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in opposition to US membership.
While hardcore Brexiters would like to pretend this is the ultimate payoff of our decision to leave the EU and write our own rules, the reality is somewhat different. In signing the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), Britain has ditched environmental standards, signed up to terms that will undermine British farmers, and left us open to being sued by multinational corporations in secretive courts. And all for no real economic benefit.
The deal began life as the Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP, a last gasp of hyper-globalisation. Alongside its ill-fated sister deal, TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), it aims to lock participating countries into rules that prioritise pro-market, corporate interests. The corporate power grab was then sold to a sceptical public as a way of containing China’s economic power, by surrounding that country in a sea of neoliberal trade.
But, like TTIP, the deal sailed into strong anti-globalisation headwinds. In the US, the last thing the public wanted was more outsourced jobs, longer and more fragile supply chains, and further power vested in the hands of big business. The 2016 presidential election was the death knell for US membership.
When the US withdrew, a few contentious parts of the deal were placed on ice – including rules that would have handed even more power to pharmaceutical monopolies to set medicine prices. But there is much to dislike in what remains of what became known as the CPTPP.
The most pressing issue reported from the talks is that
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