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Subject:        So Much For Sovereignty - monbiot.com
Date:   Fri, 29 Jul 2016 07:50:49 +0000
From:   George Monbiot <noreply+feedproxy@google.com>
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George Monbiot


 So Much For Sovereignty - monbiot.com <http://www.monbiot.com>

        

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So Much For Sovereignty 
<http://www.monbiot.com/2016/07/28/so-much-for-sovereignty/>

Posted: 28 Jul 2016 04:53 AM PDT

To this government, “taking back control” means handing Britain to a 
different set of foreign powers

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 27^th July 2016

What does it mean to love your country? What does it mean to defend its 
sovereignty? For some of the leaders of the Brexit campaign, it means 
reducing the United Kingdom to a franchise of corporate capital, 
governed from head offices overseas. They will take us out of Europe to 
deliver us into the arms of other powers.

No one embodies this contradiction as much of the man now charged with 
determining the scope of our sovereignty: the new international trade 
secretary, Liam Fox. He explained his enthusiasm for leaving Europe thus 
<http://www.conservativevoice.co.uk/long-read-in-the-hot-seat-with-liam-fox-transcript/>: 
“We’ll be able to make our own laws unhindered by anyone else, and our 
democratic parliament will not be overruled by a European Court.” But of 
all the people Theresa May could have appointed to this post, he seems 
to me the most likely to ensure that our parliament and laws are 
overruled by foreign bodies.

Dr Fox looks to me like a corporate sleeper cell implanted in 
government. In 2011, he resigned his post 
<http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/oct/14/liam-fox-resignation-letter>as 
defence secretary in disgrace, after his extracurricular interests were 
exposed. He had set up an organisation called Atlantic Bridge, financed 
in large part by a hedge fund owner 
<http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/oct/11/michael-hintze-liam-fox-backer>. 
Atlantic Bridge formed a partnership with a corporate lobbying group 
called the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is funded by 
tobacco, pharmaceutical and oil companies 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/16/lessons-atlantic-bridge-questioning>. 
Before it was struck off by the Charity Commission, it began assembling 
a transatlantic conclave 
<http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/oct/15/liam-fox-atlantic-bridge> 
of people who wished to see public services privatised and corporations 
released from regulation.

He allowed a lobbyist to attend his official meetings, without 
government clearance 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/15/liam-fox-resignation-editorial>. 
He made misleading statements about these meetings, which were later 
disproved 
<http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/oct/09/defence-secretary-fox-holed>. 
It seems extraordinary to me that a man with such a past could have been 
brought back into government, let alone given such a crucial and 
sensitive role. Most newspapers have brushed his inconvenient history 
under the political carpet. He is, after all, their man.

At every turn he promotes the millionaire’s agenda, while urging that 
the social contract which makes this country more or less habitable be 
ripped apart. He wants “a systematic dismantling of universal benefits 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9922579/Liam-Foxs-speech-to-the-Institute-of-Economic-Affairs-in-full.html> 
… turning them into tax cuts”. He has argued for a three to five-year 
holiday from capital gains tax 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9922579/Liam-Foxs-speech-to-the-Institute-of-Economic-Affairs-in-full.html>. 
He wants to “freeze public spending for at least three years and 
probably more” and to deregulate the labour market 
<http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/feb/22/liam-fox-business-tax-cuts>, 
making workers easier to fire. He suggests that access to housing 
benefit should be limited 
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9922579/Liam-Foxs-speech-to-the-Institute-of-Economic-Affairs-in-full.html> 
for people under 25.

This is the man who has been put in charge of making new trade 
agreements. What he wants to do with them is pretty clear 
<http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-trade-chief-seeks-to-calm-u-s-jitters-over-brexit-1469477274>. 
“We need to see a reinvigoration of our transatlantic relationship,” he 
argues <http://www.liamfox.co.uk/news/new-priorities-new-vision>.  “We 
have a low regulation and low taxation environment which is only likely 
to improve outside the EU.” Improve, in this context, means becoming yet 
more hostile to human welfare, social mobility and the defence of the 
living world.

One of the legitimate complaints against the EU is its determination to 
drag us into treaties that claim to be about trade but are really about 
releasing multinational corporations from democratic control. Three of 
the agreements it is trying to impose – TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade 
and Investment Partnership 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/04/us-trade-deal-full-frontal-assault-on-democracy>), 
CETA (the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement 
<http://www.globaljustice.org.uk/what-ceta>) and the Trade in Services 
Agreement 
<https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jun/03/wikileaks-documents-trade-in-services-agreement> 
– make a mockery of parliamentary sovereignty.

They threaten to reduce to the lowest common denominator the laws 
protecting us from predatory finance, the exploitation of workers, food 
adulteration, climate change and environmental destruction. They 
threaten to force the privatisation of public services. They would allow 
corporations to sue governments for compensation in offshore tribunals 
that – unlike the European Court Dr Fox professes to hate – are 
unaccountable, opaque and wildly imbalanced 
<http://corporateeurope.org/trade/2012/11/chapter-4-who-guards-guardians-conflicting-interests-investment-arbitrators>. 
The EU has no mandate to strike such agreements: a consultation on the 
offshore tribunals TTIP proposes attracted 150,000 responses,97% of 
which were negative 
<http://www.globaljustice.org.uk/news/2015/jan/13/new-levels-ttip-rejection-revealed-commission%E2%80%99s-public-consultation>.

Leaving Europe should enable us to leave behind biased, destructive 
treaties of this kind; we will, after all, have to renegotiate most of 
our trade agreements 
<http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexitvote/2016/04/12/trade-relations-will-remain-unchanged-post-brexit-claims-lord-lawson-hardly/>. 
But by putting the Fox in charge of the chicken coop, Theresa May seems 
determined to replace them with something even worse.

The corporate army is already at the gates. The Republican senator Tom 
Cotton proposes that 
<https://next.ft.com/content/dd6853fe-4422-11e6-b22f-79eb4891c97d> 
Britain should join the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). 
Using the kind of international tribunals that TTIP threatens to impose, 
NAFTA has undermined labour rights 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/04/nafta-20-years-mexico-regret> 
and environmental protection 
<http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/01/08/3737250/keystone-opponents-and-the-tpp/>. 
It has blocked attempts to produce more progressive laws 
<http://www.thenation.com/article/right-and-us-trade-law-invalidating-20th-century?page=0,5> 
and greatly restricted legislative sovereignty. Whether we formally join 
NAFTA, or connect to that trading area through TTIP or another such 
agreement, the results will gravely threaten our sovereignty – unless 
negotiations are run on an entirely different basis.

In response to the Philip Green scandal, Theresa May says she wants to 
<http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/25/theresa-may-reform-capitalism-philip-green-bhs-scandal> 
“tackle corporate irresponsibility” and “reform capitalism so that it 
works for everyone not just the privileged few.” We have no idea what 
she means, but here’s where it should begin. Before her government 
starts negotiating any new trade treaties, it should open a public 
consultation about their purpose and scope. The UK’s trading 
relationships should be debated in parliament and the people of this 
nation should be allowed to determine how much control over national 
life our representatives should retain, and how much should be ceded to 
international agreements and international bodies.

Does this mean a referendum? If we can be trusted to decide whether or 
not to share our sovereignty with Europe, should we not also be trusted 
to decide whether or not to share it with transnational capital?

But the Conservative vision of sovereignty is highly selective. People 
like Dr Fox appear to hate much of what others love about this country: 
the NHS, our public broadcasters, our social safety net, the protection 
of the countryside, the notion that power resides in the people, rather 
than in corporations and their shadowy lobbyists. There are traitors in 
our midst, who would rip down our most treasured institutions on behalf 
of the transnational elite and its offshore holdings. This, it seems, is 
what they mean by taking back control.

www.monbiot.com

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