As well as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), it has been quietly negotiating something even worse: a Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa). It is still considering a merger and downgrading of the habitats and birds directives, which are all that impede the destruction of many of our precious places and rare species.Īlongside such specific threats, the EU is engineering treaties that challenge the very principle of parliamentary control of corporations. But, prodded by governments including ours, the commission threatens them anyway. When Edmund Stoiber, the conservative former president of Bavaria, reviewed European legislation, he discovered that the combined impact of all seven environmental directives incurred less than 1% of the cost to business caused by European law. There is nothing rational or proportionate about the deregulation the commission contemplates. In reality, it often means releasing business from democracy. “Cutting red tape” is everywhere portrayed as a good thing. What the European commission calls reducing the “regulatory burden for EU business operators” often means increasing the costs the rest of us must carry: costs imposed on our pockets, our health and our quality of life. What Cameron described in parliament as “ pettifogging bureaucracy” is the rules that prevent children from being poisoned by exhaust fumes, rivers from being turned into farm sewers and workers from being exploited by their bosses.
#IM PRO OPERA AND I VOTE SERIES#
The draft decisions on these topics are a long series of euphemisms, but they amount to a further dismantling of the safeguards defending people, places and the living world. For me, the most disturbing elements are those that have been widely described in the media as “uncontroversial”: the declarations on regulations and competitiveness. Nowhere is this clearer than in the draft agreement secured by David Cameron.
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