2016-05-21theguardian.com

The prime minister has repeatedly told MPs that TTIP poses no threat to the NHS. Yet to avoid the abyss, his government has supported an amendment contrary to these assertions.

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TTIP started out as an obscure trade agreement that would create the world's biggest "free trade zone" between the US and EU, and received little media coverage or parliamentary debate. Two years ago very few politicians or journalists had even heard of it. Yet a movement has built against this deal, one that has stunned the negotiators and forced the EU trade commissioner to call TTIP "the most toxic acronym in Europe". That's because TTIP has little to do with selling more products. It's a charter for deregulation, which threatens to change the way we make decisions about laws. It even gives foreign business special "courts" through which they can sue governments for many decisions they don't like.

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Cameron is firmly pushing forward with the most extreme version of TTIP imaginable. But the ground is moving under him, and all the other politicians who can't break with the neoliberal orthodoxy of the last 40 years.



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