Bez…Bez…Good old Bez, oh no sorry its Mark now. Sorry, what’s that? Of the Reality Party. Watching Andrew Neil’s Daily Politics regularly along with many other politicos, it is easy I’m sure to become as disconnected from the concerns of the electorate as the Westminster parties have become (this is what the polls suggest at least.)
And as we are all guided by journalistic lines of questioning down the rabbit hole of false concerns, the difference between labour and the conservative party or whether the NHS can subsist on 8 or 12 billion of extra spending, those politically active members of our society are yelling, “this is a joke.” TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership may well be the kind of conspiracy that stoned paranoiacs lounge around and exchange mumbles over but does it make concerns surrounding a looming trade deal with the US any less legitimate? I don’t think it does.
One of TTIP’s primary aims is to deregulate all industries with the vision of promoting market access for all involved and promote trade between nations. On the surface this sounds fantastic but when considerations are made with regard to natural monopolies like our NHS then ones capitalistic jubilance wains. Part of the draft agreement leaked to the BBC showed, on examination by the Unite Union’s legal team that, if the agreement were signed, the NHS would be obliged to put out to tender further afield than the EU. This would most likely hasten the process of privatisation. This year sub-contractual provision rose by approximately a percentage point. Not much I suppose. However, under Andrew Landsley’s new Health and Social Care Act contracts for providing services are to be put out to any ‘qualified provider,’ which will inevitably lead in the long term, to private contractors having a large stake in the NHS. As it is such that already under EU legislation, freedom of movement of goods and services dictates that contracts must be even handedly be put out to tender throughout Europe, it can only eventuate that as a consequence of TTIP the privatisation of the NHS is accelerated and solidified as an unchangeable concept. An NHS free at the point of use but for profit.
Bez, ‘the old mucker,’ is the only televised personality to my recollection that has mentioned TTIP. Recognition of these landmark issues would, in my view, go a very long way to engaging with a public tired of hearing the same old shit.