00:00 John Hilary: [A] seamless segue from fracking into the TTIP/COP21 stuff — and the seamless bit's going to come a little bit later on. But I'm hoping — I'm John Hilary, by the way, [the] director of War on Want — but I'm hoping that people by and large in this room already know a bit about TTIP, so I'm not exactly going to start at the beginning. You pretty well know? Do you know about TTIP a bit? Yeah, pretty good. So, what I mean [is], as you know, basically up until now people focused particularly on the impact of TTIP on the NHS, TTIP on food [standards] [?], TTIP on
00:32 jobs — one million jobs is the official estimate of what['s] going to be lost [to] TTIP. But there's been less emphasis, perhaps particularly on the left, on the impact that TTIP's going to have in terms of climate and the environment, in terms of fracking and more generally. And so what I thought I'd do in my little ten minutes here is to address four of those areas, which brings in why there is a really strong left and green alliance to fight TTIP, and
01:04 why it's helping us draw in and win to an understanding of it completely new audiences [?] — of what the threats of this ever-expanding programme of neoliberal capitalism is about. The first reason, I suppose, why TTIP is going to be catastrophic for any form of climate justice, or action to try [and] stop climate change, is that it is based on the premise of endless growth and expansion. The whole point of TTIP is to push for more trade, more growth, more expansion, as
01:36 capital needs if it's going to survive. And so, for them — they've said, on every scenario (this is the European Commission's own language), under every single possible scenario that will come out of these talks, we will see dramatic growth, millions of tons of extra CO2 into the atmosphere and a profound danger to biodiversity. That's their words, not ours. And the reason for this is because, if you can imagine how trade exists under the skewed logic [of] the
02:10 globalised capitalist system, it is that just more trade in anything has got to be a good thing. So Britain, for example: at the moment we export 100,000 tons of pork every year and we import 100,000 tons of pork every [year]. So the ships are basically passing each other in mid-ocean, spewing out all of the CO2, doing absolutely nothing [for] food miles. And you would think yourself that's crazy, but [under] the logic they're promoting it's absolutely brilliant, because it just means more money and
02:42 everything being churned around in the senseless exchange, rather than anything which would be useful. So, more growth, more trade, without ever thinking why, is absolutely the premise, and that's why they say TTIP is going to be bad for the environment but we'll go ahead with it anyway. The second reason — and this goes to the centre of what TTIP's all about — is the pillar of deregulation on which TTIP is really based. Deregulation, so that capital is no
03:14 longer embedded within the social and environmental demands of society, but it's freed up from any of those conditions. And here you're looking at the environmental regulations which [are being] brought in at the European level, like for example the Fuel Quality Directive, absolutely anathema to the US — obviously even more now to VW since it's been found cheating. But that just gives you a nice example, really, where if you think that capital can regulate
03:45 itself, just look [at] the extraordinary lengths they'll go to to avoid any sensible regulation. So the deregulation agenda is already beginning to undermine some of the key directives at the European level which have been fought for for years. And as I say, the Fuel Quality Directive was the one which everyone is focused on, and that will also come up in a second where you find out some of the other bits of TTIP. So, firstly, just an increase in growth of CO2 emissions as a result [of] TTIP.
04:15 Secondly, an undermining of the climate-change-preventing directives and regulations [at] the European [level]. And the third — and this is the seamless connection to what Steve was saying about fracking — the element which I'm sure you know about, which has been most controversial under TTIP, is the introduction of this investor-state dispute settlement mechanism, where corporations get a unique power to be able to sue governments for any new policy which is brought in which might disturb their profits in the future. And
04:47 here in particular it's exactly the sort of bans on fracking we've seen. So, from France, Bulgaria, Netherlands, Scotland, almost in Wales — you know, these are the things which have already been targeted. So in Canada, where they already have the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism with the US: when the province of Quebec put a moratorium on fracking under the St Lawrence River, immediately it's now been challenged for
05:19 a quarter of a billion dollars by a US company called Lone Pine, which is suing them, saying: we have plans to frack under the St Lawrence River, and under free trade you don't get to choose whether or not you close down that market. Well — no, actually, the ultimate irony is Lone Pine isn't even a US company, it's a Canadian company with an office in the US. So it's been able to [sue] its own government [in a] way it couldn't do under its own national courts, simply because it's managed to use the ISDS
05:49 mechanism within NAFTA. And of course, at the beginning of the TTIP negotiations back in 2013, the UK government asked [the] London School of Economics to do a study: what are going to be the impacts, the consequences, [of] introducing these new powers for corporations in TTIP? And they came back saying: let's be absolutely clear, there [will be] no benefits — this is the LSE talking — there will be no benefits at all. US companies are not waiting to invest into Europe as a result of this. But
06:21 there will be dramatic costs, and the costs that they said there would be would be what Canada's facing. And even more so, you can bet your bottom dollar that fracking is going to be one of the key areas of contention, and any bans or moratoria which have been brought in will immediately be challenged by US corporations who are keen to start drilling, irrespective of whether there's any public opposition — [which] of course again is another grounds on which they [can sue]. I mean, you couldn't really make it up. There's places where there [has] been
06:51 resistance, in Central American countries, to US corporations coming in, and they've been sued because of public protest locally preventing them from being able to do their jobs. Unless you get a strong enough paramilitary force to stop people protesting in their own communities, then you're guilty. So, my fourth, perhaps the most important of all of these areas, is that in TTIP one of the key provisions that they want to put in — and the
07:22 European Union wants to have this really big and writ large as its separate chapter — is an energy chapter. And the energy chapter is about freeing up the export from the US of shale gas, from the massive boom in fracking that they've got over in the US, and from tar sands oil which comes down from Alberta, from Canada, and is refined in the US, and then get[s] shipped across to the European Union. At the moment this doesn't happen; there are some very strict rules under which you can and can't export natural
07:55 resources from the US. But once you have a free-trade deal in place like TTIP, that opens the tap. And the idea is from the European Union that you open the tap through TTIP to get this massive flood of oil and gas — and not just any old [oil]: tar sands oil, as we know, [being inaudible], it's the most carbon intensive, the most polluting. You get them streaming across the Atlantic. And this is particularly catastrophic for climate change, because there are not any facilities at the
08:25 moment, like the ports and the pipelines, which make that trade possible from the US to Europe. So they're going to have to invest tens of billions of dollars into creating the infrastructure to allow that trade to happen — and that means, of course, you're locked in for decades, because you make that investment, you want your money back. And so they're going to make sure that we are locked into dependency on that oil and gas [for] the next generation and beyond. And that is really what brings you to why they're doing this. The key
08:57 thing that fits with the theme of today — the key thing about [it] is not just the extra powers to capital, it's also about the imperialist pushback against Russia. And at the moment, if you think that many of the countries of Europe are dependent upon Russian gas and oil to a huge degree, much more than we are in Britain — they have said explicitly, TTIP is about opening that new surge in fossil fuels from [across] the Atlantic so that we can
09:29 break dependence upon Russian gas [and] oil for many of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe. And they are therefore calling TTIP — their words, not ours — the economic NATO. TTIP becomes the economic way of isolating Russia, in the same way as all of the troop movements that are currently going on through the eastern side of Poland: NATO troops going through the east[ern] Poland into the villages, being welcomed in in many instances. TTIP is the economic armoured
10:00 car. Finally then — [I have] two minutes? [inaudible] — not finally, the next thing: when we take it, I mean, one of the big things for us at the moment is using TTIP as a mechanism to be able to broaden a public political consciousness around what actually these things mean, both in terms of the capitalist expansion and in terms of the imperialist threat. And so that's why we've got at the moment a two-week campaign going on in the Lush
10:33 shops — and if you know Lush cosmetics, you have [one] local to you. In 276 Lush shops across Europe this fortnight you've got a big TTIP campaign going on, people going in getting these nice sort of free papers to give away, which is being guest edited by Vivienne Westwood, got lots of stuff in from us. It's trying to reach out to new audiences and saying: if you have any interest in preserving the climate in the future, you have got to be aware of these threats. But the other
11:03 thing we're trying to do is make people aware that there happens to be a referendum on the membership of the EU coming up. And for us, you can't begin to address any of these issues until you start thinking about the political log jam of being stuck within the institutions of the EU. We are proud to be internationalist, proud to be European, but absolutely frustrated beyond belief by over 20 years, in my case, [of] banging our
11:34 heads against the walls of the European Union [and having] seen not the slightest change. And not just no change, but no possibility of change. There are no democratic levers at all within the European Union. And that's, I think, a profound challenge to those on the centre-left who in the past have always thought that, yes, we lose a bit of sovereignty by being part [of the] European Union, but at least we get back stronger social and environmental rights than we would have if we were on our own. Well, I think now TTIP, the
12:05 internal competitiveness agenda, all of the fiscal stability pacts they are selling everybody — it'll [be] lose-lose: you lose sovereignty, you lose democracy, and increasingly you're losing out on any possibility of holding to the model of social Europe. So: fifth of October — everything in October's in Manchester. The fourth is the demo, you know; the fifth, we're having a day of actions on TTIP. We're hoping still to get
12:37 permission to do the action in front of the town hall in Albert Square at lunchtime, but then [at] half past five in the afternoon as a curtain raiser for the Jeremy Corbyn show later. And half past five on Monday fifth of October [we've] coming: Owen Jones; Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the Icelandic MP who led the big resistance and tried actually to get some sort of a different future for the Icelandic people; John Rees from the People's Assembly; a
13:07 whole lot of others; and [inaudible] from Friends of the Earth. [We] try to make that link, asking the question: okay, we're fighting against TTIP, surely we should be fighting against European Union institutions at the same time. So I'm hoping to see you all there. The fourth is like a warm-up and the fifth is the real day. [It] should be [inaudible].
## Corrections
- **One acronym, fifteen spellings.** The captions render TTIP as: *TTFN, TT, tea soup, teasing, tezak, T tip, tea tip, teetav, teeth, teaset, tita, teat it, e-tip, eat it,* and *fruity tip* ("through TTIP"), across some thirty-four occurrences. Every one is corrected to TTIP. A reader searching the raw captions for the subject of this talk would not find it. - "I'm **Jonathan Reed by when the direction of war on one**" → "I'm **John Hilary, by the way, [the] director of War on Want**" — the speaker's own introduction of himself. - "the economic **nature teat it** becomes the economic way of isolating Russia" → "the **economic NATO**. TTIP becomes the economic way of isolating Russia." The phrase "economic NATO" was used of TTIP by its own advocates, which is why he adds "their words, not ours", and the captions destroy both the phrase and the joke that follows it about the armoured car. - "how **Trey** exists ... just more **train** in anything" → "how **trade** exists ... just more **trade** in anything". - "a **mathema** to the u.s." → "**anathema** to the US"; "the fuel quality **threat it**" → "the Fuel Quality **Directive**". - "**bounds** on fracking" and "any **bands** or moratoria" → "**bans**". - "**the promise of** quebec put a moratorium on fracking under **this** Lawrence River" → "**the province of** Quebec ... under **the St** Lawrence River"; "challenged for **quarter for** a billion dollars" → "**a quarter of** a billion dollars". Lone Pine's NAFTA claim against Canada was for $250m. - "it's managed to use the **usda's** mechanism within NAFTA" → "the **ISDS** mechanism". - "the UK government asked **a lot of school of economics**" → "asked [the] **London School of Economics**", which he then calls the LSE. - "**the elegant** which I'm sure you know about" → "**the element**". - "another grounds on which they **consume** ... you **can** really make it up" → "on which they **can sue** ... you **couldn't** really make it up". A dropped negation that reverses the line. - "they've been **soothed** because of public protest" → "they've been **sued**". - "which make that **type** possible from the u.s. to Europe" → "which make that **trade** possible". - "opening that **new surgeon** fossil fuels" → "that **new surge in** fossil fuels"; "Russian **gas law**" → "Russian **gas [and] oil**". - "there are no Democratic **leaders** at all within the European Union" → "no democratic **levers**" — the claim is about mechanisms, not personnel, and "no possibility of change" is the sentence it answers. - "we are proud to be **internationalized proud by** European" → "proud to be **internationalist**, proud **to be** European"; "by being **platter** European Union" → "being **part of the** European Union". - "in front of the town **Paul** in **Alba** square" → "the town **hall** in **Albert Square**", Manchester; "**help us five**" (twice) → "**half past five**". - "**begin to jostle to use** the Icelandic MP" → "**Birgitta Jónsdóttir**, the Icelandic MP"; "**John breeze** from the People's Assembly" → "**John Rees**". - "**lost** shops across Europe" → "**Lush** shops"; "guest edited by **vivienne westwood**" → correct as given. - "the **imperious** threat" → "the **imperialist** threat". - Marked and uncertain: "TTIP on food **[standards] [?]**"; "draw in and win to an understanding of it completely new audiences **[?]**"; "tar sands oil, as we know, **[being inaudible]**" (captions: "being Vita"); "**[inaudible]** from Friends of the Earth" (captions: "clearly beautiful"); and the closing words, "[it] should be **[inaudible]**".