Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement

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One of the things Liam Fox has been briefed to bring home as Trade Secretary is the CETA trade deal, which has been 7 years in the making.

In Europe, there has been massive protest against the CETA and TTIP trade deals, with over 7m signatures collected against them.

When Wallonia blocked the CETA deal in Oct.2016, there was a great deal of "How dare they" from the Tories but not a mention of the 7,000,000 signatures gathered in protest against it. Wallonia cited 2 major stumbling blocks: 1. TTIP with the US had been stopped by Europe primarily over the loss of sovereignty under the Investor-State Dispute Settlement. 2. A vast number of US corporations had opened sub-offices in Canada and were slipping through the back door that was slammed shut by the refusal of TTIP.

So now we have CETA slipping in the UK back passage, with the most recent events at attempting to ratify it reading like a Brian Rix farce. The public cannot be allowed to see any information on CETA, and only MPs and MEPs can get a glimpse at a special room in the HoC

Liam Fox has been placed in the driving seat for the next round of CETA talks, and he has promised that it will get a full debate in the House of Commons... only they just never seem to quite get around to it.

There seems to be a big hurry to get CETA signed and ratified. Brexit is the motivator and, in the light of all we have learned about the Atlantic Bridge, I wouldn't mind taking a punt that they are the real instigators of Brexit with the very specific task of bringing home a hostile corporate take-over of the UK, and a subordination of all to becoming the 51st State of America.

Alarm bells go off in my head when I see a deliberately concocted strategy like Brexit. The £UK has taken a massive beating, losing 20% of its value and opening the doors wide open for a cheap buy-out of anything left that isn't screwed down. Between Thatcher, Blair and Cameron, there's not much worth flogging, is there? Yes, there is, the US wants to buy Education, Security, Prisons, and the NHS, all nice little earners.

On Oct.26.2016, the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee convened with Liam Fox to find out why the debate that it had asked to take place on Sept.07 had not taken place, and to find out when it would happen.

The Brexit situation is providing the perfect smoke screen for Fox to tiptoe around and play one side off against the other. You can get a sense of his fancy footwork by reading the Oral Evidence he gave on the Oct.26: "You can trust me squire, of course we are going to have a full and open debate, err I'll get my diary out and get right on it". Only it didn’t quite pan out that way.

Instead of a full debate on the House of Commons floor, as he had promised, the document that took 7 years to compile and runs to hundreds of pages, was assigned 2 hrs and 19 minutes in Committee Room 10, with about a dozen people present. The meeting was scheduled to start at 4.30 pm on Feb.06.2017 – the exact date that had been set aside for the whole House to debate the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill.

Liam Fox was not present in Committee Room 10; he left his trusty sidekick Greg Hands, Minister for Trade and Investment, to do the talking.

In the words of the Labour MP Barry Gardiner attending the Committee: "I want to pick up on the idea that the Secretary of State has done everything that could be reasonably required of him. He appeared before the European Scrutiny Committee on Oct.26, which was after he had given the commitments on Sept.07. He stated that he was "very happy" to have the debate on the Floor of the House. He claimed that the failure to set a date for the debate had been owing to a scheduling problem in the Parliamentary calendar. In reality, as a Freedom of Information request submitted by my office revealed, the govt had not been delayed by a scheduling problem in the parliamentary calendar; in fact, the first time that the Department for International Trade had even approached the managers to discuss a potential debate on CETA was on Oct.25, precisely one day before the Secretary of State was due to appear before the Committee and account for his failure to schedule that debate.

The email trail shows departmental officials asking whether they actually needed to set a date for a CETA debate at all, or whether it might be enough just to tell the Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee that "they were in the process of scheduling a debate". The email actually reads: "What advice would you give: would it be better to have an actual date or do you think we can just tell the chair we are in the process of scheduling a debate".

Greg Hands replied "I really do feel that I have already answered these questions".

Not to be fobbed off, Barry Gardiner continued: "The hon. Gentleman is right that all Members of the House have the right to attend the Committee, but he will have noticed that this one and only opportunity for them to do so was deliberately timetabled at the same time that the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill is being considered in Committee on the Floor of the House. I do not believe that is a coincidence. I do not believe that is a mistake. I believe that it is part of a deliberate attempt to stop proper scrutiny. The hon. gentleman talks about scrutiny and about moving this debate on to substantive issues within CETA, but the debate on the motion and amendment is precisely about whether this matter should go to the Floor of the House. That is why the process is important. We need to see that proper process has been kept, and sadly it has not".[1]

This was the 3rd time that the Opposition raised the issue of deliberate manipulation of the debates venue, time and make-up. A sitting committee of a dozen people is NOT a full Commons discussion on the floor of the House, and that was what Liam Fox had promised.

The Conservatives are doing their best to ensure that CETA gets squeezed through without a full parliamentary debate. That is unconstitutional at best, and sleaze at worst. Liam Fox and Greg Hands are taking the piss out of the entire process of debate, the democratic Parliamentary system and the people of the UK.

Brexit? A total sham dreamt up by the most extreme right-wing bastards out there, and they have been planning it for years.

It doesn’t matter who is POTUS in America because, like Obama, the moment you get into the White House, your arse is owned by the NeoCon machine. No laws, no regulations, maximise profit, fuck the workers, we got robots, pro-Israel, all Muslims are bastards, so are Pinko Lefty snowflakes and leftist democrat scumbags.

++ Note: this text is taken pretty much verbatim from [2]


Articles

References

  1. ^ EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. Hansard, Parliament.uk, Feb.06.2017.
  2. ^ The Birth of Brexit. The Dangerous Globe, Apr.14.2017.