The bill focuses on reversing some of the worst impacts of the Health & Social Care Act 2012, which has already seen 70 per cent of new NHS contracts outsourced to the private sector. Yet the final section also seeks to exempt the NHS from the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the controversial treaty currently being negotiated in secret between the European Commission and the US government.
Clive Efford, MP for Eltham, said: “The bill wouldn’t repeal the entire Health and Social Care Act. But it cuts the heart out of it. It would repeal some of the worst elements of it that impose market forces on the NHS.”
Are any coalition MPs who backed Lansley’s bill likely to now back Efford’s? “Not so far. I suspect that they are all too embarrassed that they supported this incredibly unpopular piece of legislation that people want repealed,” he said.
If passed into law, the bill declares that: “No ratification by a Minister of the Crown of the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Treaty shall cause any legally enforceable procurement or competition obligations to be imposed on any NHS body entering into any arrangement for the provision of health services in any part of the health services.”
It would seem though that such national legislation would not be enough to save the NHS from TTIP. If health services are included in the deal, any future UK government will be bound by its treaty obligations as an EU member state.
The coalition government, far from agreeing to remove health services from TTIP, has been talking up the business opportunities of opening health markets to private sector competition. In a response sent to The People’s NHS campaign last week, the government highlighted the potential profits to be made by multinational companies from TTIP.
Speaking at the G20 summit in Australia this weekend, David Cameron tried to dismiss fears over TTIP’s impacts on the NHS as ‘nonsense’. Yet the European Commission has confirmed that any move to renationalise the NHS would be open to challenge under the new powers that TTIP will grant US corporations, making privatisation irreversible.
Trade unions and other campaigners are now calling for outright rejection of TTIP because of the endless caveats the deal has built into it. Regardless of the potential privitisation of British public services, official assessments say TTIP will cost at least one million jobs in the EU and USA combined.
The tide is potentially turning against TTIP. The joint communiqué issued by Barack Obama and European leaders at the G20 is a last ditch attempt to save a process that is running into real trouble as more and more forces rise up in opposition to it.
