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The Government is trying to sneak investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms into future trade deals by waving the whole thing through Parliament when it's overloaded by Brexit. ISDS would allow private companies to sue the Government for losses.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
More specifically, for policies that harm their profits in any way. Imagine a future Honda, for instance, where the company tries to reclaim the £billions it invested in UK production by claiming that the circumstances of UK's trade changed so as to make UK production impossible.
Or an oil company suing for the loss of revenue because a tighter environmental policy reduced demand for the black stuff. And so on, and so forth. There are literally millions of similar scenarios it's easy to concoct.
If we sign these absurd deals, we will be holding all future Governments (of every stripe) hostage. Yet Liam Fox is all over them like a starving dog on a steak because of course he's got so little to show for his 400,000+ airmiles. We have to WAKE UP, before it's too late!
On the scale of potential post-Brexit damage, if the carving up and privatisation of the NHS or the need to accept cholorinated chicken and dodgy beef is a 10, this rates at least an 11! It's something that will haunt us FOREVER. Once this genie is out of the bottle, game over.
Put it another way, this potentially fires the starting pistol on the biggest transfer of public to private wealth of all time. Imagine any time any company experienced any government policy that affected its bottom line in any way, it resorted to legal action to reclaim damages!
