Language has the power to disarm the concerned citizen

Let’s say you want to push through a massive programme of anti-democratic corporate protection over two continents. It might be a good idea to festoon your official explanations with tedious-sounding initialisms, acronyms and euphemistic bromides, and with any luck concerned citizens will fall asleep before realising what is going on under their noses.

Consider the case of the US-EU trade deal called TTIP, with its controversial provisions for ISDS (Investor-State Dispute Settlement), and its reassuring talk of removing “barriers” and consulting “stakeholders”. As heroically wakeful perusal of its soporific rhetoric by George Monbiot and others has made clear, this threatens to constitute an enormous transfer of power from public to private hands.

TTIP – which authorities cutely invite us to pronounce tea-tip – is short for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. It sounds anodyne enough. (Everyone loves a partnership, right?) Its point is, they say, to remove “barriers” or “obstacles” to trade between the continental blocs. Well, who loves a barrier? Who adores the obstacle? As it happens, the normal kinds of trade “barriers”, ie import and export duties (collectively, “tariffs”), are already very low between the US and EU. So TTIP is focusing on the reduction of “non-tariff barriers”. Well, any kind of barrier is surely still a pesky thing.

Things begin to appear more worrisome when a persistent reader realises that most of the “non-tariff barriers” being targeted by TTIP are regulations: those annoying profit-blocking rules erected by governments to stop their citizens being poisoned or killed, or to prevent rampant pollution. TTIP’s boosters say they just want to make regulations more compatible on both sides of the Atlantic, so that a car manufacturer, say, will not have to pass two different expensive procedures, one for the US and one for the EU, that are aimed at ensuring similar safety levels. The term of art here is regulatory “harmonisation” or “coherence” or “cooperation”. Well, excellent. Who is an enemy of harmony? Who shudders at cooperation?

Perhaps it depends on who is cooperating with whom. Here is where ISDS comes in. It means that private companies will be allowed to sue national governments for doing things that harm their bottom line. Similar provisions in other treaties have already resulted in Philip Morris suing both Uruguay and Australia for enacting anti-smoking legislation, and a Swedish energy company suing Germany for phasing out nuclear power. ISDS could also help the present government’s fanatical drive to privatise the NHS. The EU, in the minutes of its “Civil Society Dialogue” in June, emphasised that it “does not have a practice of excluding specific economic sectors from ISDS”.

Investor-State Dispute Settlement is a triumphantly boring-sounding name for all this. Let us admire the use of “investor”, rather than “speculator” or, I don’t know, “rapacious corporation that artifically headquarters itself in Luxembourg for the purposes of tax avoidance”. And surely no one is against “dispute settlement”, even though such “disputes” would be arbitrated by unaccountable panels of corporate lawyers.

We are, though, assured by TTIP negotiators that they are consulting “stakeholders” throughout this process. Originally a “stakeholder” was a person who held the stakes (bets) of gamblers: so the stakeholder was the one purely disinterested party. But now “stakeholders” are all those with a stake in the outcome. Curious, then, to discover that the overwhelming majority of “stakeholders” consulted by both the EU and US TTIP bodies have turned out to be, er, corporations and their lobbyists.

TTIP is an excellent idea, say its champions, because it will be a magical GDP bonanza for both economic blocs, at least according to some controversial hand-waving models. In case anyone is worried that jobs might be at risk, the language of the economic models cited is careful to speak not of job losses, still less of job destruction; instead they refer mildly to possible “job displacements”, an ingeniously mealy-mouthed way of saying the same thing. (A cynic might object that it is not the jobs that will be moved, but the people – out of their jobs.)

While paying lip service to the idea of public (or at least “relevant stakeholder”) consultation, the architects of TTIP nonetheless intend to keep secret all the documentation of how the eventual agreement is reached – for 30 years. One might be forgiven for concluding from this, and in general from the obfuscatory and often downright misleading bureaucratese in which TTIP’s aims are framed, that they are trying to hide something. However, the official TTIP literature itself relentlessly invokes the modish political virtue of “transparency”. They must mean some kind of perfectly opaque transparency that would surely be of interest to scientists researching new smart materials. Or perhaps, after all, they are just trying to pull some very thick wool over our eyes.