Parliament just got a little bit more supreme - now to keep up the pressure

The Labour MP Clive Efford secured a highly symbolic victory in a debate on his Private Members' the National Health Service (Amended Duties and Powers) Bill on Friday 21 November to roll back NHS privatisation and remove the NHS from the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Treaty negotiations(TTIP. During the debate, in which Tory MPs were conspicuous by their absence, Labour Health shadow Andy Burnham pointed out that over 60 of their number have links to private health companies, many of which are US-owned; just the kind of multinational business that would benefit greatly if TTIP passes into law – doubly so, if the Coalition keep the NHS within the scope of the Treaty. Paradoxically, for a party that pays a lot of lip service to the convention of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ or ‘supremacy’, the Tories seem very keen to give large chunks of it away to foreign-owned businesses. TTIP would allow such businesses to sue our government if it dared to pass any future laws that threatened to undo privatisations or reduced their perceived ability to make expected profits on UK-based deals. In reality, therefore, TTIP puts the British people (the ones Cameron likes to bang on about) at the mercy of the profits of foreign and multinational business (those who have such a problem paying out taxes, remember?) And Cameron is very keen on TTIP. He wants the deal signed with almost indecent haste, and said only this week that he wanted ‘rocket boosters’ putting under the negotiations, ridiculing those who argue against it for having only ‘weak arguments’ and dismissing fears that it will be used to force further NHS privatisation as ‘nonsense’. Parliamentary sovereignty has two main features: first, there is the unwritten rule (called a ‘convention’) that parliament can pass a law on any subject it fancies – because that’s the democratic will of the people (yeah, right); and second, parliament can’t ‘bind its successors’, which means any law passed by the current parliament could be repealed by one sitting in future – we don’t have any ‘entrenched’ laws – unlike the written constitutions of the US, France or the Irish Republic, for example. So by forcing through TTIP and making sure parliament passed domestic legislation to give effect to it in this country, Cameron was hoping to make NHS privatisation unstoppable, because he’d effectively given away the power of parliament to stop it in future. After all, MPs with shares in private health companies won’t be took keen to cut off the profits from their own investments, and a future parliament would be wary of incurring legal costs if a foreign company took the UK to court because it had legislate in a way that was damaging to their supreme right to make money. TTIP, like Cameron’s line of reasoning is dangerous and needs to be stopped. Clive Efford’s PMB has to become law, for all our sakes.