23/06/2013
We've come a long way in just a few days in our understanding of the EU-US trade deal, known by its acronym TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Pact). And much
of that has been distilled down into this week's
Booker column.
But, while Mr Cameron has been making the most of the propaganda opportunities afforded, Booker links the current event with Tony Blair using Britain's last G8 presidency in 2005 to proclaim his intention to abolish poverty in Africa and halt climate change.
Since then, he writes, we have known that these gatherings are largely a matter of smoke and mirrors â just as we saw from the way last week's charade in Northern Ireland was exploited to the hilt by that "heir to Blair", David Cameron. This was nowhere more obvious than in the impression he tried to convey that he was taking the lead in proposing a historic "free-trade deal" between the USA and the EU.
With the stage thus set, Booker digs in for some "rather severe correctives". For a start, he says, China and India might have had something to say about the BBC's claim that this was a meeting of "the eight most powerful countries in the world".
Then it was not so much a "G8" as a "G8 plus Two", as we saw from the prominent presence, alongside President Obama and the rest, of those two spectres at the feast, Presidents José Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy of the EU, as they stood behind their wheelie bins.
Third, and rather more significantly, Mr Cameron, as Prime Minister of the UK, has no direct status in this deal at all, since trade is an exclusively EU competence. The negotiations are to be conducted by Mr Barroso and the European Commission, not by any mere member state.
Fourth, what is being proposed is not just an EU-US deal but something much wider: between on one side, not just the EU but also the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), including Norway and, on the other, not just the US but also Canada and Mexico, as members of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Fifth, what is being proposed is not so much a "free-trade area" as a deal allowing trade between the two groups of countries subject to the harmonising of tens of thousands of regulations. This will require years of negotiations, which will be so complex and intractable that a deal may never come off at all.
Booker notes that it is hard to conceive that any agreement could be reached between the powerful and highly protectionist farming lobbies on both sides. US agribusiness would find it impossible to accede to the EU's strict animal welfare rules. The EU, so suspicious of GM, will scarcely welcome a flood of meat and cereal products made much cheaper by America's wholesale embrace of genetic modification.
As bitter rivals in the world airline market, the US and European aviation industries have long been embattled over their rival state-subsidy schemes, each side claiming the other's to be illegal. EU manufacturers will not be enthused by an influx of all those manufactured goods made competitive by much lower US energy costs, thanks to shale gas. The list of issues on which negotiations could founder goes on and on.
It is thus very relevant to ask, as does Booker, why all those politicians last week seemed so happy to see this deal given such a high profile? As to the answers, these are many and varied.
Mr Obama favours it because analysis shows that the US would benefit much more from such a deal than the EU. The EU's leaders like it because it offers diversion from the disaster being inflicted on Europe's economies by the slow-motion train wreck of the euro. As for Mr Cameron, he hopes that his grandstanding on the deal will help him to spike UKIP's guns by insisting that we can only benefit from such an arrangement if we remain in the EU.
Here, as so often when he talks about Britain's membership of the EU, he is being disingenuous. He carefully obscures the fact that Britain could benefit just as much from a deal by leaving the EU and rejoining the EFTA.
In his desperation to keep us in the EU, he still relies on that threefold wishful thinking by which he hopes to: a) win the next election; b) promise Eurosceptics that he can then negotiate a new treaty between Britain and the EU within two years; c) put this to a referendum in 2017.
Of these, a) is highly dubious; b) is out of the question â negotiating a new treaty would, under the rules, take much longer than two years; and since c) is dependent on b), this isn't going to happen either.
This leads Booker to the inevitable conclusion that Mr Cameron's dreams can no more come true than did Mr Blair's dreams that he could abolish poverty in Africa.
It may be that, for form's sake, the parties come up with a "TIPP-lite", offering some minor concessions that can be paraded as a breakthrough, but the reality is that all the stresses and differences that prevented agreement in the WTO "Doha Round" are going to re-emerge here, and the agreements are going to be no easier to make.
From the domestic point of view though, the emphasis on a trade deal that offers more from within the EU than could be gained by the UK as an independent player, is quite clever politics on the part of the Conservatives.
And if that play is designed to spike UKIP's guns, Mr Farage's party has been slow to respond with an alternative scenario. Not until after the general election, however, may the full negotiations crash and burn, which means that Mr Cameron's best interests will already have been served by the legend on offer.
To avoid being outflanked, UKIP needs to bring to the attention of the wider public that, in deal terms, the TTIP that glitters is not free trade gold.
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