Thursdays announcement that the European Commission was to hold a consultation on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is something of a wake up call. According to this website “Since June 2013 the Commission has held three rounds of stakeholder consultations, both before and during talks on the agreement, to gather the views and wishes of the public and interested parties across Europe. The Commission has also done public consultations before the start of the TTIP negotiations.” so with this consultation there have now been 4 rounds of stakeholder consultation and I have missed all of the previous ones. According to the preamble to the consultation just announced “As part of its ongoing efforts to make its negotiations with the US the most open and transparent trade talks to date, the European Commission today launches a public consultation….” So the previous rounds of talks and discussions between the EU and other partners including the US have been less open and less transparent. More information is available here.

Whilst individual MEPs cannot be expected to personally alert their constituents to such things, it does seem strange that with 10 MEPs in the South East which is the constituency that I live in, along with 8 Million other people, that I have not heard of any of these 4 public consultations, or perhaps been contacted by any of these representatives to explain what their opinions are on such matters, so that my response to the consultation could be informed by these points of view.

In case I wanted to find out the way in which the political parties viewed the TTIP, I could reasonably check out what they have to say on the subject. Following the defection to the Conservative Party of Marta Andreason, I only have one UKIP MEP (Nigel Farage) but being the most vigorous party on matters European its not unreasonable to find out what the views of the party are. I found this piece on one of their news websites UKIP daily, with a piece written by a Iain McKie, a UKIP candidate for the Parliamentary elections in 2015:

“So where does that leave UKIP?  Given that this would be the world’s largest ever free trade agreement, we really should have an opinion.  After all, we keep banging on about getting bilateral agreements in place once we leave the EU.  Is TTIP a good blueprint because it brings down barriers to trade and hopes to speed up transaction rates? or is it a bad one because it would prevent the UK from ‘regenerating’ a region once the mill has closed?  This type of question is timely, as right now UKIP are seeking the Labour vote, one that, on the face of it, would be more suited to the European Way of Doing Things.”

Rather sadly this is the end of his piece on TTIP, not the beginning. He is actually using his article, posted at the end of January 2014 to ask the question. So far there appears to be no answer. I visited the Lib Dem Voice website, and the most recent references to TTIP go back to May 2013. I struggled to find anything from either of the other two parties through a quick google search and a search on their websites.

I know today is April fools day, and this blog could so easily be a joke, here we are in the middle of discussions by the EU on a trade agreement with the USA and no one appears to know what to do with the consultation that we are all invited to be involved with. However this is not a cleverly crafted joke. This is real life. In 7 weeks we all get to elect our future MEPs. Is it too difficult for at least one of the parties to explain why we should vote for them, and for this to be based on the work of the Parliament and Commission. Perhaps it really is. Perhaps what we need are some candidates who can at least offer us an alternative to these silent parties?