Trade

We are campaigning to ensure trade deals work for people and the planet. We’re dismantling the trade rules that are blocking climate action, enabling a new resource grab in the name of the green transition, and entrenching corporate power.

Corporate courts vs. climate action

Corporate courts – formally known as ISDS – can be written into trade deals. They give companies the power to sue governments outside of the national legal system, over policies such as environmental protection or health regulation which they allege harm their profits. Either the corporations want payoffs in the millions and billions, or they use corporate courts as a threat to force governments to back down.

We won our campaign to get the UK to leave the Energy Charter Treaty, the deal most used by fossil fuel companies to block climate action. Now we’re turning to the UK’s investment treaty with Colombia, as the country faces a slew of cases by mining companies over its efforts to protect fragile ecologies and the rights of Indigenous people.

Trade in a just transition

A global shift from fossil fuels to renewables is essential. But will the global majority benefit from the energy transition, or will big business and wealthier countries continue the exploitation that brought us here, only with green window-dressing?

Rich governments are scrambling for the ‘critical’ minerals needed for renewables technology such as electric batteries. They’re doing so partly by negotiating trade deals with resource-rich global south countries, driving more destructive mining and on unequal terms. Rather than a geopolitical race to win, and ending up furnishing the military sector, these new industries must redistribute wealth and be democratically controlled to succeed in averting climate catastrophe. We are building a movement to expose the corporate capture of the green economy and call for a globally just green transition.

US trade deal

We’ve fought this before – the failed Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the post-Brexit US-UK trade deal. Once again, the UK is trying to negotiate a deal with Trump to avoid his tariff shock. Besides the threats to food standards, farmers’ livelihoods and the NHS, the Big Tech oligarchy behind Trump brings new dangers.

 Our government’s ability to regulate technologies making life and death decisions about welfare, immigration, online safety and policing could be signed away in a trade deal. Trump has already put the UK’s tax on incomprehensively tech giants on the chopping block. The UK is pursuing a digital-focused agreement, which risks granting more powers to Elon Musk and is ilk to bully us out of protecting public services, people’s data and AI safety.