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10.7 am
Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst): The intriguing feature of these occasions is that if we are not careful there is a danger that a small number of hon. Members come along clutching briefs prepared by well-meaning organisations and deliver them to an empty House. That is always to be regretted. These are proper debates, properly held in this House, and they should therefore carry all the weight that goes with that phenomenon.
It will embarrass the hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) if I say that I agreed with the measured tone of his speech. I hope that it will set a framework for this debate because he tried to strike a proper balance between what are often wrongly seen as competing interests rather than as interests which should naturally go together.
I shall make two or three brief points as a contribution to the debate. First, there is a danger that we tend to bring a latter-day imperialism to such a debate. We have a view of the world that is well meaning and informed by the sort of groups mentioned earlier, but which may or may not be relevant to the countries that those groups and hon. Members are seeking to help.
I have always been suspicious of the proposition that we in wealthy western Europe, mollycoddled by our international organisations and protected by the European Union and our membership of the OECD, have something that is necessarily relevant to say about different cultures, different traditions and very different stages of economic development. We should be careful to guard against such an assumption.
That leads directly to a second problem, to which the hon. Member for Rotherham referred. A glib assumption is often made that Governments in what we rather patronisingly call underdeveloped, developing or third-world countries are sufficiently pure and
knowledgeable that they know what is good for their own people, and that if we involve them or leave matters to them, all will be well.
Experience in all too many countries suggests just the opposite. It is possible, as the hon. Member for Rotherham pointed out, that the involvement of even a transnational or a multinational company in a developing country might be a greater force for the good or the better of the people of that country than their Government would be in providing investment and employment. It must be a matter for those Governments to make a judgment about the basis on which they would welcome--or not--investment into their own countries.
One of the great dangers of debates such as this is that we succumb to a rather easily patronising or latter-day imperialistic view of the world, believing that we know what is good for everyone else and that we should set about telling them that, at the risk of undermining aspects of their economic development--the very thing that we say that we want to improve.
The third issue is the assumption underlying the opening speech of the hon. Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) that we, or--worse still--bureaucrats and politicians combined, know better where investment should go than those who are making the investment. I have been in the political business long enough to have more than a touch of suspicion about the knowledge and wisdom of politicians and occasionally, dare I say it, of officials and bureaucrats.
I do not have a starry-eyed view of the world of business and commerce. Of course they have their priorities, but what benefits businesses and their shareholders and employees often tends to benefit the wider community within which they operate, perhaps more so than the judgment of politicians and bureaucrats, whether in Paris, Geneva or the capital cities of the countries receiving the investment.
We should be careful before uttering a string of good-sounding cliches to solve all the problems. If we examine the speeches that have already been made and, I would not mind betting, those still to be made, we shall find an extremely high cliche content. They will contain words such as environmental protection, partnership, co-operation and all the other things to which we are supposed to pay lip service, which sound good but which, when subjected to detailed analysis, mean precious little.
I hesitate to keep quoting, but as the hon. Member for Rotherham suggested, we must find a sensible way of bringing together business interests, shareholder interests, employee interests, international development and global flows of money and investment, to meet the aims and aspirations of countries that are highly developed and those that have yet to enjoy economic development. That is surely the way ahead.
From the description of the international agreement that we heard, it sounds to me as though it provides a good basis from which to start. We should try to move it this way or that, rather than to tear it down. I hope that the tone of the debate will continue in the way that it is developing, and that contributors will offer specific suggestions about how the agreement could be made to work better, rather than a string of meaningless cliches.
10.14 am
Mr. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North):
I welcome the opportunity for this debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bury, North (Mr. Chaytor) on gaining it and on his opening remarks.
It is strange that a major development such as the multilateral agreement on investment, which has enormous implications for every citizen of the planet, should have to be debated in an Adjournment debate in the House and, I suspect, is not being debated at all in many other Parliaments, although its implications go far and wide.
The MAI proposal is a charter for multinational corporations, unaccountable and unelected, to behave as they wish around the world, to the destruction of the environment, the damaging of living standards and the aggrandisement of their own profits, all of which will eventually be repatriated to the OECD countries where those companies originate.
We must take seriously the issues of democracy and accountability around the world. Fifteen or 20 years ago a number of countries tried hard to curtail or control the power of multinational corporations. The Governments who tried to do that found themselves facing the wrath of the International Monetary Fund and the international bankers and were unable to proceed.
I well remember the way in which the Government of Jamaica were removed in 1979 by the IMF becausethey opposed the power of multinational corporations. I remember the coup in Chile in 1973, which occurred for the same reason--because the Government opposed multinational corporations. I remember the Government of Guatemala being removed in 1954 because they opposed the power of the United Fruit Company. The list is endless.
It is sad that the United Nations, having aimed to be a democratic institution and to promote such good agreements as the Rio agreement and, more recently, the New York summit on the environment, has turned its back on the issues of economic democracy. After the Rio summit the UN closed down the multinational corporations office and has sought to hand over its economic thinking to the World bank and the IMF.
The right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) complained--strangely, for a Conservative--about the northern European imperialistic view of the world, which I do not share or recognise. He was concerned about well-meaning organisations in the north, as he so charmingly put it, which try to advise the rest of the world. I was not aware that he was an active supporter of Oxfam, the World Wide Fund for Nature or other such organisations.
Mr. Corbyn:
That is okay, then--I was slightly worried for a moment.
So as not to be accused of taking part in some northern neo-colonial attempt to control the rest of the world, I will quote from a document produced by the Third World Network, an interesting organisation based in Penang, Malaysia, which seeks to bring together non- governmental organisations within what we choose to call third-world countries to examine the impact of
multinational corporations and their operations on the environment, living standards, labour conditions, child labour and so on around the world.
The Third World Network summarises the aims of the MAI as follows:
Mr. MacShane:
I do not know whether my hon. Friend has been in Penang, but I have. German multinational companies there would like to give trade union recognition to their employees, as they do in Germany, but are forbidden to do so by the Government. Oddly, under the MAI that Government rule could not apply.
"The right of entry and establishment of foreign companies in almost all sectors, except security"--
which means that Governments lose authority to determine what a foreign investor can do--
"The right to full equity ownership"--
which means that Governments would not be allowed to impose a condition that foreign companies should allow a portion of their equity to be owned locally or form joint ventures with local firms. With reference to national treatment, the foreign company must be treated on exactly equal terms with local companies.
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