| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Corbyn: I am interested in the point that my hon. Friend is making. He may not have heard clearly what I said. I said that there should be sanctions against the companies that exploit children and live off the benefits of child labour in third world countries.
Mr. Murphy: I thank my hon. Friend. I accept that we should impose economic sanctions against the companies involved, but there is also an argument about economic sanctions against the countries, which I do not support.
Time is limited, and I want to cover other topics. The WTO does not exist in isolation. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said earlier that ways of reforming the organisation were being discussed, and that a WTO parliament, council or assembly may be one possibility. I hope that other aspects will be discussed.
The WTO works with other organisations, including the United Nations, and takes account of the difficulties that some poor and perhaps less poor countries face. I think particularly of post-apartheid South Africa, war-torn Angola, and Mozambique, which is trying to recover from a civil war. Regardless of their relative economic position, consideration must be given to the efforts of those countries to free themselves from the legacy of apartheid, which dominated not only South Africa, but much of southern Africa.
Mr. Alan Simpson (Nottingham, South):
I congratulate all those who were in Seattle as Ministers, observers and protesters, on helping to turn it into the debacle that it was. Nothing has cheered me up like that in ages. Unlike the Conservatives, I have no qualms about our having four Ministers there. The notion that the United Kingdom had four horsemen at the metropolis of free trade is an interesting one. It allows us to be clear about what we need to do in the chaotic space that Seattle created for us.
The agenda was clear. It was a wonderful opportunity to see greed and arrogance overreaching themselves. No doubt America and the corporations that were part of its delegation would say that it was not about that at all. They would argue that it was even-handed--they simply wanted the right to dump GM crops and growth-hormone beef into western markets, at the same time as dumping US grain surpluses into struggling southern markets. They wanted the right to acquire corporate ownership of services in the north and primary production in the south. That provided a corporate sense of balance.
Although the corporations talked about free trade, my hon. Friend the Member for Eastwood (Mr. Murphy) was right to question their belief in the removal of all subsidies. The corporate world is phenomenally good at claiming that it cannot produce anywhere unless it is paid to do so. It wants subsidies, inducements and tax sheltering to produce in our economies and it wants Governments to pick up the cost of infrastructure development. It does not want to accept the attendant obligations. The corporate world does not believe in the absence of subsidies; it simply believes in corporate welfare. Our own debates must take place with that knowledge.
We should be brave enough to define something different to put in the space that now exists. I want to make one or two moderate suggestions that are not out of line with the Labour manifesto--they are simply in line early, with the next manifesto. If we examine the lessons of Seattle, perhaps we should first consider scrapping the WTO. It would be disastrous if we all believed that we had a remit to save it. The United Nations is an international body that already has a remit to consider environmental and human rights agendas. We should consider refounding the United Nations, rather than undermining it in the interests of corporate rather than civic society.
Let us consider where such a refounding would lead. The notion that trade has meant emancipation for all and been synonymous with progress is a monstrous distortion of our recent past. Hon. Members have cited examples of market liberalisation in Europe. I invite them to read the United Nations Environment Programme's report on eastern Europe. It describes eastern Europe as an environmental catastrophe, in which civic society has almost been stripped to its basics; where democratic processes have been torn apart and economics have been reduced to gangsterism. That is the result of market liberalisation in eastern Europe.
Hon. Members also cited examples of the phenomenal early successes in parts of south-east Asia. It has been illustrative to contact colleagues and campaigners in the southern hemisphere through the internet in the past year. They say that this came from their ability to get huge subsidies from the United States, and its agencies in the World Bank, because of their terror of the spread of communism. The United States threw money at such countries in the southern hemisphere, which were able to invest in their domestic productive capacity behind protective markets. They were allowed to do that, and they did jolly well. However, in Seattle, only countries such as India said that the idea of free trade in agriculture would run through the planet like a plague of locusts and that the developing world needed a different approach to subsidies.
The world needs to subsidise the environmental goods while restricting and taxing the environmental bads. India presented a proposal for allowing developing nations to subsidise or protect their domestic industries to the point of food security and sufficiency. They should be able to define the terms for their own development. It should not be conditional on transferring the ownership of their primary producing resources, but by retaining them and not allowing resources to migrate around the planet in pursuit of the most exploitative rates of return and interest.
Those who advise us to go down other paths should bear some of the huge consequences in mind. People claim that it will be great when Poland joins the European Union, but they fail to mention that the radical reforms Poland must accept mean pushing 2 million people off the land. Those who welcome China to the WTO manage to avoid mentioning the fact that its entry presupposes that 100 million people will be pushed off the land or banished from existing employment. This will force human migration on a scale that we have never even begun to countenance, and the consequences in terms of social destabilisation will be massive.
Martin Khor, who was mentioned earlier, was one of those who at Seattle said to the west, "You have got to start to question whether trade has brought us prosperity. It hasn't. It has transferred corporate ownership without democratic accountability into the hands of the most powerful on the planet. We see that as a pillaging process, both in the context of the industrial world and the developing world." I had occasion earlier in the day to mention another aspect of globalisation, which has appeared in my constituency.
This is the last day of mass production for Raleigh as a cycle frame manufacturer in the UK. Tomorrow, it is selling off its equipment, which is the most up-to-date in the world, under the auctioneer's hammer. The equipment was installed only three years ago and will most probably be sold to competitor companies from China and Taiwan; companies which do not have to adhere to any labour standards, recognise any objection that they employ and exploit children, or conform to environmental obligations. Raleigh will say, "How can we meet the environmental obligations that you rightly expect us to meet as producers in the industrial world when you also ask us to compete in a price-only market, which is a beggar-your-neighbour race to the bottom of the barrel?"
In Seattle, trade union marchers--industrial workers and steelworkers from throughout the United States--found themselves walking hand in hand with the non-governmental organisations and lobby organisations
from the south. A new dialogue opened up between workers without jobs in the north and workers without rights in the south. They are saying, "Here is a game that strips rights, entitlements and secure prospects from us all."
The WTO is not an accountable body and it cannot address human rights issues. Nor does it want to. In July, Richard McCormick, the vice-chair of the International Chamber of Commerce--one of the main organisations lobbying the WTO--addressed a meeting of world leaders and said that the globalisation project may be terribly fragile. He added that
"its link with labour, its link with environment, could cause disaster in the trading system".
Yet that trading system is the disaster that protesters at Seattle were trying to draw to our attention. It strips us of anything sustainable in terms of human or environmental dignity and security. Asking a body that is so committed to excluding environmental and human rights considerations to take them on board would be like asking Jeffrey Archer to be responsible for truth--it simply is not in the nature of the beast to deliver such a commitment.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |