London, United Kingdom – Breitbart London has learned that the President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz is to make an unprecedented attempt to stop the debate surrounding the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) in the European Parliament in Strasbourg tomorrow.
We can exclusively report that in addition to the vote being cancelled, as noted several hours ago, the European Union’s chief bureaucrats are in meltdown following major public backlash against what has been described as a “major corporatist stitch-up”.
Up until this month it appeared that the TTIP deal, lauded by U.S. President Barack Obama, was on course to pave the way for huge, corporate deals under the guise of “free trade” across the United States and the European Union.
Both the Conservative Party and Labour Party had backed the initiative, which could even lead, in extremis, to vast chunks of Britain’s National Health Service being outsourced to American health providers.
But Labour leadership candidate Andy Burnham has broken ranks tonight, joining UKIP in their criticism of the deal. To date, UKIP is the only major political party in Britain to have consistently opposed TTIP, which contains a number of provisions that are said to be of concern to ordinary Britons.
Documents recently released by Wikileaks show the depths to which TTIP goes in order to help big corporations gain footholds across the Atlantic. Tonight, UKIP leader Nigel Farage spoke exclusively to Breitbart London to shed light on the issue.
“In 18 years in the European Parliament, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said, remarking on the scramble amongst EU chiefs to postpone the vote, and the debate which were due to take place at 8am tomorrow.
“In the past few days, I’ve had over 10,000 e-mails on TTIP from ordinary members of the public who are concerned about what the deal means. We simply can’t cope with this volume of correspondence.” Speaking on the mood in Strasbourg, Mr Farage told Breitbart London,
“They’re in blind panic. I’ve never seen anything like it. Finally there seems to be a crack in the corporatist stitch up. Even the Labour Party, after years of having backed this thing, seem to now realise what they’ve done, what a big, corporatist deal they’ve been backing.”
Mr Farage said that he felt tomorrow’s debate should go ahead so that legislators could effectively air the views of their constituents. But Eurocrats are trying to stifle the debate just one day after U.S. President Barack Obama said that he wanted Britain to remain a part of the European Union, and cited TTIP as a core point of progress between the two countries.
Followers of American politics will know that Mr Obama is also trying to force through the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal, also known as “Obamatrade” much to the chagrin of unions, free-marketeers, and American legislators. TTIP and TTP are often referred to as “shady” and “backroom deals” that aren’t even subject to the usual, poor levels of transparency from the European Union.
UPDATE: The European Parliament has today confirmed that it will NOT to debate TTIP today, as originally planned. Breitbart London understands that both the Labour and Conservative party’s MEPs voting against having a debate today, while UKIP voted in favour. The vote was won by just 183 votes to 181.
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