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Last week the European Parliament (EP) was supposed to vote on its report on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The day before the scheduled vote, the President of the EP, Martin Schulz decided to postpone it as more than 200 amendments and requests for split or separate votes were tabled on the motion for a resolution.  This is allowed in the EP rules of procedure. Now the amendments will go back to the EP’s International Trade (INTA) committee for consideration and decision on whether they are to be voted in plenary or not.

Therefore, on 10 June the vote on the resolution did not take place, but Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted on whether to hold a debate the same day or to postpone it to be held together with the final vote on the resolution. After lively discussions, 183 MEPs voted in favor of the postponement, 181 voted against and 37 abstained.

All this testifies how controversial the issue is and how divided the EP is. It is normal: the scope of TTIP is so broad – I think too broad – as it covers so many sectors and issues. This brings along very legitimate questions about what kind of trade and investment policies, sustainable development, labour, health and social standards we want for our future societies both in the EU and US.

However, what I personally dislike, is the spiral of blame and shame dynamics that MEPs have put in place in the period between 28 May (vote in the INTA committee) and last week after the Strasbourg session. What a citizen would like to see is the politicians he or she has elected work in a responsible way to find solutions to the challenges we are facing in our economies and societies. Blaming and shaming does not get us anywhere.

At Social Platform we will continue to closely monitor the developments in the EP. As already expressed in our press release of 29 May, we hope that during the plenary the Parliament will confirm the exclusion of public services from TTIP. We also recommend that an unambiguous solution is found to explicitly exclude the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism from the agreement – the compromise found on 28 May was indeed very ambiguous. Both the EU and the US have advanced legal systems with sufficiently strong legal mechanisms to protect foreign investors against misuse or abuse of governmental powers.