Whip hand?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Whip hand?

- New York Has No “Apartheid” Schools, City-Journal.org, August 18, 2017.

3. Unloved, untimely, and unnecessary, the putative free trade pact between Europe and America is dying a slow death.

The Dutch people have amassed 100,000 signatures calling for a referendum on this Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP as we know it. The number is likely to soar after Greenpeace leaked 248 pages of negotiation papers over the weekend. The documents do not exactly show a “race to the bottom in environmental, consumer protection and public health standards” - as Greenpeace alleges - but they do raise red flags over who sets our laws and who holds the whip hand over our eviscerated parliaments.

Dutch voters have already rebuked Brussels once this year, throwing out an association agreement with Ukraine in what was really a protest against the wider conduct of European affairs by an EU priesthood that long ago lost touch with economic and political reality.

French president François Hollande cannot hide from that reality. Faced with approval ratings of 13pc in the latest TNS-Sofres poll, a TTIP mutiny within his own Socialist Party, and electoral annihilation in 2017, he is retreating. “We don't want unbridled free trade. We will never accept that basic principles are threatened,” he said.

In Germany, just 17pc now back the project, and barely half even accept that free trade itself a “good thing”, an astonishing turn for a mercantilist country that has geared its industrial system to exports.