Leaked WTO documents show them currently working out a list of what will be acceptable as a "legitimate" government objective for any regulation of services under GATS. That of "safeguarding the public interest" has already been rejected. If GATS goes ahead, warns economist Susan George, "then Europe can kiss goodbye its public health services". But even though that's just the start of the disaster, there has been no parliamentary debate or news coverage about GATS. (It's way too important for that). The British governments official line is that there's nothing to worry about anyway. The DTI claims GATS won't apply to the NHS or education here because "non-commercial services" are exempt from the fiat. But GATS says that if you've got just one tiny part of a public service that's even an iddy-biddy-bit commercial then THE WHOLE THING IS UP FOR GRABS.

Massive though GATS is, it's important to remember that it's only one more link in a longer chain locking in domestic populations to stuff they won't like and never voted for. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, locks Mexico into neo-liberal reforms in order to protect profits from what NAFTA's planners termed "the danger of a 'democracyopening' in Mexico". IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes, written in Washington, lock developing countries into "liberalisation" policies over and against the wishes of their own people. And we are locked into the Financial Services Agreement (FSA) by the Chubb Corporation! "The FSA", proclaimed the International Insurance Group, "is like taking back the neighbourhood. We can't have governments behaving in thuggish ways".

On taking back the neighbourhood of Chile, Henry Kissinger famously said, "I won't stand by and see a country go communist because of the stupidity of it's own people". And there is this kind of Kissinger-logic swimming like a virus throughout the whole toxic alphabet soup of GATS, NAFTA, SAPS. FSA, IMF. As the Washington Centre for Strategic and International Research puts it: "In the final analysis, what really matters is how effectively the surrender of governments to the global markets is carried out". (Tony Blair waved his little white flag, telling a business audience: "I still bear the scars of the public sector on my back". Note the past tense. He doesn't see himself as working in the public sector any more).

But to say that GATS is an agreement made by, and for, transnational corporations who just drew up a wish-list and handed it to politicians is not accurate. The actual phrase used by then minister of trade, Peter Mandelson and the International Chamber of Commerce was "request-list". His1998 letter promised them: "our negotiating priorities on the GATS 2000 agenda" will be "business priorities". Nor did the US Council of Service Industries (CSI) simply hand trade representative Charlene Barchevsky a GATS "wish-list", either. She got a 31-page document outlining what US government policy would be. The CSI singled out the European health services, which, they grumbled, "have largely been the responsibility of the public sector [making it] difficult for US private sector health care providers".

The central tenet of neo-liberalism is that there is no conflict between corporation and citizen. A hair line fracture in this iron logic might be the 6,000 maintenance workers laid off since rail privatisation. Another might be the highly revealing quote in this months corporate Watch from a Biwater's manager, who explains why the company pulled out of an African water privatisation project: "From a social point of view, these kinds of projects are viable but unfortunately from a private sector view they are not".

Although, that's about to change too. After water privatisation in Bolivia, people had to get special permits just to collect rainwater in roof-tanks, even though water bills were a third of average wages. Mass protests in Cochabamba then forced the government to end its contract with Bechtel. But under GATS provisions, Bechtel is suing Bolivia for scrapping water-privatisation. Thanks to private power, these kinds of projects have just got financially viable again.