Collateral damage. Enhanced interrogation. What’s the name for those phrases or words that sound relatively innocuous but are actually covering up something that’s very violent or very bad. Here’s another one: regulatory cooperation. Cooperation is a good thing, right? It doesn’t sound so threatening, but it’s a masterful example of the power of language to make something terrible sound benign. And it’s nestling at the heart of the trade deal being hammered out between the EU and the USA.

To most people, regulations such as air pollution limits and food safety standards are common sense protections against dangerous threats. However, to many big businesses, these rules are just red tape or “non-tariff barriers to trade” (NTBs) which inhibit profits. Proponents of TTIP say that 80% of the supposed benefits of the deal will come from getting rid of these NTBs.

Our new briefing shows how regulatory cooperation presents a unique opportunity for corporate interests on both sides of the Atlantic to lobby for these standards to be brought down to the lowest common denominator. Many of the major corporate interests pushing for TTIP actually think this, not ISDS, is the aspect of the deal that is most important to them. Some supporters of TTIP have even gone as far as to advocate sacrificing ISDS to protect regulatory cooperation. Corporate lobbyists have expressed the hope that regulatory cooperation will make them so powerful that it will allow them to effectively “co-write” regulation with policy-makers.

Proponents of TTIP say all of this is just scaremongering, but the reality is that this stuff is already happening. The mere prospect of the deal is already weakening certain EU standards. For example, US officials successfully used the prospect of TTIP to bully the EU into abandoning plans to ban 31 dangerous pesticides with ingredients that have been shown to cause cancer and infertility. A similar fate befell regulations around the treatment of beef with lactic acid. This was banned in Europe because of fears that the procedure was being used to conceal unhygienic practices. The ban was repealed by MEPs in a Parliamentary Committee after EU Commission officials openly suggested TTIP negotiations would be threatened if the ban wasn't lifted.