The EU's plans and its impact on trade liberalisation
The Rt Hon. David Heathcoat-Amory MP
Dr Brian Hindley
Thank you very much. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than speaking at the Bruges Group, one of the very pioneering organisations to keep us free and self governing. I think there is a picture of your Honorary President on the front, and I am always humbled to speak anywhere near an image of the greatest peacetime Prime Minister we have had, certainly in my memory.
I have chosen this subject as a mention of what the EU is planning for us, really to emphasise that now it is them that make the decisions. Britain is rapidly becoming a vassal state and the big decisions about our future are really not made here any more. Indeed, I think the whole of British foreign policy is in a very low ebb at the minute. Our Middle East policy is largely made in Washington, and our European policy is made in Brussels. But one of the other striking features of certainly our European policy is that we really don't know what it is. I can tell you quite a lot about what the newly elected President of France thinks about the European Constitution and its prospects for revival, but I can't tell you very much about the British attitude because the last document issued by the Foreign Office on the subject was last December, before the German presidency of the EU. So all the negotiations taking place at the minute about whether and how to revive the European Constitution are taking place in secret, and they are also taking place without us, and by "us" I mean not just the public, but us as Members of Parliament, without us knowing what they are even aiming at in the Foreign Office.
On 1 May, this month, I asked at PM's questions if we could have a statement about what the Government is trying to do, and that was turned down flat by our titular Foreign Secretary, Mrs Margaret Beckett.
Now, I do think it is somewhat outrageous that key elements of our not just of course our foreign but also our domestic policy, because they are arguing about domestic powers that these should not be disclosed to Members of Parliament, or indeed to the public.
Two officials, two named officials, one from the Foreign Office and one from Downing Street, have been sent to Brussels to negotiate the Constitution and what to do with it, but outside that, the Prime Minister himself is engaged in a feverish round of negotiations. Even in the dying weeks of his prime ministership, he and others met the Dutch Prime Minister about this. He has met the President of the Commission about this. He has met Mrs Merkel about this, the Chancellor of Germany, and of course he very recently met Mr Sarkozy, the new President or soon to be President of France. So a great deal is happening on this. There's no grief there, it's just that we are not allowed to know what it is.
This is a contrast with the Convention on the Future of Europe, which the Chairman mentioned, which I served on as a British delegate. I was elected by my party in the House of Commons to be one of the two House of Commons representatives on that Convention, as you may recall, and of course I fought all the way through and voted against the draft constitution. But at least that did take place in public, at least I and other delegates could go back to their national parliaments and talk about it, describe what was happening, describe the ideas being put out and what British aims were, and so on. So there was a sense of perhaps not public involvement, but at least parliamentary ownership of the end result, even though I opposed it.
But that is not going to happen again. All the talk of openness, “the public like to know”, is just that, it is just talk. You are not allowed to know. And of course the other thing is, you are not allowed to vote either. They are not going to make that mistake again.
So I think we are in a serious position. A very, very big decision is being made without us knowing, and this is going on day to day. I am a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Commons, and we have been trying to get either the Foreign Secretary or the Minister for Europe, Geoff Hoon, to come to speak to our committee in the run up to the summit which is due next month, where all this will be decided, and he has until very recently refused. He has now agreed to come, one week before the summit, far too late to have any influence on the outcome. I think it is unlikely that our committee will accept that.
So that's where we are at in Parliament. It is actually a little bit better on the Continent. We now know more about what's happening from other Member States. It is perhaps irony, we pride ourselves, or used to, about our parliamentary democracy and how we had a vigorous debate, and visitors to the House of Commons are often very struck by the candid debates and statements and questions that are flowing backwards and forwards. None of this is true about what is going on, and I'm ashamed of that.
The German position is quite well known. Mrs Merkel has made no secret of her desire to revive, if not all of the European Constitution at least as much of it as possible. I am saddened by that, because I am actually a supporter of modern Germany, I'm not one who believes in a sort of giant conspiracy theory with the Germans. I think that they have paid their price for what they have done before, but they had to make the European Union work. This is their tragedy: they are condemned to try and make it work. They have nowhere else to go. I have never been a critic of modern Germany, but I am saddened that the Chancellor of Germany apparently is willing to ignore or try and override two democratic referendum results two years ago in France and Holland, clear results against the Constitution, but apparently of no consequence.
What Mrs Merkel has done, rather helpfully, is to send around a letter to all the heads of government very recently, because of course it is Germany that is conducting the negotiations on behalf of the European Union. It is in the form of a questionnaire, and you may be familiar with the document, but I have a copy here. Unfortunately she didn't send a copy to me but I got a copy - it was leaked. What is interesting about the questionnaire, as reported in the papers but I do have a copy of the actual document, is that it does reveal what is going on, so we can begin to piece together actually what is happening in these negotiations. Very revealingly, the first suggestion in the questionnaire is that we return to not a constitution but a treaty, and it preserves the single legal personality overcoming the pillar structure of the EU.
Now, the pillar structure, I remind you, is the intergovernmental part of the existing European Union, covering foreign affairs and criminal justice and policing. So the first suggestion is that those pillars, the intergovernmental part of the European Union, is formally collapsed and taken into the rest of it. That is quite an important advance.
That is the first suggestion, but I think even more revealingly, the second suggestion is that Part I of the Constitution is preserved, and I quote, "with the necessary presentational changes". What that just means is that Part I was really the guts of the constitution, it is where all the big changes, all the big advances were made. Parts II, III and IV, though they are long, they were essentially amendments to the existing treaties. Part I is really what the Constitution is about. So that is retained “with the necessary presentational changes”. It is a very, very revealing sentence.
The third suggestion, and here we really get quite candid, is that we use different terminology without changing the legal substance. You could hardly be clearer than that, could you? The game is to get as much as possible of the Constitution through while disguising it, while making presentational changes and without changing the legal substance.
Then the last idea she has, and she is referring here to the Charter of Fundamental Rights, is that "This is replaced by a short cross reference", but wait for it, "having the same legal value." So again, the suggestion is that you actually remove the whole text, with a cross reference that it has the same legal value.
I'm grateful to Mrs Merkel for actually describing what is going on, and it is maximum substance but minimum presentation. They are going to get away with as much as they can without telling us.
Then, of course, the other thing that is happening is that, as I mentioned, at all costs we must avoid having any more referendums. People can't be trusted, can they? The history of referendums in the European Union is quite an interesting one. I won't describe it in full, but just to remind you that occasionally they do stick. Only two member states have ever had referendums on whether to introduce the single currency, the Euro. Only two: Denmark and Sweden, and they both voted no. It tells you something about the single currency. That decision has not been overturned, because they were essentially domestic decisions.
In every other case "No" is never taken as a final answer; and Denmark, with the Maastricht Treaty and Ireland with the Nice Treaty, as you remember, they were told to try again, try a bit harder and next time they said yes. But nevertheless, despite that, I don't think they are ever going to be allowed them again. I may be wrong about Ireland and Denmark because both of those countries, by the terms of their own national constitutions, have to have referendums on any advance in treaty powers by the EU, but with those exceptions, the rest of the EU will not have them ever again, if the heads of government have their way. Certainly that is the view of the new President of France.
So that is the second game, no national referendum. Try and keep the whole thing just below the referendum threshold, and I'm afraid we can't rely on Ireland and Denmark, even if they did vote no, to hold the thing up.
So how are we going to get this thing through? They tend to fall back on an argument that is really beginning to show up in the British press, that, 'Well, okay, it's not a constitution, we are going to call it a treaty, and it is necessary to make the enlarged European Union of 27 work properly'. The only problem with that argument is that it was used before in the Convention on the Future of Europe. I was told frequently when I was at that convention that the reason we needed the constitution was that the rulebook for six founding members, plus the ones that had joined since then, simply wasn't appropriate for an enlarged Union, particularly one that was about to take on ten new members. The ten Eastern European countries plus Malta and Cyprus joined in 2003, and it was asserted that it was absolutely essential to have the Constitution because there would be a paralysis under the old existing treaties. But of course, those ten countries did join and there was no paralysis. Not only that, but two more countries have joined since then, on 1 January this year, Bulgaria and Rumania, and still no paralysis. In fact, a French organisation based in Paris has estimated that it takes 25% less time to agree things in the European Union now than it did before enlargement, so it has actually speeded up.
I have some way of checking that because I'm on the European Scrutiny Committee. I mentioned the Foreign Affairs Committee, but my other penance is to serve on the European Scrutiny Committee of the House of Commons, so we see what's happening a little bit upstream. We see the regulations in draft form, the directives, the European laws, on their way towards us, and I can tell you that there has been no letting up in the volume. So again, the idea that 27 countries wouldn't be able to agree anything, there would be permanent deadlock, is frankly untrue. In fact, I would say that the volume has increased.
On that Committee and we met this afternoon, we meet weekly we look at about 1,000 new documents coming from the European Union every year, and just as an aside, and this is not the main point of my argument but I will just share this with you, just as a sort of minor scandal, is that our Committee can do nothing to impede this flow. All we can do is decide whether the proposals from the EU are of sufficient importance to merit debate in another committee; but even if that other committee doesn't like them, there's nothing that can be done. So we don't have any powers but we do at least act as a kind of filter, a kind of warning, if you like, about some of the proposals coming our way, except that we meet ourselves in private. That's another scandal. We passed the motion in the last Parliament to meet in public during our deliberative sessions. Nothing was done.
So again, all the talk about openness, transparency, a public right to know, means nothing. Even other MPs, even my colleagues, cannot attend our weekly deliberative sessions when we go through all the documents. Two years ago, in fact, the Modernisation Committee recommended that this system wasn't working in the House of Commons, and recommended some quite radical changes. That committee, the Modernisation Committee, is actually chaired by the Leader of the House, so it is chaired by a cabinet minister, and they recommended changes. That was two years ago. Since then, nothing has happened.
So it's not just in Europe it is secretive, it is even things under our own control and, I'm ashamed to say this, even the House of Commons has not opened up its own procedures for scrutinising European Union legislation to the public, or even to other MPs. That is a scandal. There was no openness in Brussels, but I'm afraid in the House of Commons as well, we don't just have stealth taxes, we have stealth policy on Europe.
So what we do do and this is why I mentioned the European Scrutiny Committee what we can do is look at the other prong of what's happening. I mentioned what is going on to try and revive the European Constitution, or at least the substance of it, but the other thing that is happening, in parallel with that, is that measures in the Constitution are being implemented anyway by stretching the existing treaty articles and using the European Court of Justice, which is a pretty compliant organisation and usually allows that to happen.
So we have been looking in our committee at a European Union energy policy. There is no energy chapter in the present treaty. You can look in vain in the present treaties for a chapter, an article about energy. There was one in the constitution that hasn't passed, but they are still introducing now an energy policy by using other existing treaty articles on trade and industry or the environment, or whatever it may be, to give them what they want. A tourism policy: again, there was a tourist chapter in the constitution, not under the existing treaties. We are having that. A space one: Giscard was obsessed by space. I remember this: as President of the Convention, he was always talking about getting Europe into space, so again, it was written into the Constitution, powers to give Europe a space policy. It doesn't exist in the present treaty, but we are getting a European space policy anyway. So we are getting a lot of this by the back door.
Then there is a familiar procedure of using single market powers, that is, the powers it is actually technically Article 94 and 95 to create the single market in Europe. That is being now used to give the European Union powers over things which are only peripherally to do with the single market, like health. Because health services can be traded, "Ah ha", they say, "a European health policy". So by stretching the existing treaty, they can get what was in the constitution.
And then of course, perhaps the best examples of all of how are they are using Article 308, and I'm not going to go into a lot of details about this specific article, but I do just have to dwell a moment on Article 308. That is a so called ‘rubber article’, or perhaps that is a rather rude word for the ‘flexibility clause’, as it is sometimes known as, in polite company. The ‘flexibility clause’ is perhaps a better phrase than ‘rubber article’. But it comes to the same thing: it is a provision in the existing treaties which allows Council ministers to legislate in areas where there are no treaty powers, provided they are fulfilling an object of the treaty, however defined. But there is a catch for them, in that it has to be in the course of the operation of the common market.
So there you have it: they can by unanimity (they all have to agree) do what they like, they can override anything in the treaty, provided it fulfills one of the general aims of the European Union, but it is supposed to be in the operation of the common market. Well, let me tell you that they completely deleted in their mind that requirement that it has to be by the common market. For instance, using Article 308, they set out a European Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. When my committee, the European Scrutiny Committee, questioned whether it was proper to use that article, and what had it got to do with the common market, we were told, well, cuckoo land this, but surely you can't really have a single market if you have a lot of racism and xenophobia around. So that was good enough for them. And of course, there is nothing we can do about this, because the only people who can make a legal challenge to the European Court of Justice are, you have guessed it, the heads of Government, the European Council, who are using the article in the first place. So they are not going to take themselves to court. Meanwhile, the House of Commons can't take anyone to court, nor can you. So they get away with it.
As another example - we debated this a week or two ago - protection of critical infrastructure in the European Union: that is now defined as anything that they define as important which might be blown up or damaged in, say, a terrorist attack. That is now defined as European critical infrastructure and, according to the directive we debated, will come under the European Union. Again, we asked, what had an anti terrorism measure got to do with the common market? Well, they just said it had, and that was the end of it. So you can see how they are using the existing treaty powers to obtain their objectives by other means.
So, the project advances relentlessly. The European Union never retreats. It never really stops. If it meets an obstacle, like some obstinate electors in France and Holland who vote no, they find a way around it. They find a way around it to revive the constitution and they find a way around it to implement a lot of the elements in it by other means, in the way that I have described.
So I will just end by asking the question, what do we do about this? How do we stop it? Well, of course, a change of government would help, but that isn't going to happen immediately. So I think we have to resort to tactics. We have to have a referendum in this country. That is the only thing, in my view, that is going to stop this. But if I can make a suggestion, let us not exaggerate what is in what will be called a treaty. It is dangerous if we raise a lot of scares and exaggerations about what may be in the final document, and then may turn out not to be there. Indeed, this is a game that I think they will play. If I can just speculate, I think what will happen is that Blair, in the closing days of his premiership, will raise something on 21st / 22nd June. That will be the summit where it is decided. But actually, that will then proceed to an intergovernmental conference later in the year under presumably Prime Minister Brown, and he may be able to get out some of the things that we object to, and claim a great triumph.
So it is very important that we are sober and moderate in our claim. We don't need to exaggerate. We have the British public on our side and they know perfectly well what the game is. We must show that anything that they agree to in the intergovernmental conference or at the summit next month is a transfer of further powers from this country and all member states to the European Union, and that requires a referendum. They will say, well, simply having a permanent President and a European Prime Minister isn't an increase in power. Yes, it is. It certainly is. They will claim that a reference, not the whole thing but just a reference to the Charter of Fundamental Rights is not an advance in the European Union powers. Yes, it is. It will bind British judges. They will say that creating a single legal personality for the European Union isn't an increase in their powers. Yes, it is, because it collapses the intergovernmental pillars on foreign policy and justice and home affairs which I mentioned, and if you remove the intergovernmental elements of the European Union, everything is subjected to scrutiny by the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice. Everything becomes judiciable in a court in Luxembourg, so we lose the legal powers to stop anything. And of course, any advance in majority voting is a clear example of lesser powers. It simply means that we can be outvoted on a whole range of new issues, and there are 42 new majority voting provisions in the constitution. Even if they go down to 10 or 12, that is still a major advance on what we have at the minute. And they will say, 'Well, there was no referendum on Maastricht'. No, there wasn't, for quite a good reason: that the main Maastricht provision was the Euro, and John Major did promise a referendum on the Euro. The fact that nobody is advancing now - no thanks to them, but now nobody is advancing the case for British membership of the Euro means that we are not going to have a referendum on the Euro, but one was promised.
The main point is this: we haven't had a referendum in this country for 32 years. Meanwhile, we have had an accumulation of treaty changes and transfers of power and authority from here to Brussels, which make a referendum essential. If we don't have one, quite simply we will cease to be in any real sense self governing. That is a betrayal of everyone who has struggled through the centuries before us for parliamentary democracy and the rights of the public.
Finally, it is not my powers at stake here, it is yours. So you, and the Bruges Group I know, will play its part in insisting that whatever comes out of the summit next month, the British people are given a say.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for those remarks. It is a pleasure to be on this platform in front of you. It is a pleasure to be on the same platform as David. And as it happens, through some miracle, although trade policy and the European Constitutional Treaty may not seem to have much to do with one another, I am in fact also going to finish up talking about what they are planning for you on the international front.
First of all, let me start out by being I can't see any other word for it, I'm going to be a curmudgeon. I'm going to object to the title that I'm talking under. That is an unusual procedure, but I hope you will see my problem. The problem is with the word "collapse". The first problem I have with it is that the Dohar round of trade talks in the WTO has not actually collapsed. It hasn't finished. It's very unlikely but it is entirely possible that you could open your newspaper tomorrow and see a headline saying, 'EU offers major concessions on agriculture, Dohar agreement'. It is very unlikely, and indeed, I would have to eat many of the words I'm going to say this evening if that should happen, but it is legally possible. The Dohar round is still, in legal terms, continuing.
I have a second problem, however, with the word "collapse". Mostly when you talk about something collapsing - the Roman Empire 'collapses'. When you talk about something collapsing, it implies that there has been some past achievement, some past hope, some height from which whatever is collapsing can fall. I am myself not at all clear that that is an accurate description of the Dohar round. It started with some hope when the United States became enthusiastic about it, right at the beginning. I will come to that later on. But by and large, it staggered from crisis to crisis, never given much hope. Personally, I am not terribly surprised at this. To put it crudely, we have a contest between the World Trade Organisation, the WTO, and the Common Agricultural Policy, the CAP. Who do we expect to win in that context? I think if you were betting even money you would bet on the CAP. The EU is not going to give up the CAP, therefore the Dohar round was in trouble always. So, rather than "collapse", I prefer to have a less dramatic word: "expiry" maybe, or just abandoned.
But I want to make stronger propositions about the behaviour of the EU in the round. It is not simply that it was the WTO versus the CAP. My own belief, which I will try and flesh out in a moment, is that so far as the EU was concerned, the Dohar round was always a charade. There was never an intention on the part of the EU to substantially liberalise agricultural trade. The name of the game for the EU was to preserve as much as possible of the Common Agricultural Policy and blame the United States for whatever had to happen for that to occur, and that indeed is the way things are working out.
Now, I am not going to bore you with the detail of trade policy, but what I am going to do is to flip back to several of the headlines that have appeared in newspapers, and I am going to go back a fair way to start, and I hope I can give you some sense of why I am telling the story the way I just summarised it.
I am going to go back to 1993, the end of the Uruguay round, which as you may remember, was the last trade round that was actually under the auspices of the GATT, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the predecessor organisation to the WTO. It was indeed that round that created the WTO.
But I want to touch on two elements of the Uruguay round. The first was the outcome of the agricultural negotiations in the Uruguay round in which the United States and the EU were face to face trying for agreement and rather missing it. At the end of that process there was an agreement, and what the agreement said was that all WTO members should give up in agriculture the many long term barriers, quotas, all kinds of health regulations, all of the non tariff barriers that they maintained to impede agricultural trade, and substitute, for those barriers, tariffs. The EU agreed to that.
Then there was the actual process of converting non tariff barriers into tariff barriers, through a process that is referred to in WTO circles as "dirty tariffication". The reason it is talked about in those terms is because the EU, for example the same was true of the US and Japan etc., everybody everybody was allowed to make that conversion of non tariff barriers, quotas, into tariffs, without any check on how they were converting. So the EU, for example, gave up most of its non tariff barriers, and it asserted new levels of tariffs higher than the levels of tariffs that had been before, and there was absolutely no check whether this was a fair conversion from non tariff barriers to tariff barriers. Hence "dirty tariffication": dirty tariffication because it was very clear that the EU in fact stated tariffs that were way higher than were necessary to compensate for the non tariff barriers that it was giving up.
The second aspect of the Uruguay round which I want to touch on, and a United States response this situation, was that the Uruguay round contained a voting agenda, so called, and the voting agenda mandated negotiations on agriculture and on services - and on a string of other matters, but these were the two important ones. In other words, the Uruguay round said that before the end of year 2000, negotiations had to start on agriculture and services, and of course in those negotiations the EU would be the primary target.
Well, this happened in '93/94 - the Marrakech agreement was in '94 - and it didn't take very long for the penny to drop in the Commission. One of our own, Leon Brittan, started talking in '95/96, saying, "We have to have another trade round. We have to have something wider than this negotiation on agriculture and services". Nobody asked terribly hard at the time, "Why do we have to have this? Why don't we do what is mandated and talk about agricultural services?" The true answer, if anybody had said it, would have been that the EU had no intention of giving anything very substantial on agriculture, but that is what Sir Leon said. The EU pressed and pressed through the 1990s for a trade round, something much larger than just agriculture and services, something containing all kinds of other important matters. The problem is the Commission had a great deal of difficulty in finding other important matters to talk about. They added competition policy, agreements on competition policy, they added agreements on investment. Nobody was terribly impressed by these, but they were enough for the Commission at Seattle in 1999 to kick off. It said and I have actually seen the papers that allocated huge sums of money to videotaping the kick off of the first WTO trade round initiated by the European Union. You will remember, perhaps, what happened in Seattle. Whether you are interested in trade policy or not, you may remember the smoke and the tear gas and the riots, and the collapse of the start of that trade round, for which, one of the oddest things I have come across, the United States got the blame and the EU no blame whatsoever.
Well, the EU of course was trying to remove the focus from agriculture and it failed in the Millennium round, so the EU tried to revive the round, and here is another of those ironies. The United States was rather lukewarm on the idea of having another trade round. Then along came 9/11, and the United States was looking for a symbol of global unity, and here is the WTO with a ministerial meeting, and the possible start to trade talks, and the symbol of global unity became the Dohar round. That is the moment of hope that I referred to a while ago, the last real moment of hope in the Dohar round, I believe.
Well, again, the things you may remember from the newspapers, the Dohar round staggered on. It broke down at Cancun, developing countries walked out on the basis largely of agriculture. The EU was forced to drop its proposals for competition policy, investment, etc., etc., but still it carried on. It almost broke down in Hong Kong in 2005, and now is on the point of breakdown.
And I think that all of this, as I said, was a simple charade on the point of the EU. The EU never had any intention to negotiate seriously about agriculture. What it wanted was the Common Agriculture Policy saved and the United States to get the blame for that. And it may well achieve that in the United States and leading developing countries.
The Dohar round let's assume is over, it has finished, it has failed. Where now? This is where I match up with David's commentary on what are they planning for us now? I have no inside information on this, but two items of news recently passed across my eyes.
The first is that the European Union is offering virtually tariff and quota free access to its market by the 30 poorest countries in the WTO. You may think that is a good thing, and I think it is a good thing, but it's a poor substitute for a multilateral agreement on the same thing. What it is doing is giving the EU some reason to say, 'Look, we care about development. Yes, the Dohar round failed, but we care about development and look what we are doing'.
The second item of news: the Commission at the beginning of last month, at the beginning of April, offered virtually duty and quota free access to what are known as the APC states, the Africa, Pacific and Caribbean states, poor developing countries, former colonies of European powers. These items said the Commission is offering essential duty free access to these countries for everything. And again, I suspect that is for the Commission to say in part, 'Yes, we care about development (even though we are not going to give up the Common Agricultural Policy, which would be the greatest thing we could do for development)'.
Just as a footnote, a couple of days ago there was an amateur item in the Financial Times saying that the French Government - who else - was trying to force the Commission to drop its commitment. The French Government didn't like the idea that the 78 associated developing countries should have free access to EU agricultural markets, they thought that was much too far to go. But nevertheless, here is the Commission making this offer.
And the third item that I note is a quite distinct change of policy towards the negotiation of free trade areas. The Commission has recently started saying that it supports the multilateral system - yes, of course it does - but it is going to be much more active in the future in negotiating trade agreements with, for instance, India, South Africa, Latin America. All over the world it proposes to negotiate bilateral agreements about trade, and this in preference to a multilateral agreement on trade.
So now, what are the plans for this? Well, in external relations the European Union's strongest card, its trump card, is trade. It doesn't have military power, it has economic power. It has a huge market, and it has control over access to that market. And what it is going to use it for, I would judge on the basis of these little pieces of information, is to construct a world in which the EU has friends, bilateral partners, who are brought in by concessions on to the protected and very profitable EU agricultural market. So one aspect of what they are planning for is an EU with a substantial tail on developing countries, who are brought in in large part by the concessions in the agricultural market, but who in turn will follow EU ideas of development and legislation.
And this extends beyond former colonies. The APC states are former colonies of the European powers, but in free trade areas the EU's plans are virtually unlimited. It is going to extend its influence in the world and extend the EU way of doing things we have just heard about the EU way of doing things. It is going to extend this again through trade treaties, through using its trump card. We are going to see the EU way of doing things spreading across the world in a way that we have only seen in the immediate locality of the EU in the past, and that is what I think they are planning for us so far as trade and foreign policy is concerned.
Thank you very much.