 So good morning everybody, my name is Michael Collins and I'm the director general of the IIEA, the Institute of International and European Affairs here in Dublin. And I'm pleased to welcome you all to this morning's IIEA webinar. And we're absolutely delighted to be joined here this morning by William Hague, the right Honourable Lord Hague of Richmond, the former leader of the Conservative Party and former UK Foreign Secretary who has been of course generous enough to take some time out of the schedule to speak to us at this early hour this morning. So glad to see everybody and glad to see you William as well and William Hague will speak to us or William will speak to us for about 20 minutes or so. And then we'll go to the Q&A with our audience before concluding at around 8.45 if you've got questions, you're free to send them in at any stage during the event. And we'll take them then as soon as William has finished his presentation. And you'd be able to join the screen and join the discussion using the Q&A function as I said, which you should see on your screen. I reminded that today's presentation and the Q&A are both on the record. And please feel free also to join the discussion using the the handle the Twitter handle at IIEA. So William Hague served for 26 years in the British House of Commons until he stood down in 2015. And at that time he served in many very senior roles including leader of the House of Commons, but is best known as leader of the Conservative Party from 1997 to 2001 and first Secretary of State and Foreign Secretary from 2010 to 2014. He is now a member of the House of Lords and pursues a wide range of business and charitable activities. And he's also a well-known writer as a weekly columnist of the Daily Telegraph and a best-selling author of historical biographies. So with that William, the floor is yours. We look forward to hearing your presentation. Well thank you very much Michael and good morning everybody in Dublin or wherever you may be. It's a great pleasure to speak to you this morning and to do so under the auspices of this prestigious institute. I know you've had many distinguished speakers in recent times and I'm honored to join that list of speakers. And as a former Foreign Secretary, of course, I'm extremely conscious of the importance of close relations between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. For me one of the most memorable and exciting times I had as Foreign Secretary was accompanying Her Majesty the Queen to Ireland on the state visit in 2011. Very memorable not only for the wonderful warmth of the occasion but because it also set the seal on the work of so many people in the United Kingdom and in the Republic to bring our countries closer together over the last few decades. And with my old friend Ayman Gilmore in the Irish Labour Party at that time, I launched the British Irish Chamber of Commerce to try to expand our commercial ties and our work to promote our exports together. It was a bit of a different environment from the Brexit environment. At that time, of course, that's 2011, we didn't know what was coming in 2016. And when we could see what was coming, it was clear that it's felt some trouble for these relations. And one of the reasons that I am a longstanding Eurosceptic was nevertheless in favour of remaining in the European Union was because I did fear the consequences for Northern Ireland, that it could damage relations with our neighbours, including with Ireland, that it could threaten the position of Scotland within the United Kingdom. And so I was what some people called a remainosceptic in the referendum and I voted to stay in the European Union. And I should explain really, it's really a commentary of how much politics has changed that I was on when I was leader of the Conservative Party and leading the campaign against joining the Euro in the UK. I was really seen as the outer edge of Euroscepticism and I didn't change any of my views that I was against the Euro and closer integration in the EU, but in favour of being in the EU. But I somehow, I went from being the outer edge of Euroscepticism to being pragmatic centrist without moving. And that was because the whole political spectrum moved past me, leaving me in a quite different position. Now that's my claim to consistency in any case, but it does show how much politics changed in the intervening 20 years. Now Brexit, however much some of us might have been against it, is an established fact. Of course, we now have to make the best of it and the interests of all countries concerned. The negotiations are entering, presumably their final few weeks. And indeed, of course, the Prime Minister here has talked at times about this week being a deadline ahead of the European Council final few weeks for a free trade agreement to be agreed. Some people think there isn't that much difference between having a late, thin deal that is the best that might be in prospect now or having no deal. There is in fact a very big difference between those two things and no free trade deal will be very serious for certain industries, particularly for the car industry, particularly for agriculture, particularly for road haulage, very serious for parts of the UK economy, and indeed the Irish economy and very serious for our future relations as well with the rest of the European Union. It would be much better to be building in the coming years on an agreement than scrabbling to put together little bits of an agreement or arguing about the consequences of not having an agreement. And of course, it would be easier with a free trade agreement to implement the Northern Ireland protocol. It's very important that that is implemented by all sides in good faith. And on this issue, I've no doubt people listening to us will have been interested in the bringing forward of the internal market bill in the UK and the provision in two areas to as a government minister himself put it to break international law in a specific and limited way. This, in my view, was not a good idea to put it mildly. There are, I think there are six of us six living former leaders of the British Conservative Party and five of us have made clear our opposition to that idea. And I wrote a few weeks in my tele, a few weeks ago in my telegraph column about how much every day as foreign secretary, I relied on international law in so many ways in all our consular work and the upholding of treaties and freedom of navigation on the seas. The United Kingdom is a country that very much depends on international law. And so I've been pleased to see a retreat to some extent by British ministers including the acceptance of an amendment in the House of Commons that requires a further vote and of course this has still to be considered by the House of Lords and let us hope that a free trade agreement means that these proposed clauses become entirely superfluous. In order to get an agreement, it will be necessary for both sides to make some further moves. And I do think that on the vexed issue of fishing it will be necessary for the EU to be a bit more realistic. Often the UK has been accused of having it trying to have its cake and eating it. Well that is rather the case with fishing and the European Union, recognising that Britain is leaving the European Union but still trying to insist on exactly the same fishing rights forever. And I don't think that is realistic, it's not politically realistic in the UK. And so I do hope there's some movement on that in the coming days. On the other main issue of state aid and level playing field, I would be a little critical of both sides. It wouldn't be realistic to expect the UK, a sovereign state outside the EU to apply exactly the same rules as the EU on state aid determined by the EU. But it is realistic to expect the UK to have its own robust set of rules on state aid with a dispute resolution procedure. And so I think both sides have scoped to be more forward leaning, more constructive on that. And it was good to hear Britain's chief negotiator say that Britain would now be prepared to go further than in a normal free trade agreement, which he said a few days ago. So I very much hope that these issues can be resolved. I would add another area to future highly desirable cooperation between Britain and the EU, which is in the area of foreign policy. And I think that we have to remember that we live in a dangerous neighbourhood we sometimes underestimate that. We have great tensions in the eastern Mediterranean. We have many dangers in North Africa. The Western Balkans can always become a less stable place relations with Russia are very difficult. And it is very important for the UK and the European Union to be able to cooperate closely where they choose to do so in no way diluting their new autonomy from each other and freedom to act in foreign policy. But that freedom should often include coming to the same conclusions and working together. I was heavily involved in the negotiation of the of the Iran nuclear deal. The fact that the whole of the EU, including the UK impose the same sanctions was a powerful factor in making that deal possible. And it will continue to be necessary to have on some issues that degree of cooperation. Sometimes Britain's new autonomy in foreign policy will mean it leads the way and takes an earlier decision than the European Union on something as it just has done on sanctions on Belarus. But nevertheless, there is a need for some structure of cooperation in my view in the future. At the official level, not just occasional meetings between the British Foreign Secretary and the EU Foreign Affairs Council in order to make sure that when there is trouble in Mali or Central African Republic, as we've seen in recent years, that plans have already been shared, that policies have already been discussed in detail, which the UK and the European Union with its common security and defence policy could implement together. So I hope that that is something that can be added in the future to an agreement between the UK and the EU. And earlier this year when Brexit was happening, I set out what I thought to be four principles for the foreign policy of global Britain as the government thinks of it. One of them was that, that close and institutionalised cooperation with the European Union, not compulsory cooperation, but the capacity to have that cooperation. The second principle you might think ironically in terms of the discussion about international law was to be committed to a world based on law. And I think that it's even more important to re-emphasise that determination now. In fact, there are a few countries so invested in the maintenance of international law and agreements as the United Kingdom with the sixth largest economy in the world, and the largest financial centre and a couple of million of our citizens overseas at any one time in normal pre-COVID times. And so I think it's crucial for the UK to emphasise that theme. And I hope in doing so to re-energise important humanitarian initiatives such as the preventing sexual violence initiative that I launched when I was Foreign Secretary and others that may be similar to that. And to use the new merger of the foreign Commonwealth office with the Department for International Development here in London to show that such initiatives can be pursued even more coherently and effectively. In fact, that is really the test of whether it's worth having such a merger, whether it's possible to pursue major humanitarian and rule of law initiatives in a more effective way. My third principle was for the UK to be an advocate for facing up to global problems. And this, it has been for a long time and continues to be under Boris Johnson. If you look at the speech that he made at the United Nations, to the virtual United Nations General Assembly a few weeks ago, it reflected the generosity of this country, the huge role of this country in international affairs, announcing hundreds of millions of pounds extra for the World Health Organization at a time when the Trump administration is intending to pull out of that hundreds of millions of more, more for vaccine for rolling out vaccines across the developing world when they become available. So whatever we think about Brexit, it hasn't stopped us here in the UK being a generous and warm hearted nation playing a big role in international affairs and it mustn't stop that. We are a member of the UN Security Council. We are a recognized nuclear weapons state. We're in the G20 and the G7. We are going to be crucially the host of the COP26 now postponed for a year to a year from now. The most crucial meeting on climate change since the agreements at Paris, therefore possibly the most crucial ever. And so that's the third principle to be a strong advocate for facing up to those global issues. And then my fourth principle was to increase the ability of Western democracy to withstand future threats. And that means that democratic nations outside and beyond our traditional alliance structures like NATO need to be working together on coherent cyber security policies in alliances like NATO to be able to wage hybrid warfare or to counter hybrid warfare. These things mean working in close alignment with the United States at all times as the UK always does in its foreign and defence policies. And of course the question then arises and the final question I want to address before opening up to questions. How do we bring these various principles together that support for Western democracies and the facing up to global problems and the international rule of law and working with European nations on foreign and global issues? How do we bring that together and bring it bring those principles to bear on the biggest issue in international relations, which is the deteriorating relations between the United States and China, and the growth of a superpower rivalry between those two countries. And on that I hope that the approach of the United States to that rivalry will be consistent so that it will bring democracies together and that it will not be erratic. I think that if Joe Biden is elected and that of course is something we could come on to discuss the implications of more widely, his proposal to bring together a conference of democracies at an early stage is a good start in trying to construct such a policy. I think we also secondly have to understand that China for all its immense achievements in recent decades lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty is firmly committed to a different view of how society should be organised in the relationship between the state and the individual and how technology should be used in the light of that in human rights and therefore we have to say in a country like the UK we cannot be dependent for key technologies on China, however much we want to encourage trade and investment in many areas. So I think the decision that British government has made over Huawei's involvement in our 5G network is the correct one, and that there will be other decisions that have to be made in other technologies and industries about that. But that avoidance of dependence on China is one pillar of a China policy. There is another important pillar which recognises that we can't solve the global issues I talked about earlier without China and they can't solve them without us. And so it is important for Western democracies to seek a framework of cooperation on global issues with China. It is vital even in the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union managed to have frameworks of cooperation on arms control on the communication between them on the European countries did with Russia and the Helsinki agreements. So if we can do that in the Cold War, it's very, very important and it should be possible to do it in this case. We can't prevent future pandemics without working with China. We can't combat climate change without that. We can't ensure there are new vital arms control agreements in the world without that. We can't, we probably in the future can't stabilise the world financial system without that. And so I hope that the United Kingdom as a close ally of the United States will be a strong force for that twin pillar approach to China of avoiding dependence but also avoiding a complete breakdown into confrontation and inability to work together on crucial global issues. And the UK will remain, even after Brexit and all its consequences, one of the countries that can still move the dial in international affairs. And I hope it will seek to do so based on the four principles that I've just set out. Now that is, I said I would talk for 20 minutes and that is 20 minutes about Brexit and the free trade agreement and the future outlines of a UK foreign policy.