 Llyfridog, sy'n gallu'n ddiwedd yn gweithio i gyd yn ddigwydd. Mae'n ddiddordeb yn gallu'n gweithio. Mae'n gallu'n gweithio i gael ymgyrchynedd yn ymgyrch yn gweithio, oherwydd Darryl Ffydds Gaelol yn ddiddordeb fel hwnnw i ddim yn gweithio i gynhyrch. Fy nid oedd eisiau ei fod yn ymgyrch yn ymwneud o'r gweithiwn. Felly gweld yn gweithio i'r gweithio i gael. Felly, mae'n gweithio i gael. The Liberal Democrat in the Foreign Office. We are a coalition government in London, a very unusual thing for the British, which some politicians and some media in Britain are still finding it difficult to adjust to. This means I spent a lot of my time inside government negotiating on coalition issues because the heaviest bit of my portfolio is in foreign policy. Because Europe is one of the more difficult bits within the coalition, I spend more time on Europe than anything else. In particular, I'm the Liberal Democrat minister on the little committee which oversees the EU balance of competencies exercise in which we are working through some 33 papers over two years looking in detail at aspects of Britain's engagement with the European Union and asking the question, sending out for submissions for evidence, is the current relationship between Britain and the European Union in your area to your advantage or to your disadvantage? Are you happy with the current extension of European competencies or do you think there should be less or more? Yesterday afternoon for my weekend reading, I received draft papers on civil justice, transport, environment and climate change and culture, media and sport on which we will be negotiating next Wednesday, so that's the end of my weekend off. In the first round in July, we published papers on the single market on foreign policy including defence, on development assistance, probably the most positive paper we've had so far, the European Union does extremely well in terms of multilateral assistance and certainly follows along with Britain's objectives. A good paper on health, I have to say working through these, I reached the point of thinking, I used to think I understood how the European Union worked but there were all these details that I had never quite understood before. Pharmaceutical regulation and the interest of the pharmaceutical industry, for example, are things that I had not previously thought I needed to know about. There was a paper on taxation which the British Treasury has deeply resisted opening up questions about EU competence in tax. I'm told this is of some interest to the Irish as well, and on animal health and welfare, quite an interesting paper because the first draft of the paper which came through from the officials in our department for environment, food and rural affairs carried the implicit assumption that the British national interest is represented by the food processing industry and farmers. I and others had to point out that a lot of their evidence had come in from the British animal health lobby and the British animal health lobby has had a great deal to do with the extension of European regulation and animal health and welfare. I suspect the European Union would not have got as far as it has in regulations on battery hands, on the transport of live animals and there is other things. It hadn't been for all those people in Britain who care passionately about that subject. As you well know, the British care far more about animal welfare than they do about human welfare. The English do. My message to you today is that Britain is not leaving the European Union. You should not believe everything which you read in the right wing British press. In January, David Cameron, our Prime Minister, made a speech in which he started from the declaration that European community membership, continuing membership is in Britain's national interest and then went on to spell out a programme of multilateral reforms of the European Union. I'll come on to that later, which would make it more comfortable for Britain to remain a fully engaged member of the European Union and will also make it easier for our government and for other national governments to persuade their publics that European Union membership is in the national interest. The second message I want to make to you is Britain is no longer sadly an exception in the European Union. The growth of national scepticism about the European Union is evident in France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Austria and many other countries as well. We all of us face a shared problem of how we persuade our publics, particularly the older generation amongst our publics, the ones who vote most frequently, that European integration, international cooperation is heavily in our respective national interests. That's why democratic legitimacy is one of the high issues on our programme. The leader of my party, the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, made a speech last week in which he went a good deal further than our Conservative partners were able to do and declared that in next year's European elections we will be the party of in, in other words the party which argues the case for staying in the European Union. Part of the difficulty I know in following the British debate is that everyone else reads the British newspapers or the English newspapers and if you read some of the English newspapers you get the idea that we are just about to leave, we are absolutely infuriated by Brussels regulations and the last thing we want to do is to stay in. Let me just remind you for any of you who have seen the Daily Mail recently of how self-conflicting these arguments can become. Last Tuesday the London Daily Mail had its main story, main front page headline, how the European Court of Human Rights was undermining English common law and we should without question now leave. On Wednesday afternoon the newspapers which are resisting the proposed royal charter on press regulation, that's say the telegraph, the mail and the news corporation, Murdoch Press announced they are going to appeal to the European Court for judicial review against the proposed royal charter. Now that shows a degree of incoherent which I rather like. The British debate is really on two levels. There is the detailed debate sort of issue by issue which is a reason debate as we are seeing in the balance and competencies review and we've had so far getting on for a thousand submissions from various interested groups and expert groups to the review. Which is talking about where our national interests lie in detail, where there are problems, where we'd like to see either less or more European regulation. Alongside that there is a fundamentally different debate which is emotional, passionate and in many ways irrational. It's about sovereignty, independence, what sort of country we are, about as it were the betrayal of Britain. They actually mean England always. This is English nationalism in all sorts of ways and about the continent as a threat and bustles as a conspiracy and these two different approaches are reflected in the different interpretations of how Britain's future relationship with the European Union should be defined. If you believe that we need to look case by case issue by issue in continuing negotiations with like-minded governments then of course you wish to pursue a reform agenda which is a multilateral agenda with others in which you may perhaps want the European Union to do more in some areas and less in others. When Nick Clegg, the leader of my party, was a European MP, he published a pamphlet. This is now some time ago in which he said that what the European Union should do is to do less, better to be involved in fewer detailed areas but to focus more effectively on the areas which are most important. This is a constructive multilateral approach and as I say the balance of consciousness review is absolutely part of that. The coalition government has built like-minded groups of other governments on a range of particular issues and we hope to continue to do so on other issues as they are to come. For those who are emotionally attached to the idea of reasserting English independence then it's a demand for unilateral repatriation, 27 against one or rather one against 27, with the expectation of course that it may well fail and with demands for a referendum as soon as possible acting as code for saying we really want to move towards the exit. This is to some extent nostalgia for an England which used to be more influential, which was able to tell Germany what to do, which was white, which had a standing in the world which we perhaps no longer have. If you look at those who are closely involved there are elements of an English Tea Party about this. Those who believe that the European Union is a conspiracy against the United Kingdom also believe that climate change isn't happening and that is also an elite conspiracy that taxes should be cut without explaining where expenditure will be cut. So it's a syndrome if you like in all sorts of ways and again this is not uniquely British. The Dutch right wing party, the National Front in France at elsewhere have similar conspiracy theories about the world and when I read in my morning newspaper this morning that the Front National in France is now trying to build an international of nationalist parties. That seems to be to me the most wonderful contradiction in terms. We'll hate you if you hate us in comparison then we can all cooperate together. It is remarkable in all of this how little attention is paid in the London-centred debate either to the possibility of Scots independence which would of course deeply affect the future of the United Kingdom and opposition in the world as such. Or to the implications of the reassertion of this sort of British illusory independence for our relations with Ireland, North and South. That needs bringing up much more actively in the British debate and I would encourage you all on all occasions that are open to you to say that to your British colleagues and interlocutors. That Ireland has a major stake in the British debate. That those who are arguing for a British exit have not thought through the implications for the relations with the rest of the British isles and that it is time that they did so. The idea that we will somehow reassert English independence if we leave the European Union is of course a little bit of odds with what British government is actually doing at the present moment which is asking for the Chinese to invest more in London and Liverpool trying to persuade the Indians to come in more etc. So we are deeply dependent on the outside world and indeed some of the foreign direct investors in Britain have intervened to say that the British need to recognise that there are economic interests at stake. In terms of British party politics we therefore have a divided Conservative party. UKIP as the right wing populist party, probably very popular for the protest vote therefore possibly going to do very well in next year's European elections. We don't know. My party committed to being the anti-UKIP party in next year's elections and a Labour party which at the present moment is silent on the European issue. And he did not mention your batall during their most recent party conference. That brings us back to the issue. So what is the British debate? What is the British set of proposals for EU reform? That starts with the issue of flexibility, how we adjust to an EU which is now an EU of 28 and therefore much more complex than the EU of 9 when the United Kingdom and Ireland joined, the EU of 12 with which we lived for many years thereafter. The diversity of an EU which is deeply divided between North and South, East and West, which countries and poor countries is part of the problem with which we struggle. Migration from within the European Union is a difficult issue in British politics at the present moment and it's anti-migration that drives support for UKIP even more than anti-Fulliners as it were, anti the German government or the French government. And the point next January when we will open under free movement of persons, a residence in Britain less conditionally to Bulgaria and Romania will be a delicate issue in the British political context which the right press will make a lot of fuss over. We welcome therefore the European Commission's refit agenda looking at the accumulated ackee and cutting out some of the unnecessary regulations which the European community has developed. We also resist that part of the cultural bustles which believes that the European Commission should always be producing new initiatives on almost every single subject. My favourite Commission proposal until the hairdressers directive came along was that the European Commission's directive on European sport colon the grass roots dimension because of course the European sport does have an EU dimension but grass roots is not part of that if you believe in proportionality and subsidiarity. The British have particular interests as a country outside the Eurozone in maintaining as coherent a single market as possible even though we recognise that Eurozone will need to take a number of additional measures on its own. Here we are particularly worried about the French approach in which the French government has many within it who wish the Eurozone to develop its own much more specific regulations possibly including a minimum wage has been spoken about at the European level, its own different taxation system etc. So keeping alongside the redefinition of how the Eurozone is managed and making sure that that does not adversely affect the single market is an important British objective. Alongside that we want to deepen the single market and the entire digital single market is one which we see as particularly important. Again because there are British interest at stake we have now some very lively new IT companies but of course also because e-commerce is developing rapidly across the European Union. Tax avoidance at e-commerce is one of the problems that also concerns all of us and we therefore wish to see European regulation extending into that area. We want to see the European Union become more competitive. Here is an area where Mrs Merkel and David Cameron see absolutely eye to eye that the European Union has got to resist. Again I am tempted to say the French government's view that the European Union if necessary needs to be more protectionist and to recognise that the European Union has to compete by innovation, by spending more money on research and by learning therefore how to compete with the Chinese and other Asian countries. The Prime Minister this week received a report on deregulation in the European Union. Now all of us have a view on deregulation. The regulations I like are very important, the regulations I don't like are unnecessary red tape as you all know. But it is clear to all of us and the commission is beginning to accept that lessening the burden of regulation on small business will be an enormous benefit to all countries across the EU. So the better regulation agenda, the less regulation agenda is again something which we will be pushing for. Let me come briefly on to the democratic accountability issue and then I am very happy to answer questions as far as I can. We have all learned painfully that there isn't a European demos that people don't feel European across 28 countries. It's very striking in Britain that we are in some ways the most European country. We have 300,000 French citizens living in the south east of England. We have probably 600,000 to 700,000 Poles. We have large numbers of Italians, Spanish etc. And we are also compared to our continental partners, astonishingly open in employment. My wife and I went to talk to Lord Green, the trade minister a few months ago and Helen was rattling away to his private secretary in French. He has a French private secretary working in the Foreign Office. I went, my daughter works in the Treasury. I went to give a presentation on the question, is there a European social model to a Treasury internal seminar last year? I am slightly horrified on arrival to discover that there was a Swedish member of the Treasury and a Spanish member of the Treasury sitting in the room. We are very open. If that's part of the contradiction of the British debate, you wouldn't get that in Berlin or in Paris or in Rome. So alongside this deep nationalism, there is also a remarkable internationalism in Britain. But the sense that Europe represents us and that we are well represented in Europe is not there, as it's not there in most other European countries. And we all have to recognise that the European Parliament doesn't really provide the accountability which we want. So we are arguing strongly using the terms of the Lisbon Treaty that national parliaments need to use those Lisbon Treaty arrangements, the yellow card intervening with the Commission, holding the European Commission and the Council of Ministers to account, and working with other national scrutiny committees of other national parliaments with better coordination through Brussels as a means of demonstrating to our national publics that national representative institutions are engaged in the evolution of European legislation and regulation. We think that's a good thing for Britain. We think it's also a good thing for a range of other countries. I was very glad to talk to the Irish European Scrutiny Committee this morning, which is fully engaged in this. Unlike some weeks ago when I was talking to the chair of the Scrutiny Committee of one of the East European members of the European Union and discovered that he wasn't quite sure what a yellow card was, and that the idea that a committee of a national parliament should disagree with its own government was not very clear inside his head. So we have some way to go, but we are working on building greater national democratic accountability for the European Union. And then, as I've already said, we are working also on our own balance of competencies exercise. There are parallel exercises more modest happening in other countries. Some of you will have seen the Dutch government's review of Dutch advantages and disadvantages inside the European Union. We have had informal conversations with some other governments on much the same ground. We hope that the review will therefore contribute to the broader European conversation about the future of Europe. And we're very happy to hear further comments from others across Europe on these issues in the next round of EU balance of competencies papers. There will be a paper on aspects of justice and home affairs, and I very much hope that some institutions in Ireland, perhaps even the IEA, may wish to contribute evidence on what the British decide on this matters to others, the common travel area after all being extremely important to us. Alongside this, the coalition government is engaging very actively, bilaterally with a range of other governments. Most of all with the German government, as we all recognise the German government is now key, I sit in a cabinet committee which meets every six months with our German counterparts. This is an absolute innovation for the British, but it's very useful. We have a sense we meet alternatively in Berlin, London, and we talk about our shared agenda. Similarly, we are actively engaged in conversations with a range of other states. I think that the Foreign Office team has probably visited more countries more often than any previous team in any previous government. We hope therefore that we are addressing the challenges that Europe currently faces, that we are staying fully engaged. We recognise that the European Union is changing, and that as the Eurozone comes out of its current crisis, Eurozone will also change, but we are engaged in continuing negotiations on how the European Union needs to respond to the challenges it currently faces. Thank you.