 So, Rodin told you at the beginning that there was a little ray of hope, and it was the UK, and I was going to tell you about it. Well, I'm sorry. And also, I guess, some of you came here hoping you were going to learn something. Well, again, I'm sorry, because we actually just don't know how Brexit is going to turn out. I actually had planned to talk about rather smaller and parochial matters in the WTO context and the grand role of what role Britain might play in the WTO in 20 years' time. And to ask, essentially, what impact is Brexit going to have on the WTO and its operations over the next three or four years? But as I said, I don't know. We have no idea what form the government thinks Brexit should take if the government knows. And so in a sense, this is all largely speculation. So think about the shock. Britain leaves the EU, common market and the single market. Great shock. Huge shock in Britain. Not yet recognized. I suspect how large it is. So a moderately big shock for the EU, Britain's 15% of the EU, and it's a threat to the institutions. A real sort of wake-up call, if you like. But how large is this shock in terms of the world? It actually isn't huge in terms of the world. The IMF in solidarity with then British government shaved 1.1 or 0.2% of its growth rates for the UK over the next few years. But basically, the world is going to manage with Brexit as well as it managed without Brexit, with one exception. And that is if Brexit somehow starts to change behavior and break up the institutions. And the point I really want to make in this is if we're careful and we're sensible, by that I basically mean if the British government is careful and sensible, but with a bit of cooperation from our friends, the world certainly can survive this crisis for Britain perfectly well. If we're not careful, then indeed we could create quite a problem. So the sort of working assumption that I'm going to make is that Britain is indeed going to leave the European Customs Union and that it is indeed going to get leave or get thrown out of the single market. Essentially, if we look at the politics, it seems that the predominant view of the people who voted for Brexit is we must take control and we must control our borders. That means reduced migration. Taking control means that we want to be able to change something and if we're in the Customs Union, we can't have our own trade policy. If we're in the single market, we can't have our own regulations. And migration, the free movement of labour is one of the four principles on which the EU is predicated. And it seems very unlikely that the EU would allow any significant reduction in the free movement and yet still allow Britain to benefit from all the rest of what the single market can offer. So I think, frankly, we are going to be in a world where Britain is on its own as a trading nation. It will have trading relations. It will trade deals, the FTA is probably with Europe and with other countries. And it will be as it were sort of struggling to keep its place in some of the global value chains. So what changes in behaviour might this set of circumstances create? It is true that the world trading system, the WTO, will be much more important to Britain than it ever was. Britain has been quite a strong advocate actually of the WTO and a liberal trading order and has acted actually to move the EU in a rather more liberal direction on the whole. That's a bit of behaviour that quite possibly will change, which is that we might see the rest of Europe slipping back a little bit from some of their openness on trade. Now, I know my colleagues say it's not perfectly open, it is not perfectly open, but Europe is relatively open. What would it mean so far as behaviour for the British government, British economy is concerned? Well, it may be that we will see a more liberal, a more active, a more imaginative sort of trade policy emerging from Europe. We have created the post of Secretary of State for international trade. The poor man has nothing to do at the moment because he doesn't own trade policy, the EU owns it until we've actually left. So he's doubtless dreaming up all sorts of grand ideas and it's just possible we'll see the Brits out trying to negotiate free trade agreements with, say, China or India if the Indians could ever bring themselves to the table. Will Britain be more liberal itself? It's possible, but I wouldn't want to bet on it. The first reason is that the majority of people who voted for Brexit were essentially casting an anti-globalisation vote. Very, very difficult to get out there and sell them, huge liberalism, if that's actually what they thought they were going to avoid. But secondly, Britain has got to negotiate a whole pile of free trade agreements and when you go into sort of a bidding match, the thing you don't do is enter your pockets before you go into the room and have nothing to negotiate with. In other words, Britain is very proud of the fact, absurdly I think, but very proud of the fact that it's the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world. But if you are the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world, you have some negotiating leverage and so I don't think the British government is going to give that away unilaterally. The third reason to worry about whether Britain is going to be very liberal is we have already, and it's going to get worse, essentially a public finance crisis. And the idea that the Treasury is going to give up some taxes voluntarily even if the Department for International Trade wants them to is not hugely plausible. So my prediction, and this is entirely a prediction, is don't expect the British to be very liberal. Now, all of those things, as I said, if we are careful, we can live with it. The system can live with it. What if we're not careful? What's the issue that might sort of emerge if we have a lot of diplomatic bombasticness? We have some carelessness and bloody mindedness on either the British side or in the other side. And that is that it's just possible that unwinding the UK position from the EU position basically calls into question or disrupts entirely the regular business of the World Trade Organization. And one of the things which I think other people in the WTO should be thinking about is how you are going to cope with this or perhaps how you can head it off. The sort of process that we've got is that the UK is a member of the World Trade Organization. No doubt about that. It has a schedule. It happens to be headed up EU at the moment. And what we need to do is essentially to bring that schedule to a position where it's headed up the United Kingdom. A number of my colleagues argue that they can do this through a process in the WTO, which is known as rectification. And this is the sort of day-by-day changes to tariff schedules that go on all the time. You notice something wrong with them. You say, we never expected that this is what we had agreed to or you didn't expect that this is what we agreed to. We will change it. Erectification involves an announcement of a change. And then providing nobody challenges within three months, it is essentially agreed. If Britain were to impose exactly the same set of tariffs as it currently charges with the EU, maybe that would be a rectification. Maybe nobody would challenge. And maybe the UK would emerge with a proper, respectable tariff schedule. Sounds perfectly straightforward. But it's not quite as straightforward as that. The essential point is that if Britain is in a free trade area with the European Union, suddenly between Britain and the other members, the EU 27, there will be a border with rules of origin because free trade areas require you to prove origin and that's what we would have to do. And so, in fact, we are going to disrupt trade within Europe, sort of trade from third countries within Europe in two particular ways. One perfectly easy to conceptualize and that's the so-called Rotterdam effect. At present, Kenya sells its flowers into Rotterdam. They're then trans shipped to Britain. Put a border in the way, put some inspections in the way, a little bit of lack of cooperation and you're immediately faced with extra costs, possible delays, possibly obstructionism. We could probably get around that. You could probably negotiate something special for flowers but it's work, it's uncertainty. But there's also a much more potentially more important issue and that goes back to the global value chains that Faisal has mentioned. Rules of origin typically require that a particular proportion of the value of a good be created in terms of local output. Within the EU, so when we get into that situation, British inputs incorporated into the EU products will not count as EU inputs and therefore the EU might lose its access to other countries where it has a free trade agreement. That country's rule of origin says 60% of the input must be EU or maybe that was split 55% on the continent and 10% in Britain. All right, take the Brents out, the EU has lost its access, exactly the same for Britain. When these things come up, I mean they're irritating, they will be difficult and messy to manage because they're in detail, but essentially they raise the prospect that other members of the WTO will say, no, no, just changing the label on the same tariff schedule from EU to UK. So we've now got two schedules rather than one does not leave our WTO rights unaffected. Indeed, it is to our disadvantage and frankly, we think you the Brits or you the European Union need to be reducing your tariffs in compensation. We want an Article 28 renegotiation. That's our fine and dandy, 163 members of the WTO. Britain has got 40 trade negotiators at the moment. Where is that going to go? It's gonna be a real mess. Exactly the same issues actually pertaining to developing countries. Think about a country, at the moment, you can import a good into the UK under GSP, you can build it into something else and flog the thing in Europe, no tariffs, no inspections, no nothing, it's fine. But now put a border in the way, you can bring the same good into Britain, you can build it into the same final good and then you can take it to Europe to sell. Well, you've got a rule of origin to face and you've also potentially got a standards issue to face because the UK will no longer be part of the single market, it will no longer be bound to enforce exactly the same standards. And at the minimum, the European authorities will have the right to ask on the border, is this of a suitable standard? Uncertainty and so on. So for developing countries, even with GSP access, just dividing the two markets, changing no tariffs, no preference marginating, does not leave everything exactly the same. Two other gritty little problems that have been observed prior to Brexit actually by the Cognizantie is that there are a number of things where the EU has a single right, as it were, in the WTO and it has to be disaggregated. One is the tariff rate quotas on agricultural products where the EU had negotiated a single tariff rate quota or a lower tariff on a particular volume of imports for the EU as a whole, you've got to break that up. When it really matters, or potentially it really matters, how you break it up? Imagine at the moment a lot of imports are going into the EU, most of them, from a developing country, shall we say, most of them get the low tariff, of course they're within the tariff rate quota. Now suppose the EU and its great generation gives the whole of that tariff rate quota to the UK, our country does an export to the UK, but all its exports into the EU now face the higher tariff. So Britain and the UK have got to, sorry, Britain and Europe have got to work that out in a way that doesn't irritate too many people so there are not too many complaints. The third area is the right to agricultural subsidies which is limited by the aggregate measure of support, the AMS, we've got to break it up. Now all of these things are nasty, gritty, and I think to be honest, no one is thinking about them very much. They're not a death sentence on the system because the WTO is a very, very pragmatic organisation, it's not terribly hung up about legalities. For instance, with the aggregate measure of support, when the European Union enlarged in 2004 and 2007, the EU declared that because it was now larger, its right to agricultural subsidies, its AMS had gone up and it told its partners in the WTO that it thought this was the case, nobody said anything, it's neither been accepted nor rejected, but trade goes on. So in a sense, getting all the legalities in place is not necessary for trade to go on. But that presupposes that we all think we're on the same side but no one thinks they're getting a run deal from this. So it seems to me that forgetting about where Britain might be as the champion of a liberal order for 20 years from now, we can't really see two, three, four years ahead, but over the next two, three or four years, there is a massive diplomatic job to be done. Most of that resides in London. I won't tell you what I think of diplomats in London, but anyway, it resides in London. You just have had it. Oh dear, me and my mouth. Quite a lot of it, I guess, resides in Brussels, but a bit resides in other capitals. And so in a sense, the constructive message to take home is that every government, every member of the WTO, you know, we need to spend 10 minutes thinking about this. We need to decide are we gonna be very cooperative or are we gonna exploit this little bit of disruption with a view to getting an extra concession or two. But don't underestimate how destructive that could be to the fabric of the WTO unless you find a way of insulating the system from it. Thank you very much, Alan. Thank you.