[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] So I said say.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the 2016 time of the lecture at Lincoln College and Oxford University.
It's a pleasure to see so many of you here this afternoon, and an even greater pleasure to welcome.
Baroness Williams of Crosby, Baroness Williams started her distinguished career when she was elected in 1964 as the Labour MP for Hitchin.
Prior to that, she had studied here at Somerville College, and then went on a Fulbright Scholarship to the US to postgraduate study.
As she rose very rapidly through the ranks of the Labour Party to become Shadow Home Secretary,
and in Harold Wilson's government assumed a ministerial position, first as the minister for, I think, prices and consumer protection.
Um, and then secondly, as Secretary of State for education.
And in 1981, unhappy with the women's anti Europe anti European sentiment in parts of the Labour Party,
Baroness Williams formed uh was a founder and the first MP for the SDP,
the Social Democratic Party, um and was elected as its first female MP to Parliament um in uh 87.
She uh, left Parliament and went off to become an academic in uh, beneath uh, um,
the Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University, um, where she, uh, um, lectured on elective politics.
Um, she was elected as a sent to the House of Lords as a life here, uh, in the 1990s and has only recently stepped down from that position.
Um, most people retire from their, their full time job in order to, uh, put their feet up.
But I understand that Baroness Williams has done so in order to devote herself more single mindedly to, uh, the Brexit debate.
Uh, The Guardian said recently that that one unbroken thread runs throughout the whole of Williams political life, and that is Europe.
In 1971, Williams voted with 68 rebel Labour MPs, uh, with Edward Heath's government to take Britain into the European Union,
and in 1975 she was a leader of the campaign for Britain to remain in Europe, uh, in the first European referendum.
Uh, I think no one has fought harder and longer for Britain's membership of the European Union.
And we look forward very much to hearing your lecture.
And so afternoon, Baroness Williams, on the subject of European values and the value of being part of Europe.
Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.
Prince of all, how nice of you to say what you said. And thank you all for coming.
Um, let me say, what I'm going to do is to talk, um, a little bit, first of all,
about European values and how they have been shaped and formed in the recent, probably a century.
Then I'm going to talk about the Grisha links,
about the the various forces that have played together to create what one might begin to call a corpus of European values.
And then, given the situation we're all in. I'm going to turn over to the last ten days of the European referendum, uh, arguments,
and say something about the situation in which we find ourselves and talk a bit
about what we may now try to deal with among the choices that confront us.
But let me say two things. First of all. The first thing I want to say, first of all, is that there has been in my mind a tragedy in this referendum.
What was meant to be and should have been a referendum about the pros and cons of this country's relationship to Europe,
where we could have talked a bit about foreign affairs, about our relationships with Russia and other countries in the Eurasian continent,
where we could have talked to some extent about the huge challenges that confront us in the new post-industrial age.
We have, in fact, spent almost all the time in what one might describe as a lively and very bad tempered conversation about who should be the former,
the thought, the next leader of the Conservative Party. And I believe that to be deeply sad,
not because I don't agree that there should be a discussion about who should be the leader of the Conservative Party, but because, frankly,
we are facing some of the most serious existential questions this country's ever going
to face in this year and in the years to come that we have entered into this debate,
often with very opinionated positions, sometimes quarrelling and arguing about whether what we're hearing are factually correct or not.
What we haven't done as a country with a remarkable past and potentially a remarkable future,
is to discuss what that future might look like and what we should do with it.
And so I'm going to talk about that as well, because in this half an hour,
we have those things to look at as well as the things we've already looked at.
Let me begin by by saying something that all of you know, but it's worth remembering the week after next I should go to sleep.
Fall. Where is Thiepval? See it fall is the memorial to the people who lost their lives at the battle of the Somme.
And some of you who are historians will know that those losses were on a colossal scale.
Something like 32,000 men was killed on the very first day of the Somme, but it didn't end there.
It went on and on. Week after week after week, for something like nine weeks, leaving behind the blood soaked fields of France.
And that experience, that piece of history had a colossal influence on those who began to build the European Community,
as it then was not the European Union, but the European Community.
It had two great insights.
One was the sense of loss, which was shared throughout the continent of Europe and is still at the back of many people's minds even today.
But the second, and it's important to emphasise this, was a remarkable and absolute determination that this would never be allowed to happen again.
The men who drew up, and they were all men. European treaty documents shortly after the Second World War.
Having seen in the course of less than half a century two major world wars.
With thousands upon thousands of dead men and women as testimony to it.
Has this extraordinary political determination, this commitment that they should never let this happen again.
It was quite remarkable when one thinks about it.
The leading figures in Britain, in France and in Germany, which is very important, were part of this dedication and this commitment.
And so the very first thing to say about the European Union and the earlier European Community is that this is one of the driving factors in it all.
People wonder why there was something called the Coal and Steel community, which is where it all began back in 1951.
They sometimes forget that, of course, in those years.
We're now talking about 1939, the two great resources of war, the resources that fed war and sustained it were coal and steel.
When we look back at it from now, it all seems a long time ago,
but without control of coal and steel, you could not fight a war, and certainly not a world war.
And what mattered about that was that what happened was that they were, in effect, super nationalised.
They came under the control of all the countries that were part of the coal and steel community,
and that meant that they were governed, controlled and directed with an international goal rather than a national goal in mind.
They developed, as you probably know, on to what became the beginning of the European Community not only coal and steel, but trade in goods.
Not at that time a single market, but the beginning of the breaking down of the various restraints and restrictions that govern trade.
And they moved on through the 1960s to gradually developing political,
economic and cultural elements in themselves, but always, always to all this time.
There's 30 years from 1945 through to 1975, there was this passionate sense of what the direction of all this was going to be.
If we then step a bit further forward by the time we get to the mid 1970s, as most of you will know,
and Mrs. Thatcher was on her way to power become leader of the Conservative Party,
she was asked by that great, uh, community servant, Jack the Lord, what the way forward might be to greater integration.
But in a way, somebody accepted to Mrs. Thatcher, who was not an enthusiast for political integration,
and it was Mrs. Thatcher who essentially offered Jack to law the choice between if he wished to go ahead to greater integration,
doing it by the economic roots and particular by the roots of the single market.
We have today got a single market, one which many businesses rate very highly.
But where it's worth saying that many people still don't realise that the single market is only halfway through its development.
If we were to move on to a single market in services, there would be probably a substantial increase in the prospects,
not least in terms of the profits to be made from having a single market which covers services as well as goods.
And the United Kingdom, of course, more than most, is a country which itself, as you will all know,
has switched steadily away from goods to services over the last 2030 years and
nowadays has a much stronger position in services than it does in goods somewhere,
it seems. The pity. The second thing that I want to talk about in respect of the development of the European Community, is that it has inevitably,
unnecessarily become more involved in international politics, more involved in international perceptions of how to live with other countries.
That was true earlier on, and I want to make the point very strongly.
Put made by long ago by Winston Churchill that the United Kingdom is in the extraordinarily fortunate position.
Of belonging to almost all his so-called concentric circles.
Winston Churchill pointed out that the extraordinary thing about the United Kingdom was it it belonged to the Commonwealth.
Belong to the European Community. Belong to the special relationship with the United States and most, in effect,
the only European country that had a presence in all these concentric circles and these concentric circles, Churchill said.
Long ago, back in the 1960s, not long before his death, where the centre of our unexpectedly great influence,
because we were a bridging country which was to be found involved in the creation of many
of these international organisations and in the relationship one had with the other.
And that's important because of course, some like the Commonwealth, interracial and Inter Geographic and others like the European Union itself,
would have a much more specific nature with very specific purposes in mind.
Let me then pause for a minute and say that to my mind.
One of the saddest things about this debate we have just been having is how little attention has been paid to our role in the concentric circles,
how little notice we take of the endless references to the fact that Commonwealth leaders, United States,
and of course, other European leaders keep spelling out their belief that we have an essential role to play.
There is quite a strong will or wish in some parts of this nation to abdicate from all that,
to pull out and not be any longer involved in the extraordinarily difficult questions that now confront us from the flow of refugees,
by way of the growing concern and indeed restlessness of Russia by way of the relations that we have with the Far East.
Let me turn from that to say a few words more about the European Union itself.
The values of Europe stem from two great intellectual flows, in my view.
Uh, and they are responsive to both. One of those flows is familiar to all of us.
It is what I might call the great liberal values that flow from the French Revolution on,
and are above all about individual liberty and to some extent, of course, the case of France references also to equality and fraternity.
But those values are also very clear from the American Constitution and from, in Britain, the gradual emergence of a philosophy of human rights,
which is what in part this lecture is about, where essentially based upon this concept of the individual and his or her significance.
Human rights must not be for one moment devalued in this the great strengths in D.the magic, if you like, of the European Covenant of Human Rights,
is that it is the only structure in the world where an individual can take his or her own state to the court for a decision throughout the world.
Structure of. International law. The position has almost always been that an individual can have a case with another individual.
He or she may have a case with a person in a community, or a trade union, or something of that kind.
But the ability to take your own states to a court, to decide whether your rights have been upheld or have been infringed,
is a crucial element in the whole flow of legal sense of the rule of law, of the survival of democratic protection for individuals.
And that was one of the two great flows that produced the situation with which we live today.
I will not for a moment hide from you my huge fear that we are now seeing our own covenant of human rights.
Originally signed in 1950 under considerable threat, with a growing move to say that the time has come for a specifically British Bill of rights.
And the time has come to abandon the European Covenant. Let us be very direct about that.
A British Bill of rights by the nature of its title. Could not be global.
Could not even be continent.
A British Bill of rights would be a strange, in my view, hangover from the Imperial age and wholly inappropriate to the modern world.
Let me next say a word or two, if I can, about some of the issues that the young generation is now confronting,
and they really swing around the whole concept of sovereignty.
It has become very popular, particularly for those in the leave group of of people to talk about the importance of sovereignty.
We'll pause for a minute and ask yourself what the sovereignty is all about.
How can you have a sovereign response to, for example, the problem of climate change?
I've recently come back from India. The temperature there at the time was 38.
Rising towards 40. Terrifying with each month that passed.
And the same is true of April in England. An increase in the average temperature month by month.
It is all happening much more quickly than we realise.
But you cannot have a sovereign response to the issue of climate change or the issue of resource running out.
These are not sovereign issues. These are global issues where it is.
The interrelationship between countries is crucial to what we do in January.
As many of you will know, particularly those of you who are involved in science.
There was a rather remarkable breakthrough in Paris at the famous climate conference that was chaired by the government of France,
chaired, if I may say so, brilliantly about the government of France.
The previous major conference on climate change was the one that was held in Copenhagen a year and a half ago.
It was a failure. Many people signed, many people made commitments.
Nobody did anything very much. And the Danes, who had committed themselves passionately to the climate change conference,
had to admit that they had got less than half of what they had hoped to get at Paris, thank God.
Much of that failure was saved. There were people signing into law various restrictions on the amount of of a kind of high carbon gas.
There is restrictions on the level of energy creation.
Various restrictions on individual need to conserve energy in individual houses in individual countries.
And it came out therefore as at least a reasonable compromise.
Not a perfect answer, no, but a reasonable compromise.
It was one that would not have been achieved if we tried to achieve a single sovereign outcome.
Because you cannot restrict pollution or the movement of climate one way or another across borders by a sovereign decision, the nature of nature,
or you have goals up to which you prefer to say is not to recognise restrictions
on borders that themselves cannot restrict pollution or changes in the climate.
That's how you one example of many.
I think what we're going to see in the next few decades is tremendous challenges, not just on climate, but on a whole range of other things.
I'll give you just two examples to be going on.
One is the astonishing courage and determination taken by the Commission or Commissioner for competition at the present time.
She is a Danish lady, and she has taken off after the great companies that laugh in the face of those who try to restrict evasion from taxation,
and said that they must live like other citizens and do what a citizens is demanded of them.
She has told us all in the last few days that she is going to insist that the Googles of this world and the various equivalents,
the Amazons and so on, by the by, Amazon is just about to spread into the whole of the retail industry very soon now.
She's made it quite clear that if they wish to operate as competitive companies,
she will expect them and the Commission will expect to pay a will same basis as every other company, including small and medium sized companies.
The taxation that is duly to be paid by them.
Now if you read the Financial Times, you will see this in article after article.
They point out that most nation states do not have the courage or the capacity to bring
the Googles and the Amazons of this world to the point where they have to obey the law,
just like you and I do.
And that's a very substantial step forward, because it means that what we're doing is bringing back into law and the rule of law.
Companies so large they consider these things don't apply to them.
Sovereignty is no longer only a national characteristic.
It's also very often nowadays, an economic characteristic, and one we have to consider in that light.
Let me then go on for just a moment more to talk a bit about foreign affairs.
I hope you will have that I have not made. Any personal attacks on anybody, and I do not intend to do so.
One of the things that most frightens me about this whole referendum campaign is that
the considerable cynicism in which elected politicians are held by the public and,
in my view, has had a lot to do with the awfulness of this campaign, grows out of the fact that the Queensberry Rules don't seem to apply anymore.
And that in turn, of course, leads to a deep cynicism on the part of the public towards those that they elect.
That deep cynicism, and it is very deep indeed, could destroy democracy relatively easily.
It is not a game for everyone to play, for the media to point out that politicians are a bunch of crooks.
And if you think that politicians are a bunch of crooks, you get a bunch of crooks to be all politicians.
It's as simple as that. So going back for a moment, then to what I was trying to say about the nature of all this in terms of democracy,
it is that we have to do take this very seriously.
We have, in my view, to address this country.
If we stay in and I'll come back to if we go out, we have to address how we make the European Community Marathon,
as it now is a more democratic place and it currently is.
Now, the funny thing is, if you believe in making the European Union more democratic than it currently is.
A very large part of the solution lies in the hands of guess what?
This country, which has refused to move in the direction of making it more democratic.
What do I mean? Give you an example. Why don't we agree that when we appoint a commissioner, he or she should appear before Parliament,
should answer questions from parliamentarians, what's known as advise and consent in American Senate?
Should then be chosen and selected only when he or she is able to carry a majority
of the Members of Parliament in the House of Commons for their appointment,
and should then be given in turn by Parliament.
In my view, at least one day a month where they answer questions about what's happening in the Commission and in the European Parliament,
in other words,
where they become accountable to MPs and suggests that every other country in the European Union that has got a commissioner, they all have.
Should we go through exactly the same process? Imagine how much more we, the country,
which knows less about the European Union than any other member who isn't in the very recent group of people who are joined from Eastern Europe,
but who have got very little knowledge of the European Union, would find that we had a great deal more.
Imagine if you turned on the BBC to listen to today in Parliament, and one day in every fortnight.
It was about today in the European Parliament.
We would all be very much wiser than we are, because it does actually suit governments, including our own, to not do too much about it.
So they can always blame the European Union. If something happens, it's unpopular.
You will know the famous example when it emerged that the decision not to charge any tariff on Chinese dumped steel
was the one that had been stopped by the United Kingdom government and had been proposed by the French government.
Not one Britain in ten knows that. They all assume that somehow the weakened European Union came along and stopped Port Talbot.
Being saved is rubbish and it's untrue, and I hope to God Port Talbot will be saved.
But we lived for day after day in the false impression that this was the case, and very few people, even today, know what the truth was.
Last of all, and let me turn to foreign affairs. This is one [INAUDIBLE] of a dangerous time to be destabilising the contents of Europe.
And that's exactly what is likely to happen. The Russians are still in part of Ukraine occupying it.
Occupying it because they haven't been told to leave. There is still great unease and great difficulty in the relationship between Russia and Ukraine,
and it's high time that the European Union got involved.
The extent of starting new talks to try to bring about a peaceful settlement,
which might involve the presence of a United Nations peacekeeping force between eastern Ukraine and the border of Russia.
That's the kind of thing we ought to be able to do. Second example, the European Union, not militarily but in terms of civic peace,
should pick up responsibility of some of the big issues that confront us,
which can only be dealt with by an outcome of long, careful patient negotiation.
Two examples. One. Some of you may have come across as I've done, and that has been extremely efficient dealing with the problem of privacy.
Sorry. Piracy in the Indian Ocean conducted by a group.
Not in this case of the United States, NATO,
but a group of European navies ensuring that ships have a peaceful passage around the very dangerous coast of Somalia.
And today, you can go back and take that route with relative safety.
A few months ago, it was very close to having to be closed down altogether.
That's a good example and another example, which to my mind is absolutely brilliant.
But that's partly because I spent a lot of my life looking into issues of nuclear proliferation.
Most what many of you will remember that astonishing divergence between what the United States
thought we should do about Iran and what the European Union thought it should do about Iran.
And the person who went out and talked and talked and talked.
Cathy Ashton, a Briton who was the Commissioner for Foreign affairs and eventually led to a
decision by Iran to cease the refinement at least for 15 years of nuclear weapons,
was a staggering contrast to the way that we dealt much earlier with the Iraq situation, with all the terrible, terrible events that have followed.
So don't underestimate the capacity of the European Union to deal with some of the key international matters of the time,
but to do so without carrying with them a legacy of empire or oppression, which makes them suspect among those they're trying to negotiate with.
I don't want to talk too long because I you have questions to ask, and I'll try to answer them as best I may.
But let me conclude with what I'm going to say about now, the two immediate crises that confront us, and they confront us next week.
The first of those is the possibility of a complete breakdown of the United Kingdom.
I do not know whether those who are in the leave campaign,
and some of them are highly intelligent men, think all men, but highly intelligent nonetheless.
I've never. I think it's fair to say, correct me if you think I'm wrong.
There has never been serious consideration given to the possibility of the end of the United Kingdom.
When you think about it, it's an extraordinary irony that a government that felt it had to hold a referendum.
Maybe the government presides over the end of the government of the country which it governs.
But it's more impossible. Why? Well, first, we all know the position on Scotland.
It may be delayed because once again, the oil price is conveniently fallen yet further,
and Scotland will find it very hard to keep together if there's no Barnett formula to assist it through hard economic times.
And I certainly don't wish that on my Scottish friends, the Scottish family, but it is a real possibility.
And that would mean, if it happens, that the Scottish National Party will be driven to some extent, certainly to demand a new referendum in Scotland.
If not immediately, then within a year or two, and even if not towards in a year or two.
Think for a moment about the investment consequences of simply not knowing whether the country into which you may invest is going to be independent,
or continue to be part of the United Kingdom. Those of you who are economists or financiers or bankers will be very much aware how damning that is,
how blighting it is to any long term attempt to try to invest in Scotland or any other country.
The second example,
which also is part of the possible Break-Up of the United Kingdom and in some ways an even more ironic and tragic one, is, of course,
what might happen to the Good Friday Agreement, for example,
which is famous worldwide of how to end an ancient historic battle which has involved many deaths and has blighted many lives.
There is today no border, as you probably know, between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
None at all. People are waved through by the police on both sides.
If the day after next week, we leave the United, the European Union.
One of the first things that has to happen is the reconstruction of a border.
It cannot be avoided because Britain is not a member of the Schengen borderless agreement.
And Ireland is. If you then have the end of that border free relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom.
One of the things that might happen, I hope to God it doesn't predict political,
would be the slow reawakening of the Talibans that are part of the terrorist movement on both sides.
There will be some who will say, now that we're no longer part of the same European Union,
it's time to set up once again our basic demands and our basic expectations as nationalist countries.
That would be not only a tragedy for Ireland, the Republic and the North.
It would be an absolute tragedy for Britain's huge achievement in managing to get those two countries not only to work together,
but to have a partnership in government of another remarkable kind.
Those of you who go to Ireland will know that the relationship that now exists is an altogether different kind than the one that was there 20,
30 years ago, when people like me or John Major or whoever you like to name walked in risk of their lives,
because at any moment they might be the targets of terrorism.
So bringing that in the possibility of the breakdown of the United Kingdom has led people like Prime Minister John Major to,
in a sense, cry out in agony for there to be a more thoughtful consideration that's given to what we should do now.
And the other thing I will leave you with is this if you close your eyes and think that tomorrow it's all over and we're out of the European Union.
Ask yourself the question, what is this going to look like?
What we do. How we start training again.
How we negotiate the whole structure on which all this is dependent.
And ask yourself most of all whether the inheritance from our grandparents and our parents.
Because like many of you, both my parents generation and the one before it lost many of their closest and dearest relatives.
Ask yourself whether and where we think they're going now.
And thank you for listening.