mr president i address my remarks to the president-in-office of the council
president sarkozy it was your own energy dynamism and initiative that sent you off to georgia and russia to try and broker a deal
you did it off your own bat
you were not acting on behalf of the european union
it is a delusion if anybody in this place thinks you were
there had been no council meeting there was no resolution and there was no mandate
you did it as the french president and well done to you
however if you are proposing that that is the model on which we should decide our foreign affairs in the future the idea that a permanent president or a permanent foreign minister decides on the hoof what the foreign policy of all of us should be and goes off and does this without reference to national governments and national parliaments the answer has to be no thank you very much indeed
as far as the financial crisis is concerned i am delighted that your original plan that everybody should club their money together in the middle fell to pieces
it was a good thing that the irish greeks and germans went off and acted in their own national interests
what happened at the summit was more a case of nation states agreeing with each other which is fine and which i am happy with
i have not heard anybody today recognise that this financial crisis is as much as anything else a failure of regulation
we have not had a lack of regulation out of the financial services action plan for the last ten years we have had a blizzard of regulation
it has damaged the competitiveness of places like london and it has not protected a single investor
so please more regulation is not the answer
we need to rethink what we have been doing
i think we need to start acting in our own national interest
the fact that our banks cannot pay dividends for the next five years whereas the swiss banks can is something that proves that if you have the flexibility and adaptability of being outside the european union you can weather financial crises far better than being stuck in the middle
