BRITISH NORTH AMERICAN COMMITTEE
London Meeting, 11 - 14 May 2000
THE TOAST TO THE HEADS OF STATE OF OUR THREE COUNTRIES
Remarks by the UK Co-chair
Sir John Daniel
My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen; BNAC friends:
It is a great privilege to be hosting you, as the UK co-chair of BNAC, at this first BNAC meeting of the 21st century, of the third millennium or, for the purists among you who think that neither of those start till next year, the first BNAC meeting of the year 2000.
The UK government has made its decision about when the new millennium starts and here we are in the principal celebration of that decision, the MilIennium Dome. I am particularly delighted that our dinner for this meeting is taking place in this great structure because, two years ago, when I was called on to do the UK country report at our meeting in Bath, I boasted that Britain was getting even with Canada and the US by finally building a structure large enough to be seen from outer space.
As you know there are only a few man-made structures that astronauts can see when they orbit the earth. China has its Great Wall. The United States has the Pentagon. Canada has the President’s House at the University of British Columbia – and now Britain has the Millennium Dome.
We have built this structure for maximum effect at the intersection of the zero meridian and the flight path into Heathrow airport from the East. This means that we shall now have recognisable landmarks on both approaches to Heathrow airport. You will, of course, recall the story of the American tourist who visited Windsor Castle and said it was a wonderful residence but he couldn’t understand why the Queen had built it right under the flight path into Heathrow.
May I, on your behalf, express our warm thanks to our hosts at the Dome this evening. Two of our members, Lord Simpson of Marconi and Sir Richard Evans of BAe Systems, are sponsoring our visit. Sadly, they themselves cannot be with us I know that you would like to thank them, through their representatives, Jeff Brooks and Peter McLoughlin, for a splendid evening.
I am sorry that we have given you so little time to visit the Dome, which makes for a very nice day out as Kristin and I found when we came here in January to check it out for you. It has been a controversial project in the UK, partly because the successive governments invested plenty of their own political capital in the Dome Project and partly because, as you know, the British have great difficulty coming to terms with success and good news of any kind. Some of the bad press is just spite on the part of a bunch of newspaper editors and media magnates who were kept waiting for a very long time at the security check when they were invited to the gala opening and New Year celebration here on the millennium eve.
Like all of you, I do a lot of public speaking but I find the after dinner genre particularly challenging. In my ears I always hear echoes of Dr Samuel Johnson’s remark that:
“One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thought.”
I became even more worried about that when I read the other day the remarkable statistic that 80% of US households do not own a corkscrew. However, looking around you do seem to know what you are drinking and you seem to be enjoying it.
As we heard yesterday in our three excellent country reports, the months since our last meeting in the lovely city of Vancouver been quite exceptionally interesting in our three countries. On the political front we have seen some striking contrasts. The conventional wisdom is that in the USA political parties have less influence on their members than they do in Canada and the UK. Yet the two US party machines have successfully seen off two candidates, McCain and Bradley, who seemed to strike a chord with both the US voters and observers overseas. So two somewhat conventional machine politicians are left to slug out the presidential election campaign while President Clinton retrains for a new career.
Here in Britain, where political parties are meant to be all powerful, they have proved impotent in the new political context created by devolution. In successive elections in Scotland, Wales, and most dramatically last week in London, Tony Blair’s New Labour party has signally failed to deliver the results it wanted. All of a sudden a government and a Prime Minister who were credited with consummate political skills look rather beleaguered. And the other British political parties aren’t doing much better.
The good news is that there is, of course, lots of good counsel from other politicians available to people in a tight corner like this. Churchill reminds us that “Sometimes doing your best is not enough, sometimes you must do what is required”. Or they can take the advice given by our former Prime Minister, John Major, who remarked:
“When you’ve got your back to the wall you must turn round and fight.”
Or there is the more radical model of the great African leader, Sekou Touré, who said,
“Two years ago at independence our country stood at the edge of the abyss. Since then we have taken a giant step forward.”
Meanwhile, politicians in both the UK and the US must envy the model of Canada, where the Liberal Party seems to have found the secret of parkingitself on the middle ground of politics in perpetuity and delivering to the people a quality of life that places Canada at the top of the UN rankings year after year. The opposition parties there struggle to regain a national constituency from sea to sea to sea.
These recent months have also been uniquely interesting on the economic front. We have had a new economy. In February I was privileged to be invited to address all the US Governors at the winter meeting of the National Governors Association, on higher education in the new economy. It was all very exciting.
Today after the stockmarket has wobbled a bit, people seem less ready to assert that all the old laws of economics have been repealed. The dot.com phenomenon has been both thrilling and poignant. Before Christmas an aggressive new American dot.com was threatening to buy the Open University outright if we didn’t do business with it; two weeks ago I got a rather sad e-mail saying all their plans for development had been put on hold.
The dot.com roller coaster reminds me of that notice in the doctor’s office which said:
“The first year of life is the most dangerous”
And underneath it someone had written:
“Yes, but remember that the last one has its hazards too!”
We’ve also seen globalisation continue with the merger of the Frankfurt and London stockmarkets, the closer integration of the markets in Canada and the establishment of a branch of the NASDAQ in Montreal.
We’ve also had the excitement, if you can call it that, of the Seattle meeting of the WTO, the Washington meeting of the IMF, and the anti-capitalist riots in London two weeks ago. The sentiments behind these manifestations are matters of interest and concern to BNAC and it seems very timely that we have set up our new working group on the Evolving Relations between NGOs and Corporations.
BNAC members of many years standing often say that BNAC is most effective when there is a clear and present danger to some of the values we hold dear, especially democracy, transparency, open markets, free trade and multi-lateral cooperation. This seems to be such a time of threat for some of these values. I am committed to working with our US co-chair, Bob Rogers, and the Canadian chairman of the Executive Committee, Ron Osborne, to make BNAC effective in this context. I hope that you are finding this London meeting a useful contribution to your thinking and understanding of some of the contemporary issues.
It is now my most pleasant duty to ask you to rise for the toast to the heads of state of our three countries.
I give you The Queen.
I give you The President.