Well I think that people are slowly starting to surface in the real disasters
of the last couple of years and saying it seems to start getting worse
and now how are we going to make it get better.
And those businesses that are in Europe looking around them and saying
“Where do we go from here?” But after this unparalleled period
of economic slump I think people are looking around them are saying
“Is EU really giving us everything that we should have?”
in order to have another big market there alongside the United States
and of course now Asia.
Asia’s… and really hardly faulted through all this period.
The US of course had a very bad time and Europe did but now
you have other problems coming up in Europe,
particularly regarding how the Euro is going to sustain the difficulties
which it’s looking at the moment and how do we really benefit from
an economic area which is bigger than the US.
And both the US and Europe have to look at how they're going
to compete with Asia in general and China in particular and I think
those are some of the issues that will need to be addressed.
Frankly I don’t think it’s a question the new leadership,
I mean, whoever is there and I think that, you know,
we’re talking about this from a business point of view
and not from a political point of view.
I think the politicians need to understand that all the discussions
which have been going on about the treaty
and who does what and how and where and I see this
when I go to Brussels, there's far too much concentration
on that and far too little on the practicalities.
It’s all very well having lengthy discussions about the treaty
which only a very small group of aficionados really understand.
People outside are saying
“Excuse me, we have to make a living
and we have everybody else make a living,”
those are the things that we need to concentrate on.
I think it has to do the same as everybody else.
It has to do the same as what's happening in the United States.
It needs to deal with it in a coherent manner
and of course the EU is ideally placed to try to bring that coherence in
and we’re looking to see them do it.
In the UK, if I'm going to speak for the UK part of it for a moment,
we’re obviously well in the EU and have been for a long time
but we’re not in the Eurozone so we’re not subject to the same pressures
happening to countries that are in the Eurozone
but I think if you look more particularly at the EU
rather than just the Eurozone,
we have to see how we can better leverage off the opportunities
from all the parts of Europe
and I deliberately didn’t say “countries”
because I think from this point of view
we have to try and regard this as a single market.
I know that’s what we’re trying to do in Brussels for a long time
but still it could work together.
I suppose the simple callous answer would be
to get rid of all the bureaucrats
and then get on with running their businesses
but of course more seriously, you do need rules.
But I do feel when I get to Brussels that they’ve developed this
into a art form and as I was saying earlier,
I think if the – if those who are responsible for developing the EU
spend their time concentrating on how to develop it
and has rather less time on arguing about the niceties of
whatever the latest sort of regulations are the best it would be.
When you talk about regulation of course we were going to say
“Ah yes because we didn’t have regulation or adequate regulation
we got the mess we were in before”
and that is absolutely true but there's always the danger there
that you end up with more regulation.
We don’t want more regulation we want better regulation.
And if you look at the crisis we’ve been through,
the banks have gone through a terrible mess,
the insurance sector as a whole did very well,
didn’t get themselves in a mess, were world capitalized,
and […] the problems in AIG did not stem from the insurance business.
So our position is that the insurance sector generally,
and Lloyd’s in particular,
did very well and came through this in good shape
so if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.