Right, good afternoon to the select group of faithful who are in the wrong and to the nice people who have decided that they would be interested in joining us online.

A very warm welcome to all of you from Dr. Marcus Goering and myself, Eleanor Sharpton.

The way we thought we would run this in order to maximize involvement is that Marcus and I are going to do a couple of exchanges looking at some aspects of the topic.

And then we're going to open it up to questions and answers,

both for those in the room and for those online.

And I will hand over to Marcus for the running of the technology

because I am a technologically challenged.

Now I should begin by saying that we are going to be talking about and concentrating on a

report by a group known as the group of 12, it's a Franco-German initiative, and the report is entitled sailing on high seas.

Speaking as a sailor, I've never thought that sailing on the high seas bit was the particularly

difficult bit. My experience is that the problems arise when you get a bit closer to the land.

That's the moment when you tend to run into promontories or

there are outlying shoals or you have to be able to calculate the rise at the fall of the tide.

Be it as it may, the title of the document is sailing on high seas and it is indeed a welcome

and ambitious addition to the discussion.

I should point out that the discussion has been going on for some time.

The bit that we're not talking about, so to seek, which is equally important,

is the whole process of the conference on the future of Europe,

which kicked off in July 2019.

And there were due the exchanges on that,

the European Parliament looked at it.

There was, of course, was actually a briefing

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