It's a European Union of economic failure of mass unemployment and of low growth.

I live with one foot in the sand and one in the snow. There's European egocentricity and the African opposite. I normally say that my African experience has made me a better European.

The land is ours. It's not European and we have taken it we have given it to the rightful people... Those of white extraction who happen to be in the country and are farming are welcome to do so but they must do so on the basis of equality.

People who have not done their research on me do not know that I am European born in Copenhagen Denmark to an Italian father from Napoli and a mother from Alabama who was singing opera and went to Europe met my dad fell in love and then moved back to Rome where I was raised between Rome and Hamburg.

Because with courage and conviction I believe we can deliver a more flexible adaptable and open European Union in which the interests and ambitions of all its members can be met.

Measured in time of transport and communication the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago.

People feel that the EU is a one-way process a great machine that sucks up decision-making from national parliaments to the European level until everything is decided by the EU. That needs to change.

The biggest danger to the European Union comes not from those who advocate change but from those who denounce new thinking as heresy. In its long history Europe has experience of heretics who turned out to have a point.

We have the character of an island nation: independent forthright passionate in defence of our sovereignty. We can no more change this British sensibility than we can drain the English Channel. And because of this sensibility we come to the European Union with a frame of mind that is more practical than emotional.

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible at least on the scale it occurred.