00:00Now, Baroness Catherine Ashton was the EU's foreign policy chief between 2009 and 2014.
00:07Just before that, she briefly served as the EU's trade commissioner
00:11and brokered a deal with the US following a long-standing dispute over beef exports.
00:17Our correspondent, Angela Skugins, caught up with Baroness Ashton yesterday
00:21and started by asking her what advice she'd have for the current EU trade chief, Maroshevkovic,
00:28as he seeks to salvage the EU's fraught trade deal with the US.
00:34What I would say is that it's really in the interests of business right across Europe,
00:39especially, to have some consistency and certainty about the markets they're dealing with.
00:45And we do have a president that sees the willingness of others to kind of talk to him about trade
00:53as both an important part of the conversation, but in a sense, almost to weaponise it,
00:59to make clear that if we don't do things that he thinks are really important,
01:04then we can't expect the benefits.
01:06And it's very transactional.
01:08And he's always been very clear as a president that he takes that view,
01:12that being a transactional president is the way that he wants to go forward.
01:16And I think that's really how Europe has to respond, or any country has to respond,
01:21is to try and work through that.
01:23It is very difficult because of the changing landscape.
01:28But in the end, this all comes down to the fact that with all that's happening,
01:33especially in the Middle East right now,
01:35we are moving to a time when there are additional issues globally
01:40that we're all going to have to grapple with.
01:42And so the more that we can work together on trade, the better.
01:45During your post as the EU's top diplomat, you negotiated with Iran
01:49to temporarily curb some of that country's nuclear activities for sanction relief.
01:55You clearly know how to speak to the Middle Eastern country diplomatically.
02:00How would you currently assess the way that Trump is speaking with Tehran
02:05and the tenor from the EU as well in particular?
02:08I think there's a different approach that's being taken.
02:10It's much more to raise the temperature rather than to lower it.
02:15And it's a bit of ensuring that there's a complete clarity about what could happen.
02:21So the critical thing seems to be to address the Straits of Hormuz
02:24and to find ways that you can get these open because of the impact that it's all having globally
02:31and actually then start to build up a negotiation that can resolve the conflict altogether.
02:37The UK could pay £1 billion to have greater access to the single market.
02:42We know that the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, wants to reset relations between the EU and the UK.
02:48But some critics have criticised this news, stating that it's merely pay to play.
02:54What do you make of this?
02:57There's no question that Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, and many of his colleagues have absolutely recognised
03:03that there is a need to get closer to the European Union and to Europe generally.
03:08That's partly because of the security and defence issues that we're confronted with,
03:14not least the war in Ukraine, but also the economic realities of the world in which we live.
03:20And I think all of this talk now about what money is, what should be done, how it would work,
03:26is really all about laying the groundwork for the summit, which is coming, I hope, in the next few months,
03:32where they can actually start to bed this down and make sense of it.
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