I was not involved in the preparation of the UNCITRAL Model Law, and so I feel I am qualified to say – that which hardly needs saying – the UNCITRAL Model Law is a tour de force. It stands as the conclusion of years of hard work by dedicated and skilled people who have laboured to create a harmonised framework of law within which may exist the array of tribunals, arbitral institutions, arbitrators' rules etc which confront and bewilder any businessman contemplating an arbitration clause in an international agreement. My task now is to consider the attitudes of commercial people involved in international commerce and trade towards the Model Law and whether it meets their needs. However before doing so I feel that it is relevant to preface my remarks with some brief account of my credentials to comment on this issue. Of course I do nor pretend to speak on behalf of everyone engaged in commerce, but my remarks are tempered by some long experience of international business and trading over the last forty years linked with service on the Panel of Arbitrators of the London Rubber Trade Association which I joined in 1954. Nevertheless I came to the Law and to the international oil business relatively late in my career and to arbitration in the broader international sense later still. I have to say at the start that enquiries I have made amongst my old friends in the City of London and the Markets indicate some hostility to the changes the Model Law would bring to the kind of arbitration they employ for private resolution of dispute.1 This is not so surprising. Their system has long been known as ‘London Arbitration’. It involves submission to English Law in the governance of the substance of the dispute, the …