Quote

There has to be a drive to make the U.K. competitive in the motorcar industry or in the engineering industry. To do that, you have to give attention to the manufacturing sector.

U.K. companies are in very international and very competitive markets. If you look at PC penetration in the U.K., it is very similar to the United States market.

The economic situation, the high cost of undertaking manufacturing, the supply chain - which is, by the way, dying out also as manufacturing undergoes hardship - make the U.K. not the first place you would look at to make a manufacturing investment.

We recognised from the start that we couldn't just stay in the U.K. and Ireland markets. We have always looked to the products of the future. I've always said, 'If you don't innovate, you'll evaporate.'

A national investment bank can invest to provide us with the foundations of shared and ecologically sustainable growth: renewing the U.K.'s energy, digital and transport infrastructure which lags woefully behind other major economies.

I hope there will be continued U.K. investment in human spaceflight to enable Britain to benefit from space travel in the longer term and that many more Britons - women and men - will travel into space.

London has a centrifugal pull on talent, investment and business from the rest of Europe and the world. That brings benefits to the broader U.K. economy.

It is very important that people see there is a bright future, and we can re-engage that entrepreneurial spirit of the trading nation for which the U.K. has always been known - that dynamic, creative spirit.

You know the illusion of the cheap money is over and now Britain has to go out there and graft and earn its way and create wealth and prosperity in a very competitive world.

Like university science departments, the arts have shown how they can earn their way and point to an economically newborn future for this country. They show that the U.K. could be a prime provider of imaginative riches and intellectual adventure, which I think are the two great prizes of the 21st century.