These past few weeks I have met dozens of businesses from across the United Kingdom. Pub and restaurant owners in Cornwall and Kent. Defence manufacturers in Belfast and Moray. Investment opportunities in Aberdeenshire and Port Talbot.
I have seen an economy that has the ingredients for success – a skilled and committed workforce, world-class universities, innovative businesses. You don’t hear Reform or the Conservatives talk of this success. They want you to believe the economy is broken. That our best days are behind us and that the path of decline is inevitable. I fundamentally reject that. It is not the country I see around us, and it is not the future I believe in. Britain’s economy is not broken, but I know that in recent years it has got stuck.
