Alastair Campbell

And that's put us in a difficult place.

We, we became reliant on,

Back from the EU accession countries back when Tony Blair was prime minister, we became overly reliant on relatively high skilled but relatively low paid labour.

So we didn't invest enough in the kind of technologies that would increase productivity.

And we over relied on the...

post-Cold War peace dividend.

And so there are lots of things there that we need to do to re-establish ourselves as a top-tier player.

I think it can be done, but it's going to take some fundamental resets in things like our tax and regulatory system.

We tax and regulate our businesses to such an extent.

They can't grow.

We punish growth.

When it happens, we're not investing in the right kind of defense.

We're not taking a lot of things as seriously as we should.

And I think these are recoverable because we've still, we're in the right time zone.

We've got a fantastic education system.

We've got some very, very good technologists.

London is the world's third largest AI country.

uh center but we are going to have to do some big things differently if we are going to maintain that power and and really easy to watch soft power people think diplomacy is soft power it's not it's hard power it's hard power with a smiley face and velvet gloves but it is predicated on your ability to do difficult and tough stuff if need be and if we are not willing or able to do that

then we are not going to be able to have any kind of sovereignty.

But it really comes down to strong economic decisions, cheaper energy, because that fuels everything.