Liam Byrne

And there's no public services left because they've been shut down thanks to austerity.

You now basically feel like you're trapped in a world that is very different and much worse than your memory.

So when you talk to people about what do you want to see restored, the words that people come up with are things like, well, I'd like to see the butchers back and the post office and the greengrocers.

People have these kind of... It's rosy retrospection, as the pollsters tell you.

But the nostalgia thing, I think, is...

These shops are shutting down.

Partly, but I think there are also some consequentials here for labour and its economic policy.

So, I mean, if you look at the way that we have loaded up small business with a ton of costs right now, whether that is crime costs, labour costs, energy costs...

business rates... You're talking about this Labour government?

I'm talking about this Labour government.

HMRC that doesn't answer the telephone.

It's impossible to find out who owns these shop units because they're often based abroad because we haven't sorted that out yet.

Actually, we're not helping ourselves here.

You could actually have a small business renaissance on high streets if we...

changed our economic thinking a bit and actually moved on from the kind of Bidenomics that characterised Labour getting elected and actually thought, do you know what?

To rebuild our economy, we actually need small business, entrepreneurs, freelancers to actually be able to do an awful lot better.

And we need to rethink the way that we're not overburdening them right now.

Well, I think you could...

NICs is definitely a tough, tough deal for a lot of small businesses.

But my point, and this was my first question actually to Keira on the liaison committee when I joined the liaison committee at the beginning of this parliament.