Merryn Somerset Webb

I mean, the good news is, because there's a risk there of us disappearing down a plug hole again, I blame you for that, is all this is exactly fixable with the political will and a degree of political skill.

These are fixable problems.

They're not intractable.

They're difficult, but they're not intractable problems to solve.

And in the spirit of...

adding in a further dose of optimism, whisper it quietly, but UK PLC might be the most innovative nation on the planet, right?

Absolutely.

So you look at the pipeline of venture capital-backed businesses that are growing like Topsy and

And we rank, you know, this be businesses, you know, north of 25 million a year revenue.

So not yet unicorns, not yet with wings, but nonetheless, the cults and thoroughbreds that are rising at real pace.

The businesses we know...

are the wellspring of job creation, of value creation, of productivity generation.

If you rank the UK on the absolute number of those cults and thoroughbreds, short of unicorns, but nonetheless with the potential to grow wings, we rank third behind the US and China in numbers.

And on a per capita basis, because guess what?

A lot more people in China and the US than there are in the UK.

We are towards the top of the pops.

So when it comes to potential scale-ups, the unicorns prospectively of tomorrow are

We are an innovation nation.

We are smashing the lights out relative to the rest of Europe and arguably even relative to the US.

The key, Merrin, is, of course, to nurture those cults and thoroughbreds.