Merryn Somerset Webb

But now having sampled this myself, I'm completely with small business owners and thinking this is an endless and rising tide of compliance, which again, individually well-intentioned, but the collective consequence I think is an overburdened engine of the economy.

Because of course, corporates are the engine of the economy.

And it's an interesting utter failure of the public sector to understand the extent of the friction that is involved.

I mean, we always say when it comes to investing, we talk about investing in personal finance a lot.

And one of the things that prevents people investing, prevents them sorting out their personal finance is friction.

It's admin.

Literally, there is nothing in the world that people hate more, apart from war, I guess, but in general, admin.

Admin is everybody's personal hell.

Yes, an overly complex admin of that that oozes from every port.

So there's lots that could be done.

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.