Nick Clegg

Because at the moment, I don't understand why the body politic, whether it's here or in Paris or Berlin, does not respond much, much more radically.

And again, I do think that sort of seems to me to be the background frustration that Tony Blair was channeling.

You know, this is existential to us.

Most people know what they need to do.

We need to become the sum of our parts again and again.

In this part of the world.

And when I say it's not just the EU, it's Norway, Ukraine, maybe even parts of the Middle East.

You need to you need to you need to create a sort of Eurovision approach to Europe, maybe without Australia.

We are big enough.

We have enough talent.

My experience, I don't know what you find, is that an increasing number of politicians across the spectrum.

Oddly enough, I think the left and the centre left is the most sort of.

out of step with it with this need they don't really sort of but i think a lot of people now understand that to develop that scale to develop those um deep liquid capital markets to get we've got in this country got pension funds amazing pension funds that don't invest either in britain or crucially they don't invest despite signing up to something called the mansion house accord they don't actually do what they've said they would do and invest i think it was quite a small amount five percent of their capital into a more risky asset private equity vc and so on

So if we have our if our own pension funds are not prepared to put their money into really high growth sectors.

It is a national scandal.

I bumped into Jeremy Hunt the other day, I think, who quite rightly is very proud of having, I think, brought the pension fund industry together for the so-called Mansion House Accord, where they signed up to making this commitment.

Well, they've done nothing, basically, or next to nothing, maybe a few have.

And funnily enough, we both reflected, though we were both, I suppose, small liberals of different hues and persuasions.

So not generally the first kind of people to call for market intervention.

I've come around to the view that if it requires some more heavy-handed intervention to get the pension funds to actually help great British businesses to scale up, to your point, it's this lack of so-called scale-up capital.