It's The Real Economy, Stupid
I am very grateful to you at Bloomberg for hosting this event today. Your presence here in London tells us something very important about our country and our economy. I believe we are one of the world's most open and accessible economies. In fact this goes right back into our history. London grew not as a fortified capital but as the centre of a network of trade routes. Above all, London has always been a market place, and a market place that is open to all.
London is, I believe, at the moment the greatest city in the world. One reason is that so many people come here to do business and to trade. It is what makes London so diverse, so exciting, and so dynamic. I am sure that a vital ingredient that won us the Olympics in 2012 was the brilliant idea of London as the world in one city.
And the day after that victory the terrible bombings confirmed the truth of that in a tragic way. Seeing the lists of victims I was struck by how young and how diverse they were. The victims came from so many different parts of the world, attracted by the vitality and vigour of London. And we are not going to let a few desperate suicide bombers destroy something so valuable.
It is the vigour of that marketplace and the real economy which surrounds it that I want to talk about today. I particularly want to focus on the real economy because that is after all what the Department I shadow, Trade and Industry, is all about. But it is also because the political debate on the economy is all too often about tax and spend.
Gordon Brown's humiliating abandonment of his fiscal rule last week reminded us of the importance of controlling public spending and bringing down the burden of tax. But it would be wrong to focus exclusively on tax and spend when there is much else governments can do to create a framework to make us all more prosperous.
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