BP is working to bring more lower carbon energy to the UK, like designing two hydrogen plants,

and we're keeping oil and gas flowing from the North Sea. It's and not all. That's how BP is backing Britain.

While today we're mostly in oil and gas we increased the proportion of our

global annual investment that went into our lower carbon and other transition businesses

from around 3% in 2019 to around 23% in 2023.

VP.com slash and not all. Hello and welcome to political fix from the Financial Times. I'm Lucy Fisher.

Now as promised we have an extra

episode this week and I've been really looking forward to it. In the studio I'm

joined by the FT's chief economics commentator Martin Wolf for this pre-budget special examining the UK economy in depth.

Martin, welcome.

It's a pleasure to be with you.

Now there's a huge amount to discuss, but I thought to begin with I'd ask you a very broad brush question.

We know Labour came to power just over a hundred days ago.

A lot has been made about their fiscal inheritance and will come onto that but I

wanted to start by talking about their economic inheritance.

As we're talking in autumn 2024, tell us about the state of the UK economy

and how it compares to other major European economies and to say the US?

Well I suppose the single most important fact which was summarized very very well in the latest green budget from the Institute for Fiscal Studies,

is that productivity growth has been very close to zero for a very long time. So over the last decade, since roughly 2014,

productivity output per worker is essentially stagnated. It looks as though this is the worst

decayed since the middle of the 19th century except for the decay that included the

First World War and the Spanish flu.

...