Quasi, is the UK broken right now?

Well, look, I think obviously the left, the Labour Party have come in and it's very much in their interest

to say everything is terrible, everything doesn't work.

Now I think the Conservatives and, know me I was involved in that

we got things wrong we have to accept that but there were some things we got right and

if you look at the GDP growth it's pretty competitive actually is it I think well the whole of the west it could be a lot better let me say that

obviously I tried with Liz trust and others to try and kick-start the growth but. But we're not doing worse than people in France or Germany.

I don't want to re-litigate Brexit, but the whole Brexit thing was about, oh well, you know, we should stay in Europe because they're doing better than us.

They're not doing better than us. So a lot of the problems we face, you know large immigration levels,

creaking public services, quite slow growth, all of these problems are faced across the West, particularly in Europe. And so if you say Britain is broken, you might as well say

Western Europe is broken. We all face challenges and obviously we've got to grip them.

So you said the conservatives did some

things right and some things wrong. Give us the summary of what you think you

the conservatives did right and wrong. So I think the problem we had was essentially for six

years we had this austerity narrative which was probably not the right narrative I don't disagree with austerity but I think

we exaggerated the extent to which we were restraining spending and then after

Brexit there was all hell broke loose and I'll give you an illustration of this. I was in

Parliament, Theresa May was the Prime Minister and out of the blue she called a general election I

don't know whether you remember it but the 2017 election came out of the blue she called a general election. I don't know whether you remember it, but the 2017 election came out of a clear blue sky. Nobody was expecting that.

And she went into the election with a majority and as a consequence of the election, we lost our majority.

So then we had two years where there was no majority in the House of Commons.

We were trying to get Brexit legislation through, and it was a mess. We didn't get anything through the house. We came up with a deal. She couldn't get the deal through and that ultimately was why she had to leave office.

...