Liam Byrne

This has been an excellent debate. Let me once again say that I am incredibly grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for ensuring that we could spend time together debating the issues at stake. We heard some brilliant speeches from across the House. In a way, my ambitions for the debate were satisfied, because I wanted to ensure, after our report on the priorities of the business community, and having secured this debate, that we actually heard business voices in this Chamber, and in the corridors of power. We do not give enough time, space or attention to business voices, and to hearing about the challenges in boardrooms and on shop floors. If we did that a little bit more, it would surprise us how much consensus there is in this country about the big moves forward. This is for the economic historians among us. We have to recognise that we are at one of those moments in history that occur every 30 to 40 years. We have a series of geopolitical shocks, and then we have a big, agonising debate about whether the country is in decline, whether it is all going to hell, or whether there is a different way forward, in which the country rallies together and chooses to build a different kind of sovereign capability. Inevitably, that has consequences for the kind of state that emerges. We went through this in the 1980s, the 1940s and after world war one. We have to conduct that argument now at a moment when it is clear that the United States—that great power, that great ally of ours, that built the multilateral system beginning in 1944 in San Francisco and then through to the end of world war two—in the words of Joseph Chamberlain, is a weary titan no longer able to grasp the orb of its fate. We have to recognise that for those of us who support that multilateral rules-based order, we will have to step up. That will be difficult and expensive, but it will bring new opportunities for business growth and, crucially, for our constituents to earn a good living.