And when I was in Los Angeles a few weeks ago and pointed out that the Los Angeles greater metropolitan area has a higher GDP than Saudi Arabia, it makes you understand why we have to start to think about that in a totally different way.
We’ve got to change from the cartographer’s view of the world to the mercantilist view of the world, and start to reshape the structures of government to respond to where the opportunities arise and the size of markets.
And if the US states were countries about six of them would be in the G20, so the idea we regard it as one trading partner is ludicrous. So we are in the process at the moment of moving our UKTI personnel round the world so we match better our footprint on the ground to the markets for British companies. And then we’ll encourage them to export into those countries.
And one other change. We’ve made a fundamental shift in British policy that has not yet been noticed. Up till recently, until the change of government, the government’s policy was to get as much foreign direct investment into the United Kingdom as possible, but to largely ignore overseas direct investment elsewhere. And let me tell you why that’s a problem. Because it’s great the year we get the FDI and we get jobs created, but every year after that all their income flows that go to their parent companies or their parent countries are outward flows in our current account. And unless we have counterbalancing overseas development, overseas investment, we are unable to get those income flows to counterbalance that.