Speech by Matt Clifford

What I want to talk about tonight - what this event is about - is saving the country.

I've had the privilege to work in Number Ten and work on the country's AI strategy, but what I really want to draw on tonight are the last fourteen years I've spent helping people build and scale technology companies in the UK, and the last three years as chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), trying to find the breakthroughs that will build the industries of the future.

I'm really excited to be here tonight because I think it's easy, when you're not in a crowd like this, to lose faith. It's easy to open BBC News, read the first three headlines - and they're all about our failure - and it's easy to lose faith. But even just talking to some of you tonight, being in this crowd, I feel that if we can harness the energy of this crowd and movement, then not only is it possible, it's inevitable. We can do extraordinary things.

And extraordinary things are already happening. I do want to say: it is amazing what Lawrence and the team have done with LFG in a remarkably short period of time and with very little money. It's really amazing.

One thing I've learned through entrepreneurship is that when you're staring into the abyss - and sadly that's a feeling you have a lot as a founder - when you're staring at a really hard problem, the most important thing you can do is be absolutely clear about exactly what problem you're trying to solve and what it would look like to succeed.

And I've thought hard about how to frame that in a single sentence. I think it's as simple as this: our goal should be to make the UK rich again.

That's not, these days, a very British thing to say - and that's part of the problem. But our goal should be to make the UK rich again. Almost all our other problems are downstream of stagnation. We've had no growth for seventeen years in this country.

I was trying to work out when I was preparing this talk just how bad that is. If you look at how rich we would be today if we'd carried on growing for the last seventeen years at the rate we were in the decade before the financial crisis, the answer is that losing that potential is equivalent to £16,000 per person, per year. Not per household. per person. If we'd stayed on that trend and lost it all overnight to where we are today, the loss in economic output would be close to 30%. It's the biggest economic disaster in the history of our country.

But because it's been a slow-motion disaster, it's been far too easy - especially for our political class - to ignore.

Now, I know that wealth is a means, not an end. But it is the means that fuels all our ends. Whatever you care about, whatever your vision for this country, it will be much easier to achieve it if we make the UK rich again.

If what you really want is a fairer society, you need people to feel like they're playing a positive-sum game, not scrapping over a shrinking pie. That's when people's instincts to look after each other kick in.

If you want a safer society, people need to see paths from poverty into prosperity. You need to be able to afford to pay for well-lit streets, great public spaces, more prisons, more police, more probation.

If you want a healthier society, you need to be able to pay for it - for preventative healthcare, for cutting-edge treatments, for high-quality environments and homes that make us healthy.

Even if you want a more beautiful society, we need to be rich to pay for it.

I'm from Bradford. I don't know how many of you have been to Bradford - I'm actually going tomorrow, which I'm very excited about. Unfortunately today Bradford is not such a beautiful city. But I remember growing up, walking often through the city centre surrounded by ugly concrete monstrosities, and there in the middle of it stood this absolutely stunning City Hall. A triumph of Gothic architecture.

Why does Bradford have such a beautiful City Hall? Because at the time we built that building, Bradford was one of the richest cities in the world.

It's the same reason why we built the most beautiful train stations in the world. I commute into London through Marylebone and often out through St Pancras - these are some of the most beautiful buildings in the country - and we built them when Britain was the richest country in the world.

Wealth as a nation gives us choices.

I've got a seven-year-old and a five-year-old at home, and I often think it's easy to dismiss the difference between some growth and no growth. But actually, if I think about my little boy, Jasper, who's five, the difference for his generation, by the time he's my age, between 1% a year growth and 3% a year growth is a threefold increase in GDP. We'll be three times richer by the time Jasper is 40 if we grow at 3% instead of 1%.

We have to make the UK rich again.

Now, when I talk about this, people say, "Well, that's great - but is it possible?" I find that bizarre. Of course it's possible. We know it's possible. We have an existence proof: we did it before.

The UK was the richest country in the world. The thing I want claim - the thing I want to insist on - is that that wasn't an accident: it was the result of British exceptionalism. Another thing it's unfashionable to say these days, but if you look at our institutions, our inventions, at the role we played in the Industrial Revolution, it's clear this country has had an exceptional history.

This is the country where the laws of gravity were discovered. Where natural selection, the electron, and the neutron were discovered. Where the structure of DNA was first uncovered. Where vaccination was invented. Here we discovered penicillin, pioneered antiseptic surgery, we invented the modern clinical trial.

This is where computer science was born - the country of Babbage and Lovelace, of Turing. It's where the steam locomotive was pioneered and industrialised - the birthplace of the railway age. It's where the steam turbine and the jet engine were invented.

It's the birthplace of modern sanitation, the postal service, common law, constitutional rights, parliamentary democracy, the stock exchange, joint-stock companies, the police, the National Health Service.

We invented football. We invented rugby. We invented golf. We invented cricket. It's the country of Shakespeare. Of Eliot and Tolkien.

Britain created the modern world.

This country gave us so much of what not only we, but the world, values today.

So why does it feel so hard? Why, when I run through that list, does it feel like we're not going to do it again?

Because stagnation is a choice - and it's one we've been making for nearly twenty years. We've chosen to build layer upon layer of cultural, legal, and institutional cruft on top of our capacity to invent, innovate, and grow.

Lawrence likes to say, "You can just do stuff." That's true of LFG, and it's impressive, but the reality is that far too often today, this is a country where you can't just do things. You can't just build. You can't just grow. And as I learned in Number Ten, you can't just govern.

The lesson from our history of British exceptionalism is that the mother of greatness is permissionlessness. You shouldn't need a licence to do all these things. We need to build a country where you can just do stuff.

But we've gone in the opposite direction. We've broken our relationship with our history. We've broken our relationship with risk. We've broken our relationship with success.

On history, we've come to see all our past achievements as tainted - the result of mere oppression or extraction. Of course there was some of that, but that's not where that long list of British accomplishments came from.

On risk, we've come to see all negative outcomes as the result of insufficient control, especially top down, from the centre. Whenever we see anything we don't like, any bad outcome, however rare, our instinct is to ban it, suppress it, or delay it.

And on success, we've come to see it as suspicious, the product of a rigged game.

Now, I get it. Too often the game is rigged - and that's one of the biggest problems with a stagnant society. In a stagnant economy, it's too often better to be an incumbent than an innovator. But it doesn't have to be that way.

We should aspire to live in a country where the way to get rich is to create new things, to take big risks, to figure out how to make products and services that people love. But we're not going to get there if we don't learn to love success, if we don't learn to celebrate our entrepreneurs, our inventors, our builders.

When I ask myself what it would take to make the UK rich again - to treble GDP over the next couple of decades - that's the theme that stands out: we have to back our builders.

We have to back our builders of great companies.

We have to back our builders of physical infrastructure.

We have to back our builders of state capacity.

And I know it's possible because I've seen it.

I've seen it at Entrepreneurs First, the company I built with my co-founder Alice. We've backed hundreds of British founders who've built companies worth over $10 billion and created over 8,000 jobs.

But the truth is, sadly, today too many of them choose to move to the US. Why do they do that? Partly it's because they think they can raise capital there, and they're often right. But I think we also have to admit it's because they think that's where their ambition will be welcomed, not dismissed.

We can fix that. It's a matter of will.

I've seen it at ARIA, where we're funding the trillion-pound industries of the future - from programmable plants to precision neurotech. The talent and ambition are there. The question is whether we can match them with investment and procurement. Again, the answer is yes - it's just a matter of will.

I've seen it with the AI Security Institute, where the team went from zero to the strongest AI state capacity in the world in a year - by being willing to do government differently and to break some of the rules. You can do government differently - it's a matter of will.

When I wrote the AI Opportunities Action Plan, we had the biggest AI funders in the world lining up to invest tens of billions into our infrastructure… if only we could sort out our energy mess. Could we? Well, of course we could. Again, a matter of will.

It's all fixable. Britain is a great country that's saveable and worth saving.

And the reason I know it's saveable is because through these experiences I feel I've seen the best of Britain: I feel I've seen its talent, its genius, its drive to make this an amazing country.

And I really want to emphasise this is not all about elites. I've been fortunate to work with the founders of billion-pound companies and some of our best scientists and technologists, but it's not just about them. I've also seen that drive to make our country great in some of the teachers at my state school in Bradford; in my mum, who was a teaching assistant in a primary school; and in my dad, who was a social worker his whole life.

And I see it in the people I've met through LFG. Most of you in this room don't know each other, but I bet if you did, you would find in this group the will to make Britain rich again.

We can do it. We just need to back our builders.

So let's go.

Thank you.