We need a new British business bank with a clean balance sheet and an ability to expand lending rapidly to the manufacturers, exporters and high-growth companies that power our economy. Today I can announce we will have one.

So I went into government with a clear mind about what the problems were, and what needed to be done.

The Robert Mugabe school of economics provides a salutary warning about uncontrolled monetary expansion in generating hyper-inflation. The road to Harare is not as long as we might hope.

Regulators are a backstop: they don't own banks. The governance at the top of our leading banks has been shown to be lamentably weak. No one at the top of Barclays will take responsibility for systemic abuse.

The government increasingly resembles somebody who is trying to give the kiss of life to a corpse.

I think what is happening is I think first of all there is confidence in the U.K. economy. We're in a German rather than a Greek position in international financial markets, which is very positive and keeps our debt service costs down, and we're also beginning to see real evidence of rebalancing.

We have sectors of the economy, aerospace is a good example, where Britain's probably the second country in the world, the automobile sector, where we've done extraordinarily well, an enormous amount of investment over the last couple of years, life sciences is another.