There remains tremendously important work to be done to fix a Crisis in Competitiveness, productivity, training and education to prepare our economy and our people of all ages for the global challenges that we face.

It is essentially a Crisis of Competitiveness for the West, one which was building for some three decades.

My noble friend Lord Monks put it well when he said that the generalised Crisis of Competitiveness in western economies has driven apart and revealed the frailties which were there in the euro project from the beginning.

It seems, to me anyway, to be in some part a Crisis of Competitiveness in western countries as a whole, which will be very difficult to repair and which will demand large-scale restructuring.

The Prime Minister has paid the usual lip service to the EU's Crisis of Competitiveness, but, rather like what happened under his predecessor, Tony Blair, 15 years ago, nothing has changed.