Speeches by Cooper.

“I believe that that is the case. Can you tell me that your current organisation has no involvement with Mr Mandelson?”

“Listening to you here today, it strikes me sometimes that we are feeding the Chinese dragon in hopes that it will immolate us last. Other countries seem very keen to put in—Rain, you made an excellent pitch for free trade; Adam Smith would have loved that—but we cannot be naive about this. China is a threat. It is that…”

“Mr Burnett, your China-Britain Business Council is quite closely involved, I think, with the Great Britain-China Centre. That is an FCDO arm’s length body, as I understand it. At one point, its honorary president, I think, was Peter Mandelson, a name that is on many lips at the moment.”

“Rain, do you think Canada has a good model?”

“Wonderful. Thank you for that.”

“You are looking to diversify into other markets, but what do you think the chances are of you setting up manufacture in China? Can you see the day when Bromptons are made over there?”

“Do you think that that growth can continue? Do you think that there are risks to this?”

“Coming back to you, Julian, from Brompton, I am a huge admirer of the technology behind your product. You have skewed transport policy in Scotland, unfortunately, because the Scottish Government think that we can all ride on foldy bicycles, even if we live 75 miles away from the nearest hospital. Anyway, that is an asi…”

“At an awards ceremony in Scotland last month, apprentices said time and again how they were told throughout their school careers that their grades were good enough to go to university, and that they should think again about going into an apprenticeship. Apprenticeships create not just jobs but careers, so what can the …”

“12. What steps she is taking to promote apprenticeships as an alternative to university education.”

“The buzzword this morning is “bold”. Yet the reality is that, though this plan might be bolder than what went before, it remains with all the oomph of a 40W bulb. When electricity in Dumfries in my constituency is four times the price in Dumfries in Virginia, in the United States, this country has a major problem with …”

“To listen to the Minister, one might think that the DIP matters very little and that we are cracking on regardless, but the truth is that the MOD has been out-manoeuvred by the Chancellor, and the DIP is pinned down by the Treasury. The DIP matters a very great deal to industry because the demand signals that it will g…”

“You are spreading the bet. Phill, what is your thought on that sort of spread bet? Is that the idea?”

“If a pension scheme came to you and said, “We want to put money into AI,” which areas of AI would you recommend that it look at? Where do you think the biggest potentials for growth are? Is it the frontier companies, the big players? Is it vertical solutions that are very nuanced and task-specific? Is it the infrastruc…”

“Karim, what are your thoughts? Where are you placing your bets?”

“Mr Evans, do you think that we are in quite a good place?”

“How should we be addressing that? Should we be trying to onshore production of these? Is that possible? I have been to Taiwan and they are very clear in Taiwan that they are streets ahead of most people. That is not easily replicable; infrastructure like that is not something you can just create overnight. We are talki…”

“I wonder whether that is the point, Dame Wendy. Are we asking the wrong question here? I often think of television. You do not need to understand Rediffusion to change the channel on the TV. Are we looking at this through the wrong model? Are we trying to centralise control when we should be diffusing control?”

“Professor, you talked about campus UK and our attractiveness for AI companies. We are host to something like 6,000 companies that are involved in AI. I wonder how attractive we are on the global scale. What factors influence that attractiveness? Particularly, is the Government’s AI action plan having a positive impact,…”

“AI rests on super-sophisticated chips, at the end of the day. There are very specialist items, such as field-programmable gate arrays, which themselves are new and novel. What do you think about the British position for accessing these kinds of things? Mr Milward, I wanted to start with you because you mentioned the ch…”