The article is available here and a full transcript of the interview is below:

 

Philip Salter: How has Britain’s business relationship with India changed over recent years?

Lord Bilimoria: Whenever I take people around Parliament I show them the mural at St Stephen’s Hall which depicts Sir Thomas Rowe, Britain’s first Ambassador to India, presenting his credentials to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1614. The UK’s relationship with India spans over 400 years and when I was brought up as a child in India anti-colonial and anti-empire sentiment abounded.

Since liberalization in 1991, everything has changed. The Indian economy has opened up and there is now much more mutual respect between Britain and India. The British Council recently conducted a survey of young Indians’ attitudes to different countries called India Matters and, in almost every category, young Indians rank the United States as their destination of choice, with Britain a clear second. British universities, which are some of the best in the world along with those found in the United States, were singled out as one of the most attractive aspects of moving to Britain.

Prime Minister Modi clearly stated that India now looks upon its relationship with Britain as a relationship of equals during his visit to the UK in November 2015. This, in many ways, is terrific as India’s population is 20 times Britain’s, but it demonstrates the UK’s world-beating capabilities in almost every field. It sits at the top table on the world stage and is a global power, with the fifth largest economy in the world in absolute terms.

However, there is no running away from the fact that the whole world is now trying to do business in India. The UK is the largest investor in India and vice versa – with companies like Vodafone , JCB and Molson Coors investing in India and Tata, Jaguar Land Rover, and Tetley investing in the UK – but there is now strong competition between leading economies to do business in India. The UK needs to ensure that it retains its competitive advantage and that the ties between the two countries remain strong.

 

Salter: Has closing the post-study work visa route damaged the UK-India relationship?

Bilimoria: In my roles as Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, President of UKCISA, and Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, I have seen the damage caused by closing the post-study work visa route to the UK-India relationship.

The number of Indian students coming to the UK has halved in the past few years. The introduction of the post study visa, which I spearheaded in Parliament, made a huge difference in enabling students, and particularly Indian students – one of the largest groups in the UK – to study here. The visa allowed students to earn money to pay off their university fees, which are expensive by Indian standards, and enabled them to gain necessary work experience. It also helped to build bridges between countries, all while allowing the world’s best and brightest to contribute to Britain’s economy.

The British public support allowing talented international students to stay and work after their studies, with 75% of the public backing overseas students being allowed to work here. The Home Secretary’s immigration policies are economically illiterate when it comes to international students. The broad push to reduce immigration at any cost means that opportunities to attract the immigration that the country needs, highly skilled individuals in a variety of fields, such as finance and academia (30% of academics at our best universities like Oxford, Cambridge and Birmingham are foreign born), are missed. It also disregards the huge amount of soft power gained from international students studying in Britain.

Scotland was the first country in the UK to introduce the post-study work visa and MSPs on Holyrood’s Devolution Committee are now calling for the UK Government to reinstate the visa. This is the right step to take. Theresa May and the Home Office’s attitude, typified by decisions to reduce the number of international students studying in the UK and include international students in net immigration figures, is damaging and takes a short term view, rather than the long term view needed to benefit the UK.

 

Salter: Which countries are the UK’s key competitors in attracting finance and talent from India?

Bilimoria: Without a doubt, the United States is the number one destination for young Indian people and there are now a number of Indians heading huge US companies, including Microsoft, Google, Pepsi, and MasterCard. The United States is also the most attractive overseas study destination for students, with numbers from India growing fast. Other competitors for Indian students are Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Germany. These countries have put in place ambitious strategies to increase the number of international students attending there and, while there are no targets to increase the number of international students studying in the UK, France plans to double the number of their overseas students by 2020. Theresa May’s Australian counterpart has even thanked the Home Secretary for her immigration stance after the number of students attending Australian universities has surged after the implementation of visa streamlining processes and the depreciation of the Australian Dollar.

 

Salter: Are you seeing a growth in entrepreneurship in India and the UK? If so, which industries/sectors have the most potential for mutual benefit?

Bilimoria: When I first came to the UK in the 1980s entrepreneurship was looked down on, conjuring up images of Del Boy and second hand car salesmen. Margaret Thatcher’s encouragement of entrepreneurship helped to change that and each subsequent government has successfully promoted entrepreneurship in the UK. Now it is cool to be an entrepreneur. The UK has become a lot more aspirational and is one of the most enterprising countries in the world, with London ranked as the second best city in Europe for entrepreneurship.

India unleashed its entrepreneurial talent during its liberalization in 1991, which saw the rise of global Indian companies. India excels in the tech and telecommunications sectors, producing behemoths like Infosys and Air Tel; these sectors, along with the Higher Education sector, show the most potential for economic benefit between the UK and India.

 

Salter: What do you think the UK can learn from the way business is done in India?

Bilimoria: There is a lot that the UK can learn from India, but one important principle that is now becoming widely emulated in the West is that of Jugaad – an Indian term for an innovative fix or a simple work-around. Professor Jaideep Prabhu of Cambridge Judge Business School has written at length about the benefits of this type of frugal innovation and Jugaad is becoming increasingly more accepted as a legitimate management technique. Companies around the world are beginning to adopt Jugaad to counteract a reduction in research and development costs and to encourage creative, out of the box thinking in order to maximize resources.

 

Salter: What do you think India can learn from the way business is done in the UK?

Bilimoria: There is no question that Britain is the best country in the world in which to base a business, with an excellent rule of law and justice system. It is renowned for its fairness and is used by businesses around the world as a center for justice and arbitration. London is the number one financial center in the world and has a number of world-class universities right on its doorstep. Cambridge University has more Nobel prizes than any other university in the world – 92 – and the UK is an excellent center of research, producing the third largest number of research papers in the world. The Royal Society represents the pinnacle of scientific achievement and, incidentally, for the first time in history the President of the Royal Society, Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, is Indian. He is also a Nobel Laureate from Trinity College Cambridge.

Britain is a world leader in a number of fields, including in manufacturing, accountancy, law, architecture, design, and creative industries. It represents the best of the best and the Government’s GREAT campaign does an excellent job highlighting this.

He was joined by the Bulgarian Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Konstantin Dimitrov, and Labour MP Barbara Roche, the former Immigration Minister.

The following transcript was kindly provided by Sky News.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well immigration is one of the most divisive issues in politics at the moment but does our opinion of immigrants change depending on what country people come from to the UK?  Well a poll for this programme suggests that of course it does.  In the exclusive YouGov poll carried out for this programme people were asked ‘Do you think that immigrants from each of the following countries make a positive or negative contribution to life in Britain today?’  Well Australia, the United States and Germany came out top, at least 50% of people think they do make a positive contribution, immigrants from India and Poland also did pretty well coming out at 44% but the figure was much lower for immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania, just 18% of people think they make a positive contribution to life in Britain and in fact more people think they actually have a negative impact.  So why is that?  Well I am joined now by Bulgaria’s Ambassador to the UK, Konstatin Dimitrov, by the Labour MP Barbara Roche who is a former immigration minister and chair of the campaign group, the Migration Matters Trust and by Lord Bilimoria, an Indian born British businessman of course who is chairman amongst other things of Cobra Beer, a very good morning to you all.  Well Ambassador I want to start with you, first of all your reaction to that poll in that your countrymen and women when they come to the UK, they aren’t really rated very highly?

KONSTANTIN DIMITROV: Yes, I’m not surprised, it’s a combination of the brutal anti-Bulgarian propaganda for years now by certain politicians and media whose name I will not mention for obvious reason and the second point, a simple lack of personal knowledge of Bulgarians by many Brits.  Why?  Because there are only about 60,000 Bulgarians working in the UK in a population of 64 million so there is a very low chance for anyone to have met a Bulgarian or worked with a Bulgarian person and moreover, one other thing, it is exactly in places where there are no Bulgarians that people are very much prejudiced against Bulgarians unlike centres of mixed communities where Bulgarians are seen as very …

DM: You just tell us, I know you’ve told me before, that the majority of Bulgarians who come to the UK come here to get jobs and when the jobs disappear or when they have worked long enough, they go back to Bulgaria.

KONSTANTIN DIMITROV: Exactly, just 1080 people have been registered to receive substantial work benefits in the UK last year, imagine, 1080 people, that’s absolutely negligible.  Our compatriots are primarily between 18 and 35 years of age, single and they come here to work primarily as a result of an a priori agreed upon contract.

DM: Barbara, you come in to this, clearly there are different perceptions of different nationalities here, do you think we need some cool heads when it comes to discussing this issue, in particularly migration from within the European Union?

BARBARA ROCHE: Oh absolutely, I absolutely agree with what the Ambassador has had to say and indeed when I was a Member of Parliament and now in my role as Chair of Migration Matters, that’s what we actually try and argue.  We just need to look at the facts and I also think it’s time that all political parties know and say what’s in their heart of hearts, that actually legal migration can be a very positive good for this country both in our public services and for our economy so the more we know the facts, the better.

DM: Do you think there is any point trying or should we not even try at all to limit migration from within the European Union and in particular underlying these figures, these findings we’ve got in particular to restrict Bulgarians, Romanians and a lot of East Europeans?

BARBARA ROCHE: I think the difficulty is that when we talk about this, and I am somebody who actually does believe in freedom of movement within the European Union, I think it is one of the fundamental tenets.  I remember one of my very first votes as a young woman was to vote for Britain to actually stay in the Union and not only is freedom of movement a good thing but we actually don’t often discuss the fact that there are very many British people who are working elsewhere in the European Union, particularly young people, and they value their freedom of movement and we would lose that.

DM: Lord Bilimoria, you come in, are you heartened by the fact – and this then begs the question, is it just a matter of time of the indigenous population so to speak getting to know the immigrant population – India is pretty popular, it features up there along with the Poles coming in at 44% approval?

 LORD BILIMORIA: Well that doesn’t surprise me at all and I am relieved to hear that the Indian community is being appreciated for the contribution that it has made for decades to this economy and I would think this immigration debate has become so dangerous now particularly driven by UKIP, where everyone is being tarred with the same brush and you don’t look at the good immigration that has helped this country become great.  I mean look at Bulgaria, I know a very, very impressive young Bulgarian banker who works for the Queen’s bank who is highly impressive, you’d want somebody like that in this country.  We look at countries on this league table that you have just put up, you’ve missed out Bangladesh.  This evening I am going to be speaking at the Bangladesh Caterers Association annual awards dinner, over 1000 Bangladeshi restaurateurs from around the country, they are the ones – over two-thirds of restaurants are owned by Bangladeshis – they are the ones who actually brought curry to our homes, we love that food and yet they can’t bring in the skilled chefs that they need.  Look at Tata who own Jaguar Land Rover, a company six years ago nobody wanted to buy, now it is so successful.  Who is the Chief Executive of Tata Jaguar Land Rover in this country?  A German, Ralf Speth.

 DM: Just to stay with this, Lord Bilimoria, do you think it is some of the perceptions and misperceptions if I can coin that phrase, that go around especially this idea that the vast majority of immigrants some people think come here to claim benefits, to sponge off society.  When people get to know for instance the South Asian community, let’s lump them all together, they are very hard working, there is a lot of productivity going on there.

LORD BILIMORIA: Hard work, family values, education.  Look at foreign students, we still include international students in our immigration figures and the government has got this ridiculous target and one of the biggest mistakes that David Cameron has made is to put up this target of reducing immigration to the tens of thousands.  They are more than double that figure, they are never going to hit that figure.  I think that was a huge mistake to make and they are paying the price for that right now.

DM: Ambassador, what do Bulgarians, your nationals who come along to you, what do they tell you about the way they are treated by the UK population because there is that classic case where you might answer a survey like ours and say I am not very keen on Bulgarians and Romanians and others but when you actually have met someone or worked alongside one of them as you mentioned, you think they are okay.

KONSTANTIN DIMITROV: I would revert back to the last point I made, those who have worked with Bulgarians are very open and many Brits, 400,000 Brits a year go to Bulgaria to spend their time there, to have their holidays there, to even buy properties there.  If there is some inborn antipathy no one would do that.  The problem is those who are objects of propaganda and indeed those who haven’t met any Bulgarians at all, statistically these are quite convincing parameters as only 60,000 people in your country out of a country of 64 million, how could you possibly have an idea as to the contribution of such a small batch of people to your economy or to the texture of your society?

LORD BILIMORIA: And if you look at it, the other point is if you ask Theresa May, tell me the number of illegal immigrants in this country she wouldn’t have a clue, her department wouldn’t have a clue.  They don’t know whether it’s half a million, a million, a million and a half because we have lost control of immigration in that sense.  We still don’t have exit checks at our borders.  We would have a queue of Indian IT companies ready to do that job so that we can scan everyone’s passport when they come from wherever in the world, scan everyone’s passport when they have gone and then we would know who shouldn’t be here who are still here.  We should be attracting the best and the brightest people to this country.

DM: Barbara Roche, there is an absolute numbers argument going on here as well.  If you get net migration of 250,000, just do the maths, over 20 years you end up with millions more people here and whatever nation they come from it just means that particularly public services are put under enormous strain.

BARBARA ROCHE: You have to look at it two ways, first of all it is absolutely right that countries, and we need to control our borders and certainly when I was the Immigration Minister that was a tenet.

DM: But how would you stop it?

BARBARA ROCHE: Well what you have to do first of all is also to acknowledge that people come and people go, we live in a global world and …

DM: But you just said that you don’t support stopping Europeans coming in and they are the vast majority of migrants so how do you control your borders?

BARBARA ROCHE: I actually think, I want to go back to the question that you asked about public services, you were talking about the strain on public services.  What the figures show and what the OECD says is that actually migrants contribute more to public services than they take out.  I think it is estimated that nearly 40% of our doctors, nearly 40% are migrants so the question is, are we asking the right questions about the effects on our public services?  If we stopped migration tomorrow our public services would be worse and our debt would be worse and I also would say if you stopped migration here, what is going to happen to all those people who want their holidays [inaudible] … the European Union?

DM: Okay, quick thoughts on that Ambassador, I know you want to come in on that.

KONSTANTIN DIMITROV: That is right and also let us face a truth, outsiders, foreigners, come to work here because there are niches that the Brits wouldn’t like to take up, they wouldn’t like to go to the agricultural sector because there is no interest in such positions so of course legally our working citizens of the European Union will continue to come here to fill in the niches which are not wanted for other reasons by the Brits.  If the Brits started filling those niches in, there would be no need for such immigration as we talk about.

DM: So market forces can deal with it.  Last point to you Lord Bilimoria.

LORD BILIMORIA: Well I think it’s across the board. It’s what the Ambassador has just spoken about but also I mentioned the Chief Executive of Jaguar Land Rover, my joint venture partners at Cobra Molson Coors, we had a worldwide search for our UK chief executive, who is he?  A Belgian.  We want the brightest and the best across the board, from the Commonwealth, from the European Union and the biggest advantage of this country is that we are an open economy and that’s why we are still number two, number two inward investment country in the world today is this tiny country.

DM: Oh well pointed out, I didn’t know that.  Listen, I must end it there, thank you very much to you Lord Bilimoria, good to see you, Konstantin Dimitrov, Ambassador and Barbara Roche, thank you very much indeed.

The following article was published on the New Statesman’s “The Staggers’ blog on Monday 1st September.

Founded in 1913, the New Statesman is one of the most well-respected current affairs magazines in the United Kingdom.

The government must stop treating international students with hostility

This year, the number of foreign students undertaking higher education in Britain fell for the first time since 1983. The government must stop treating them with contempt.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Gandhi. Each one of them has shaped the world in which we live and, as it happens, every one of them was educated here in Britain.

Along with the United States, the UK’s universities are the finest on the planet. The ability that this gives us to attract the world’s talent to these shores represents not only an enormous economic opportunity but also a crucial component of our nation’s cultural strength. It is something I have been proud to observe in recent months as the newly appointed chancellor of the University of Birmingham.

I came to the UK from my birthplace of India because of the outstanding quality of its higher education institutions, but it was Britain’s internationalism – its unique role as a point of congregation for ideas and creativity from around the globe – that allowed me to start Cobra Beer here.

And yet despite the mutually beneficial historic relationship between the UK and international students, this government continues to badge them as immigrants, a group it treats with a contempt bordering on outright hostility.

That’s despite new research from Universities UK, which found that only 22 per cent of the British public considers overseas students to be immigrants. Political leaders from the Deputy Prime Minister to Lord Heseltine have added their voices to the call for international students to be removed from the immigration figures. And yet the Home Office still refuses to take action, despite the evident failure of its crude policies towards controlling net migration, shown recently to have risen by 68,000 in the last year.

Net migration may be rising but one vital statistic is going the other way, with potentially severe consequences. This year the number of foreign students undertaking higher education here in Britain fell by 1 per cent – the first time a decline has been recorded since 1983. With government-sponsored poster campaigns barking “go home or face arrest” and the disastrous, failed proposal for “high risk” visa applicants from nations like Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan to pay a £3,000 “security bond” deposit upon entering the UK, it’s little wonder that the world’s brightest and best are starting to look elsewhere.

Indeed, an NUS poll carried out earlier this year recorded that 51 per cent of international students found the British government “unwelcoming”. That damage is being done to Britain’s reputation on the world stage as a home for the future talent on which our economy increasingly depends couldn’t be more clear.

And while the government is helping promote a climate of hostility against overseas students, the Universities UK research clearly demonstrates that this does not reflect the public mood. 59 per cent of respondents to the survey said that the government should not reduce numbers of international students, even if such action made reducing overall immigration numbers harder.

Our universities are competing in a zero-sum game of global proportions and every engineer, programmer and aspiring entrepreneur that we turn away will be welcomed with open arms by the likes of Canada, Germany and Australia. Given that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills estimates overseas students contribute more than £13 billion to the UK economy, that is a prospect we should all be extremely worried about.

For years the government has been ignoring the well-founded requests of colleagues within the House of Lords and many more besides, to remove international students from the immigration statistics. Now the public has spoken too; and it is time the government started listening.

Lord Bilimoria CBE is founder and chairman of Cobra Beer, a crossbench peer and chancellor of the University of Birmingham

The full video can be found HERE.

My Lords, when the United States was formed in 1776, it took 19 people on a farm to produce enough food for 20 people, so most people had to spend their time and effort in growing food. Today, it is down to 1% or 2% to produce the food. So let us consider the vast amount of supposed unemployment produced by that. There was not really any unemployment produced; what happened was that people who had formerly been tied up working in agriculture were freed up by technological developments and improvements to do something else, which enabled us to have a better standard of living and a more extensive range of products. That is Friedman—arguing against the race to the bottom. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, talked about robots, but I have gone back to 1776. Nothing has changed in that sense.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Freud, for initiating this debate. I have just a few points to make. First, the rise in the overall employment rate is real and is at record levels and, correspondingly, there has been a fall in unemployment. With the economic dominance of the south-east, there is a need to rebalance the economy by supporting manufacturing, particularly in the regions. Continued tax reform is also needed. The Office of Tax Simplification is an oxymoron; our tax system is getting more and more complicated.

UK unemployment has fallen by 63,000 to 2.33 million. The unemployment rate now stands at 7.2% of the population. As the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, said in his excellent speech, employment has risen to a record of more than 30 million. The bad news is that the NEETS are still close to the 1 million mark; although the figure is falling, it is still above 900,000. The number of people claiming jobseeker’s allowance has fallen to 1.175 million. Over the year that number has dropped by 363,200, which is terrific. That is all really good news.

The new Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney—I say new, but he has been in post for almost a year—made a fundamental mistake in saying that he was going to give us forward guidance and that when unemployment fell to 7% the Bank would think of raising interest rates. That figure has been reached more quickly than thought, and he has had to back-track on the forward guidance almost straightaway. Interest rates are still at a record low of 0.5%. Just think: what got us into this financial crisis was what was then perceived as being the longest period of low interest rates for a long time—and they were then at 5%. Interest rates are 10 times lower than that, but still we cannot increase them, although the unemployment figures are near, or at, what the Governor of the Bank of England wanted them to be. They have been kept unchanged at 0.5%.

The real issue is public expenditure. Public expenditure used to be around the 40% mark. It was 42% of GDP in the early 1970s. Then under the previous Government it went up to almost 50% of GDP. By the late 1980s it was below 40%. We need to get that public expenditure down to 40%, because our tax-collecting ability historically has been around 38% to 39%. If we can get our public expenditure down to 40% we will have a balanced economy and will eliminate the deficit.

UK manufacturing is not dead, by any means. We are excelling in manufacturing. Our aerospace industry is the second largest in the world. Our automotive industry, of which I speak regularly, is flying. When Tata Motors bought Jaguar Land Rover in 2008 I spent a whole day at the Land Rover factory. Wow—it was impressive. I am due another visit, because my last one is already outdated. The company is now making more in profits than it paid for a business that nobody was interested in buying in 2008: that is how well it is doing. It is also exporting and creating employment.

We have heard the great news that Bentley is moving its 12-cylinder engine manufacturing from Volkswagen in Germany to Crewe in the UK. How wonderful is that? Rolls-Royce is manufacturing at Goodwood. Therefore, we have the best of the best quality—the best cars in the world—being manufactured here in Britain.

Our chemical industry is huge; our defence industry is huge; our electronics industry is huge; and so is our food and drink industry. I speak from my own experience. I mentioned yesterday that we were manufacturing a great deal in Europe. In fact, the majority of our production was in Europe some years ago and we decided to reshore to the UK because here we can produce world-class beer. We now produce in Burton upon Trent; we are winning award after award and exporting around the world. I am proud of that.

We have a plastics industry and a steel industry; we also have a textile industry, which we thought was dead but which is not dead at all. There are still almost 80,000 businesses employing 340,000 people and generating £11.5 billion of turnover.

What about the regions and the whole focus on London? We have a country where one big city is the capital and the financial capital and is much bigger than the second biggest city, Birmingham—let alone Manchester or anywhere else. If we look at a large country such as the United States, New York is big but you have Los Angeles, Chicago and lots of other big cities. If we look at another large country, India, there is Mumbai but also Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta and Delhi, which are huge cities in their own right. We have this one big city. I am very proud of London; it is the greatest of the world’s great cities. But how can we encourage business and employment in the regions? The answer is simple: we must encourage manufacturing. We cannot manufacture in London; we have to manufacture in the regions. That can create the jobs.

The Financial Times analysis tells a story in which the percentage of people on jobseeker’s allowance benefits dropped by more than 30% last year in places as varied as Oldham in the north, Stafford in the Midlands and the Suffolk coastal region. This is great news. If we can carry on in that vein, we will have growth and employment outside London.

Again, worries about lopsided economic growth are not new. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, talked about developments 50 years ago, at a time when the economy was also recovering after a period of stagnation.

The then Labour leader, Harold Wilson, complained in Parliament of a two-nations economy and said that,

“the Chancellor has to try to restrain the overheating which he sees in the South at a time when large areas in the North are still in the chill grip of his predecessor’s freeze”.

—[Official Report, Commons, 14/04/1964; col. 285.]

Those were the comments of Harold Wilson on Reginald Maudling’s 1964 Budget speech.

We should look at the great signs of success. We have already heard that Hitachi is to move its rail business headquarters from Japan to the UK, and that Bentley is to move from Germany to the UK. Companies from Japan and Germany, the pinnacles of high-tech manufacturing, are moving to the UK. This is fantastic. Hitachi says its move will expand the number of rail jobs to 4,000, which is excellent. I have already mentioned Jaguar Land Rover and Bentley. The Chancellor has promised to cut the costs of manufacturing to boost growth, and he has done it. He predicts that energy costs will go down by £7 billion. Again, that is excellent.

Immigration is one area where I fundamentally disagree with the Government. Their immigration policy has sent out the wrong signals around the world to foreign students and academics. That affects not just universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, where 30% of the academics are foreign. For example, more than 30% of the academics at Birmingham University are foreign. As I say, bad signals have been sent out, and the number of Indian foreign students is now plummeting, but we should look at the contribution Indians make to our economy. On Friday, I went to the celebrations for the principal of West Nottinghamshire College, who has been made a dame. She is the first Indian-born dame in 83 years. She came to this country as a young bride unable to speak English but today heads the most successful further education college in the UK, and probably one of the most successful in the world. That is the power of immigration.

The statistics show that Indians make a huge contribution to our economy. In 2013, Indian men topped the ethnicity employment table in the UK and Indian women came second. Indian men had the second lowest rate of unemployment—and so it goes on. One in seven companies is founded by a migrant entrepreneur. Migrants make a huge contribution to our economy and create jobs. Migrant entrepreneurs have been a benefit to this country.

In looking at overall business performance, we must not neglect SMEs. The Minister talked about all the Government’s initiatives. I was on the National Employment Panel for eight years and on the New Deal task force before that. SMEs account for 59% of private sector employment and 48% of private sector turnover. Within SMEs, small businesses account for 79% of employment and 69% of turnover. We need to encourage these small businesses to grow, because the argument about big companies not paying corporation tax misses the point. Yes, we would like them to pay more corporation tax, but that tax makes up only 8% of our tax take. Most of our tax take comes from the tax that is generated by employment—more than 50% comes from PAYE and NI-paying employees and NI-paying employers. The more jobs we create, the more tax we will generate, therefore we should encourage SMEs to grow.

I have suggested to the noble Lord, Lord Young, that we should have a competition in this country to sponsor staff from 100 companies to attend the Cranfield School of Management business growth programme or the University of Cambridge Postgraduate Diploma in Entrepreneurship. It costs £10,000 to attend these programmes. The businesses that send people to attend those programmes will grow faster than other businesses because we will be training our entrepreneurs to perform better and grow their businesses.

We need to go further on national insurance breaks. Ralf Speth, the chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover, said that the secret of his company’s success was innovation. UK Trade and Investment was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. Exports are crucial. The further we go down the route that I am suggesting of training our entrepreneurs, encouraging manufacturing in the regions and generating jobs, the more exports will follow. I have mentioned my own experience as an example of that.

To conclude, what is the purpose of business? I think that, yes, you want to create a product that people love, but you also want to create employment for the well-being of the people whom you employ. In every survey that asks people what is most important to them, they say family. What else is important to them? They say health. What else is important to them? They say their working life. If people do not work, they are not going to be happy. A happy country is a country with, ideally, full employment. We will never get to full employment, but at least let us try.

My Lords, the leading Cambridge historian, Dr Clare Jackson, says that politicians on both sides of the Scottish independence debate could learn from King James VI of Scotland, who also became King James I of England. He dedicated his life to creating a truly united kingdom that would see Scotland, England—including the Principality of Wales—and Ireland share more than just a crown. The main thing is that he engaged in a huge public relations exercise using emotive rhetoric, and he knew how to compromise. He made the first attempt at creating a new flag. Dr Jackson said:

“It shrinks the tendency to assume that everything happening now has never been thought of before”— a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth. She added:

“Now exactly 300 years after Queen Anne’s death, the 2014 referendum will decide if the settlement she made will last or if Scotland will once again become an independent country sharing a monarch with England, just as it did throughout the Stuart century”.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lang, for his excellent speech in leading this debate. We have heard all the arguments so far and we will continue to hear them. We have heard about Alex Salmond and his SNP’s wish list and the serious consequences. As the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, said, Scotland is tiny. It has 8.4% of the population of Britain and contributes 8.1% of the GDP. From the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, we heard about the famous Scots in every field imaginable, not just today but historically, always doing brilliantly. Scotland has so much that we need and it has so many hidden gems. Wearing my Cobra Beer hat, Heriot-Watt University very kindly gave me an honorary doctorate. The university has the International Centre for Brewing and Distilling, one of the three finest in the world, and it must remain not just Scottish but British.

Alistair Darling clearly pointed out that Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England, had said that,

“the failings of the Eurozone show that to have a successful monetary union you require fiscal and political union”.

I have said that time and time again. Mr Darling said that,

“the Governor’s judgement on currency unions is devastating for Alex Salmond’s currency plans. Why? Because the whole point of independence is to break the fiscal and political union that makes monetary union possible”.

Of course, Scotland has always had its own bank-notes—and long may they keep them.

Let us remind Alex Salmond about 2008. I have just returned from my annual week at the Harvard Business School. In March 2008, Alex Salmond made a speech at Harvard University and spoke about the “arc of prosperity” through Ireland, Iceland and Norway. He referred to,

“the lesson we draw from our neighbours in Ireland—the Celtic Tiger economy”.

He went on:

“With RBS and HBOS—two of the world’s biggest banks—Scotland has global leaders today, tomorrow and for the long-term”.

We are discovering the strength of that Scottish financial sector—but look at what London has done.

Let us keep this in perspective. In a currency union, Scotland has 10% of GDP and Britain has 90%. If it ever breaks up, we know who will call the shots. Losing the strength and security of the UK pound would have a profound impact on the Scots. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, as Advocate-General for Scotland, sent us a letter which clearly stated:

“The UK Government’s position is clear—Scotland benefits from being part of the UK, and the UK benefits from having Scotland within it”.

The letter gave a list of the “Top 20 Benefits of the UK”. He very clearly spelled out the Government’s stance on the matter.

One prediction following the assumption made by the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs was that it would result in Scotland accruing around 90% of oil revenues. Its report described this as the,

“economic bridge over which Scotland would pass to independence”,

and expected it to make up for all the loss of finances allocated by our Treasury under the Barnett formula. However, as has been said, the impact of prices in the oil market could just throw this, as could the length of time that oil will last. It would be a very unpredictable source of revenue.

Looking ahead, the university sector in Scotland is strong and we are proud of it. The Scottish Government are maintaining free access to higher education for Scots and people from the EU—except for people from England and Wales. In research funding, to this day, 15% of research for Scottish universities comes from UK charities. If Scotland breaks away, that will not last.

The Prime Minister has assured Mr Salmond that the reform of the Barnett formula, which gives Scots £1,364 per head more spending than the UK average, was “not on the horizon”. He did not say that it will never happen but Scotland has the assurance that that is not on the horizon. On 27 November 2013, YouGov published a poll which asked British citizens how they would vote—if they were able to—on whether Scotland should be an independent country. The response, by political party, was: Conservative, 65% no; Labour, 60% no; Liberal Democrat, 62% no; and even UKIP respondents voted 55% no. The response by gender was: males 57% no and females 54% no. It is overwhelming that the people of Britain, let alone the people of Scotland, do not want this.

Let us look back at history. Adam Smith, the great economic theorist and moral philosopher, never saw himself as Scottish. He was north British. Edinburgh, the Athens of the north, was a great centre of learning and at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment. The wonderful Balmoral Hotel, where I have stayed, was known as the North British Hotel until the 1980s.

I will draw on my experience in India. The partition of India into India and Pakistan was a huge mistake. It did not last. My father fought for the liberation of Bangladesh. The united India of 1947—despite many attempts by parts of India to break away—has stayed united, and it is stronger united. Scotland today has the best of both worlds, being an independent country but being part of the United Kingdom.

Any Government will have many priorities, but the top four are: first, the security of citizens, both external and internal. If Scotland breaks away, we have heard that defence will go for a six. The second and third priorities are health and education, which the Scots have anyway. The fourth is the economy, and Scotland would be far weaker by being outside the UK.

The key issues are not just practical but the emotional. King James played on the emotional to get unity, and the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, in her excellent maiden speech, said that she was equally proud to be both Scottish and British. My father’s regiment, the 5th Gurkhas shared battle honours with the Cameron and Gordon Highlanders. As a colonel, he made a pilgrimage to Inverness to visit the regiment because it meant so much. These are emotional identities.

In conclusion, my friend Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate, speaks of identity. We have multiple identities. I am proud to be a Zoroastrian Parsi; I am proud to be an Asian in Britain; I am proud to be Indian; and I am really proud to be British. In the same way, I think that the Scottish are proud to be Scots and proud to be British. David Torrance published a book entitled The Battle for Britain: Scotland and the Independence Referendum. This is not about Scottish independence; this is a battle for Britain and a battle for the United Kingdom, which must stay united.