Welcome to Sharp Talk.

This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Will Hutton.

Will Hutton is a columnist for the Observer and the Newspapers.

He's principal of Hartford College, Oxford, and is the chairman of the Big Innovation Center. Will, I'd like to talk to you about many, many things.

We haven't got that much time.

But first of all, your take on the current state of the British economy in these strange pre-Brexit times we're living in.

There is a chill settling on the British economy.

It's getting chillier by the quarter. You can see it in multiple

ways. You can see it in the squeeze on real wages. You can see it in the refusal of exports to respond to the big fall in the exchange rate.

You can see it in the residential and commercial property markets.

You can see it in stagnating investment.

You can see it in stubbornly frozen productivity and

and 2020 when real wages will not have increased.

This is not a happy picture.

You paint a pretty bleak picture, but just try and be done that good.

It's not all bad news.

It means Britain still has relatively low unemployment. We're still a major

recipient of foreign indirect investment, so it's not all bad news, is it? I don't see being a recipient

of foreign direct investment if it's your company's being bought by other companies as a sign of strength, necessarily.

I don't, of course, you welcome foreign direct investment.

But one of the reasons why Britain has been the third biggest country in the world after the United States and China,

as a recipient of FDI,

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