I thought the talk she just gave was good. At least it is more positive now.
However, there is still pussy footing around the real issue which is work culture. The US just work longer hours and take far less holidays than we do. Compared to much of Europe, we do work quite hard, but not compared to many Asia countries and US, on average. If you want growth, you also need your population to simply work harder and I do not think the appetite for that is here. There has to be more of an incentive here to make work pay and to make more work pay more. The whole tax system disincentives additional work. No mention from her on the huge disincentives in the tax system.
Secondly, if you look at how eg the Swiss do things. They build a data centre but then use energy from the data centre to give it to locals for free. If you want local infrastructure projects to succeed and go through without much grumbling (we are a grumbling nation), then you have to offer the locals a concrete incentive like that. Let them all benefit in a very real way.
On the defined benefit pension scheme ploughing surpluses back. Again, unless pensions invest in British companies, then exactly how is that going to help. If they simply buy foreign stocks. Equity investment to British companies is what we need.
It seems to be yet again that positivity is good, but we need more of a buy-in from the whole population. Every single person needs to want to contribute and feel positive. And how do you achieve that? With the constant negativity everywhere and the grumbling. It is like we lost our self confidence as a nation.