George Osborne: ‘Second-rate Britain’ Needs to Be More Like China

George Osborne in China

THE INDEPENDENT: Chancellor dismisses suggestions that China has a 'sweatshop' economy and wishes Britain would be more like the communist country

Britain is no longer great, is defeatist and unambitious and needs to be more like China, the Chancellor has said.

In an astonishing trashing of his country’s attitudes, George Osborne added that Britain had lost its “can do” approach and had been relegated to the status of a “second-rate power”.

He was speaking at the end of a five-day trip to China in which he had been awed by the speed and scale of China’s economic development.

Dismissing suggestions that China has a “sweatshop” economy, he said he wished Britain would be more like the communist country.

“I also feel a bit like, my God, we’ve really got to up our game as a country, and the whole of the West has to understand what is happening here in Asia,” the Daily Telegraph reported him as saying. » | Lewis Smith | Friday, October 18, 2013