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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: We are going to take a look through the business pages of the Sunday papers and I am joined by the Director General of the British Chambers of Commerce, John Longworth, a very good morning to you Mr Longworth. Now we have a lot to discuss, particularly with the party conference season well underway and a lot emanating from those which directly affect businesses. The first story you’ve chosen is on the front page of the Telegraph, reflecting an article by Chris Grayling.

JOHN LONGWORTH: I’ve picked out three stories, this is one of them which is stop the clobbering of the rich. It really is indicative of a whole range of stories in the press this morning around Labour’s policy on fairness and standard of living but what it says to me is a couple of things. One is first of all, all of our political class, all three leaders – and we’ll see what the Tories do next week – are focusing on lots of things that are not to do with the central issue and I’d like to see the leadership of the parties talking about economic growth and the economy because everything else depends on it. If we don’t get economic growth and we don’t perform well as a nation …

DM: So what you have to hear then is this about infrastructure and all the rest of it rather than who’ll get taxed more?

JL: We ought to be talking about the size of the cake not how we divide it up and making the size of the cake bigger is fundamentally important. If we want the NHS, if we want education, welfare, pensions, defence, we’ve got to pay for them so we’ve got to grow the economy and we’re at a stage where growing the economy is a very vital …

DM: But coming out of the Labour conference, which has led Chris Grayling to write that article, is the sense that there is a divide growing here and the Lib Dems are on the Labour side as well when they’re saying how do you define rich people? Fifty, sixty thousand pounds a year? That’s what that article is addressing. Do you see that as being the right approach or are you saying that there will be benefits for all even if the very rich get even richer?

JL: We’ve got to make sure we have fairness and that everybody’s on board but actually making the cake bigger is much more important than how it’s divided up. The sort of sums we are talking about here, these are all working people, even up to £150,000, are not the really rich, the really rich are transnational, so concentration on these things is not necessarily going to be good for anybody and we really want to see the party leaders talking about the economy. It will be interesting to see as we go through these conferences whether the leaders actually talk about growth in the economy because certainly at the Lib Dems they didn’t. We’ll see whether Ed Miliband does.

DM: So you’re keeping an eye on Mr Miliband, okay. The next story, Mr Longworth, this is about RBS plans rejected, what to do with RBS?

JL: This is very interesting again. This story is all about what to do with RBS and we’ve seen …

DM: They want to hive off the rotten assets.

JL: Hive off the rotten assets, create a good bank that can then start lending to the economy and we’re spending a lot of time discussing what we should do with RBS, just as in fact we’ve had story after story after story over the last five years about the wrongdoing of bankers and whether they’re going back to their old ways and so on. The City is very important to the country, make no mistake about it but we really need to have a solution to getting access to finance for businesses in the UK and actually having businesses able to get the money that they need to grow now we’re in the growth phase is crucially important if we’re going to have a sustained growth.

DM: I’ve asked this question for the last five, six, seven years – okay, we control RBS and you’re talking about getting money to small and medium sized businesses, they’re not getting it so just tell them to do it.

JL: It’s one solution but we are spending an awful lot of time discussing this, discussing the privatisation of Lloyds Bank and actually the government have created a business bank which is not yet operating and what we really need to see is very quickly that business bank up and running with relationships with actual business customers underwritten by the Bank of England and actually lending to businesses. They’ve gone through credit easing, they’ve gone through quantitative easing and funding for lending and none of them have worked.

DM: An interesting point, they’ve kind of missed the ball on that one. John Longworth, we must end it there, thank you very much indeed for taking us through some of the business stories there in the Sunday papers.