The House of Commons library has compiled figures to show that it is small, not large, companies that produce employment growth in the economy. This should not be news to anyone although sadly it is. For it is small companies which provide almost all of the forward impetus of the economy. This is true everywhere and always:

Small firms have created ten times more jobs than the big businesses who are lobbying to keep Britain inside the EU's single market, an MP revealed last night.

Tory backbencher Charlie Elphicke said the figures – compiled by the independent House of Commons library - nailed the CBI's 'single market lies'.

The pro-EU business group argues it is vital for the economy that the UK stays inside the tariff-free single market.

...

The figures show small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have created 3.4 million new jobs in the private sector in the past 15 years.

Big businesses have created 323,000 over the same period, according to a new analysis of the Government's Business Population Estimates 2015.

This is true not just of employment. It is also true of innovation - as in the old joke that science proceeds one funeral at a time. The economy advances, productivity increases, one bankruptcy at a time.

New technologies are created, new technologies are adopted, largely through firm exit from the market and firm entry to it. Thus the entire system itself advances not through those large companies continuing to exist, but by their death from the competition bubbling up underneath them.

This is not a point specific to Brexit or the EU argument of course, but it is relevant to it. It's the entire and whole reason why we want a lightly regulated economy. Regulation aids incumbents as they are the people with the size and heft to be able to deal with the overhead of said regulation. It is only via a low regulation environment that we leave the room for the small companies to pop up into and so drive that economy forward to the ever greater enrichment of us all.

The relevance of the EU or Brexit to this being that we do all believe that we can transform the EU into a low regulation economy, right?

Right?