British Prime Minister in waiting and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown said that India is set to create 25% of extra jobs or an estimated 200 million jobs by 2020 which will be more than the numbers created in the US, Europe, and China put together.

Brown said that India was the UK’s third largest investor after the US and Japan with 60% of Indian foreign direct investment (FDI) going to the UK and 500 hundred Indian companies now operate in the UK with 50 of them listed in the London Stock Exchange. He also highlighted that his nation was the fifth largest investor in India. Bilateral trade had grown at an impressive 20% growth and has doubled in the last five years to £8 billion annually and he expected this figure to double by 2010 and quadruple by 2020.

However, Brown said that there much more that can be done in bilateral relations. Asserting his intention to keep London as the world’s largest, most diverse and innovative, and most open and well regulated capital market, Brown said his nation’s banks and insurance firms wanted India, as one of the engines of global growth, to view Britain as a location of choice.

Delivering the keynote speech at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) “CII Partnership Summit 2007,” he strongly supported India’s bid for a permanent seat in the UNSC and applauded New Delhi for being the third largest UN peacekeeping force in the world. He also noted that both nations had suffered tremendously due to terrorist activities and reaffirmed his philosophy that terrorism should not be identified as “anti-Americanism” and that his nation will “stand full-square against all terrorism and murderous extremists” preaching Islamist ideologies. UK, he said, has doubled its investment in security and the two nations should work together as part of a “coherent global effort” in military, police, and intelligence sharing activities.