In China the Growth is coming from deploying the enormous pool of cheap labour. If you're taking a peasant off the land, his productivity barely matters, it will still be an improvement. In the West, we don't have that vast pool of Labour, though perhaps redesigning our welfare states to make it a little less easy to claim benefits for life and a little less taxing to choose low-paid work might help.

This is why China and India can grow at 8-10% a year by deploying already developed techniques and technology to billions of people still currently using the ox-plough, which was cutting edge technology in Europe 700 years ago. In general, as Britain, Europe, North America, Much of the Pacific Rim are on the 'Technological frontier' there is no off-the-self technology to deploy to generate growth. We must instead do things ever better in order to generate productivity growth. Starting with spinning and weaving, leading to the Industrial revolution, doing things slightly more efficiently was an incremental process. There have been several technologies to change the world since then: the Steam engine for the first time freed productive energy from animal muscle (and in a few aplications, the water-wheel & windmill). Later the Internal combustion engine gave personal mobility to the masses. Air travel shrunk the world. The internet gave everyone the equivalent of British Library on their desks and later in their pocket.

I think we're on the cusp of another revolution in productivity. The driverless car. AutoNOMOS labs have trialled their car, 'Made in Germany', a VW Passat, on the public streets of Berlin. Google have also driven their driverless vehicle, a Prius round the streets of Nevada and California for hundreds of thousands of miles. This has been involved in just one accident, but it was being driven manually at the time. If you're looking long term, all those delivery drivers, taxi drivers and chauffeurs will lose their jobs to machines. Their Labour can then go and be used elsewhere, making society as a whole richer. But it's more than professional drivers. It's the commuter too. Imagine you can read, make phone calls or sleep while getting somewhere. With the UKs average commute at 45 minutes each way that's a lot of time freed up from doing a mentally taxing, boring, stressful and downright dangerous manual task. A machine WILL do it better, freeing you for work or leisure whilst travelling.

It is safe to assume that the driverless car will be safer than, say, an Italian or Frenchman driving at 80mph while texting his many mistresses. So there well be fewer road deaths, even in the UK where the standard of driving is reasonably high. There will be fewer accidents, meaning insurance will be cheaper, freeing that money up to be spent elsewhere. Fewer accidents means fewer people employed in the car insurance industry. The flow of traffic on arterial roads will become more laminar as fewer motorists over brake, change lanes and otherwise cause the stop-start traffic symptomatic of congestion. This will reduce stress, and reduce journey-times. The road's carrying capacity will be improved at a stroke meaning road maintenance & building gets more from existing infrastructure. It is likely that cars on motorways could safely drive bumper-to-bumper, saving enormously on fuel on long journeys further increasing capacity. Self-driving cars could drop you off in the town centre, park, then return when needed, freeing city centre land from car-parks to more productive or aesthetically pleasing uses and hopefully re-invigorating town centres.

But it's more than just better use of roads. Perhaps driverless cars will mean fewer people will bother owning one, freeing garage space for other uses. Instead perhaps fleets of cars will circulate before being summonsed by a phone call. Freed from the need to own and insure a car, people instead pay for journeys used. Each car is in use for a greater part of the day so capital currently employed sitting on drives and office car-parks for the vast majority of its useful life will be sweated more efficiently. Thus technological improvements lead to economic growth.

But in this case, it's more than economic growth. Commuting is an hour of a half of concentrated stress and misery for many people. A long commute is up there with divorce and bereavement for making people miserable. A short one is second only to a successful marriage in correlation with self-declared happiness, and way above riches. If cars can park themselves there will be fewer cars in a town centre at any one time, meaning towns can finally be built around people, not machines once more. Can the driverless car make us happier?

It will certainly represent a huge boon to those currently unable to drive. The old, epileptics, the Blind and those just simply incapable of driving (the French, for example). Or Maureen, who will finally be able to enjoy the freedom of door-to-door travel.


And as for the rest of us. Freed from the controls, we could relax, let our minds wander, read and arrive wherever it is we want to go, refreshed. If you're not driving you can travel without getting angsty that someone has slowed you down for 30 seconds. With no-one DRIVING their Audis or BMWs there will be fewer wankers (Cause or effect? I believe that these cars CAUSE people to become utter dicks while behind the wheel). I cannot see a single negative effect of this overdue technological development. Please don't tell me you ENJOY day-to-day driving? If you're a petrol-head, go to a race-track, where driving is as it should be -fun. There are plenty about.

You can think through other examples: an invention, an innovation, an improvement to an existing process, a time-saving device. Think of the knock on benefits in time or other resources saved, which can be used elsewhere. That is how our economy is going to grow. The current financial crisis is noise. The signal is the result of hundreds of years of freedom to come up with and develop ideas. And that has not stopped, nor will it, so long as we retain a capitalist, free-market economy and intellectual freedom which allows, celebrates and rewards those whose ideas make our lives a little better.

This morning, feebly groping for good news after a disastrous conference, Leicester MP Liz Kendall pointed to some You Gov data from June, which suggested that Labour enjoy a 19% lead on "party closest to women's voters & understands their views". This is the desperate data-mining which is common currency on the left, so I called both her and Chris Williamson, Labour MP for Derby North, who retweeted, on it.

is that the sound of a barrel being scraped? How far behind are Labour on the economy? How's Ed doing?

They both responded. Chris Williamson MP

@VeryBritishDude claims @leicesterliz & I are scraping the barrel for pointing out Labour has 13 point poll lead over Tories amongst women

of course, Labour didn't then nor now have "a 19% lead amongst women". Their lead was smaller than it was for men, a FACT an MP like Williamson will have known. Liz Kendal too made the same, stupid, incorrect point.

@VeryBritishDude views & concerns of 50% of electorate 'scraping barrel'? Enough said...

First this is old data, and it's an occasional question. However EVEN AT THE TIME, the labour lead amongst women was SMALLER than it was amongst men. So the claim that the Tories, and by extension, me are not concerned by women's issues is ridiculous. Of course, Labour, the party of identity politics is going to have a lead amongst the kind of people for whom women's issues (which Labour probably think mean abortion and childcare, issues on which I'm probably closer to Labour than the Tories). However the Tories undeniably enjoy a stronger position amongst women than men, at the time, and now. So by women's OWN responses, the Tories better answer Women's concerns then they do for men.

This kind of 'pick a leading question which gives a Labour lead, extrapolate wildly and then suggest the Tories are anti this issue' is common on the left. Indeed Posts headlined 'polls suggest voters reject Tory cuts on ...." accounts for about half the posts on Liberal Conspiracy. Such "analysis" is fine when a hack like Sunny Hundal indulges himself in it. however this is a flagrant abuse of statistics, or to put it another way, lying.

I expect better from my elected representatives, even Labour ones, and wouldn't mind an apology from Mr Williamson and Ms Kendall, for suggesting that I'm sexist or Anti-women for suggesting that people, women included, think 'the economy' and the performance of a potential PM (which, unfortunately for Labour, Ed Miliband currently is) to be a more important a question right now than 'women's issues', about which YouGov can't even be bothered to ask regularly.

So. Which is it Chris & Liz, Lying or Ignorant?

If you want one paragraph to sum up the unprincipled evil of Labour, This one on Labour-Uncut by Dan Hodges

"You begin by deciding where you want to position yourself politically. You then develop a policy framework to support that positioning. And finally you construct a philosophical and intellectual narrative to define your programme as you sell it to the electorate"

... is it.

Right now, the EuroSceptics across Europe are enjoying a moral ascendancy. Peter Oborne was able to openly ridicule a Eurocrat on Newsnight to the extent that Amadeu Altafaj-Tardio stormed off, with Oborne receiving barely a ticking off from Paxman. The Germans are close to refusing to pay the bills, the Italians are reliant on the ECB for solvency and Ireland, Portugal and especially Greece have seen their economies destroyed by an inappropriate currency union. From his Spectator essay last week

Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse

This credibility was hard-won. The BBC, The FT, the CBI and even the Tory party were all infiltrated by extreme Euro-fanatics who painted those sceptical of the project as a Lunatic fringe. Fortunately, the Fleet-street Newspapers knew which way the British public felt. By the skin of our teeth, the UK was kept out of the Euro. For the UK the price was the credibility of the Tory party and 13 years of Labour idiocy. All reasonable people, even the Leader of the Liberal Democrats and at least one of their former leaders who argued strenuously for Britain to ditch the pound, are now on record as saying the Euro will not be suitable "for the foreseeable future". The sceptics have been utterly vindicated.

It would be unwise to dent this credibility by suggesting things as "inevitable" such as Greek withdrawal or a currency collapse, which aren't. The ECB, in common with other money-issuing central banks, can in final analysis, print enough money to meet any and all liabilities. The Eurozone as a whole is in considerably better fiscal shape than the USA or Japan. The UK despite the advantages of a long maturity debt profile is STILL running a 10% deficit, and is catching up fast with Germany & France's debt as a percentage of GDP. The question of whether the Eurozone stays together is ultimately one of political will. And there seems no chink in the Armour of the European political class's will to defy their people, people whom it should be remembered are not yet voting en mass for deeply Euro sceptic parties. Euro sceptics must remember that most people really don't think "Europe" a big issue. Not big enough to change their vote. Until they think it is, they will tend to vote for the Status Quo, or allow themselves to be led by the political class on an esoteric issue of which they have little understanding.

This is why I believe the Euro will survive this crisis, intact. Enough money will be printed to keep all the nations together, only Greece and then possibly Portugal & Ireland will default. Financial crises come around once every 10 years or so. The next one will probably not affect the EU, so at a guess, the Eurozone will not face another significant challenge for a couple of decades. In the mean-time, the growth-denying aspects of the way the Eurozone is structured will fuel Euro sceptic parties across the EU, who will have received a boost from this crisis. The next crisis may find traction in a more skeptical political class. Or it may not.

Rather than indulging in wishful thinking, by saying "the end of the EU is nigh", we have to CONTINUE to make the arguments. Events are not yet going to do it for us. The end of the disaster for economic growth and democracy that is the European Union is unfortunately some way off. We cannot pat ourselves on the back just yet.

Despite almost universally glum economic projections, infinitesimal economic growth, inflation, unemployment, falling wages and terrible outlook, only You Gov, who weight Mirror/Daily Record readers double their responses in their online panel, now have Labour showing a significant lead. The rest show Labour at best neck and neck with the Conservatives. Labour have lost their Scottish Fastnesses to the Scottish Nationalists. The Tories are making headway in Wales, and Labour no-longer exists at all south of the Severn/Wash line save for a couple of pockets in London.

Labour represents almost no-one in this country who pay the taxes that keep the country afloat. They're mistrusted by the elctorate on the economy and are seen as the party of benefit recipients, immigrants and the Public sector unions. Labour's leader, Ed Miliband is risible, even less popular than Gordon Brown at the height of his unpopularity. Only the Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls is more universally disliked.

At the conference, Miliband said "I am not Tony Blair" He paused, waiting for the cheers. What happened was that the assorted brothers in the hall hissed and booed at the name of Labour's most successful ever leader. This is not a party which wants power. They want to enjoy the economic equivalent of smearing themselves in faeces, in opposition by opposing economic sanity at each turn.

Just about the only thing which could possibly save Labour now is a complete collapse of the Coalition's economic policy. That is possible, but unlikely. (If you vote Labour, and want to take issue with this assessment, please, bugger off. I'm not interested in your economic brain-fart, any more than I would be interested in Halle Berry's views on the importance of a decent forward defensive stroke). Even if we get a double dip recession, the economy will in all likelihood be recovering nicely by the time the next election hoves into view. In any case, global financial events are behind the slow-down. Just as Gordon Brown was not blamed (rightly) for the recession which Brown is judged to have handled deftly, the electorate do blame Labour for the cuts. The charge that Labour spent too much in the good times, leaving us vulnerable when the crunch came, has stuck. The electorate have surprisingly long memories.

Coming out of the Labour conference was no real, honest admission that they overspent and left the country unprepared for the recession when it came. Indeed whilst Shadow Cabinet members mouthed the need for deficit reduction, no-one really did so with the enthusiasm necessary to achieve so hard a political end, and the talk from the stage was all about the "savagery" or the "callousness" of the coalition's economic plans. With this attitude, Labour are just not, and will not be trusted on the economy before the election.

Then there is the Boundary review, which I reckon will go through, which removes much of Labour's inbuilt (unfair) advantage, as will individual voter registration which removes the opportunity for Labour to farm votes in ethnic minority communities. Finally the incumbency advantage will be behind the Tories.


The fact is Labour's polling is boosted by the fact that saying something to a pollster when times are tough, as now, is a cheap way of telling the Government "I'm unhappy". Mike Smithson of Political Betting.com believes that Leader approval ratings are a better guide to the future electoral success of parties than the standard "if there was an election tomorrow..." question, as voters in an election are looking for Prime-Ministers. If he's right, Labour's toast.

On the Today program, Jim Naughtie asked Ed Miliband "Why do people find you weird?" There is just no way Labour can win an election with such an implausible twat at the helm. Ed Miliband: My favourite Labour leader since Gordon Brown.