Let me take you back to a world some of you have probably never known, a time when going on holiday didn’t mean loading your Kindle with trashy novels and smugly Instagramming the view from your sun lounger.
Back in those dark ages, political careers were not ended by insanely fast-moving mob rages on Twitter, and bankers weren’t debating whether Bitcoin would ultimately threaten their business model. Nor was Hillary Clinton suggesting that a “sharing economy” – making ends meet by renting your home or your spare room to strangers through Airbnb, turning your car into an Uber cab, generally sweating whatever assets you’ve got – may be slowly destroying good, solid reliable jobs.
And none of this was happening because none of these things had yet been invented; most people had probably never heard of fracking or 3D printing either. And if you haven’t already guessed, then the year we’re talking about is 2005, the last time Labour managed to get itself elected.
That’s how fast technology is changing public and private lives; that’s the speed at which the world turns. And that’s why it’s no longer OK for politicians not to get the internet. If Labour wants to promise good jobs and great public services on a tight budget in 2020 – and if it doesn’t, God only knows how it expects to be elected – then it’s got to show that it understands how this wave of technological change will both help and hinder those aims. Because otherwise it’s basically trying to build a house in a hurricane while not really grasping what a brick does.
You can’t reform policing without considering whether recorded crime is falling, at least partly because it’s moving online, into a world of identity theft and increasingly sophisticated bank fraud and live-streamed child abuse perpetrated to order overseas.
You can’t tackle the radicalisation process without understanding that it’s moved on from mosques into suburban bedrooms, where British teenagers talk direct to Islamic State fighters via messaging apps you’ve probably never heard of (and to which security services will increasingly demand access).
You can’t champion social justice unless you get that as life shifts online millions of poorer Britons without internet access will struggle to do the most basic things and risk becoming poorer and more excluded than ever. And you certainly won’t save the NHS without investing in technology that keeps patients out of hospital.
Imagine diabetics and cardiac patients routinely checking their own insulin levels or blood pressure or weight via devices that send data straight to their GP’s computer so they can be monitored without setting foot in a clinic. This is the “internet of things”, where connected devices talk to each other. And the technology is already here. It might sound uncomfortably Big Brotherish, but it could save billions by keeping the chronically sick out of doctors’ surgeries and – if all this data allowed GPs to anticipate and avoid medical emergencies such as heart attacks and strokes – out of hospital beds. When over two-thirds of primary and acute budgets now go on the chronically ill, that’s close to the holy grail of cutting spending without punishing the poor.
Just before the last election, the digital entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox pointed out that the choice on offer was basically between less spending and even less spending; but it wasn’t, she argued, “as simple as we are being told”. If only politicians weren’t so scared of technology it could, she felt, be harnessed to provide decent services and invest in staff all for less money.
That’s not as painless as it sounds: back-office jobs would surely be slashed, and the nature of doctors’ or teachers’ jobs might change radically. But it could be the beginning of an economically credible alternative to crude austerity.
Doing routine stuff more cheaply is, however, just the start of it. Digital technology excels at opening up expert knowledge to everyone – say, allowing all of us to Google our symptoms before seeing the GP – but we’re barely beginning to explore its potential role in education. Should we still be encouraging students to pile up debt by going away to conventional universities, or could online courses – set and marked by tutors but followed at home – provide a good-enough alternative?
But the really intriguing thing the internet can do is bring together people who otherwise wouldn’t have met. That sounds frivolous until you think about its application to stubborn social problems conventional policy is rubbish at solving: endemic loneliness, fragmenting communities, the struggle to break into elite professions from outside.
Backr is a small, London-based social network connecting working people with jobless ones, inspired by the fact that four out of five British job vacancies still aren’t openly advertised – making work easier to find if you’ve already got it. The social entrepreneur Hilary Cottam, who helped found it, sees Backr as a digital version of what might once have been pub gossip about who’s hiring: something enormously time-consuming to rebuild in real life but relatively easily replicated online.
It’s not that the Labour leadership contest has totally ignored this debate. Yvette Cooper has met Lane Fox to discuss ways of using technology to boost productivity in public services; Liz Kendall has done thoughtful work on keeping people out of hospital. But nobody has yet managed to bring it all to life.
It’s traditional to blame the candidates for failing to capture the imagination, but having sat through more than enough Labour hustings now, I wonder. Ask the same questions over and over again, as audiences do – how will you reconnect with the working classes? Can you regain economic credibility? What about immigration? – and, unsurprisingly, you get the same answers.
This isn’t the fault of party activists, who are just doing as everyone said they should and trying to understand why Labour lost. But two months in, we’re frankly scraping the barrel for insights, and the candidates are starting to bore even themselves. Maybe changing the questions wouldn’t elicit more exciting answers – but hell, by this stage it’s not like there’s anything to lose.
