An insight into what keeps Gordon Brown up at night:
In the last eighteen months the doubling of oil prices is just one visible sign of the scale and speed of global economic change: Asia's manufacturing output now greater than Europe; Asia now consuming 30 per cent of world oil and China almost 10 per cent; once only responsible for 10 per cent of world manufactured exports, Asia and developing countries will soon produce 50 per cent. On its own china already produces 30 per cent of the world's television sets, 50 per cent of cameras, 70 per cent of photocopiers, even 90 per cent of children's toys - and perhaps soon 60 per cent of all the world's clothing.
At no point since the industrial revolution has the restructuring of global economic activity been so dramatic; at no point has there been such a shift in production, Asia moving from the fringes to the centre of the new world economic order; and at no point in our whole history has the speed and scale of technological change been so fast and pervasive.
Think back only to 1997: no digital TV, no DVDs, no video phones, no broadband, virtually no texting. Just eight years ago: only ten per cent people were on the internet and only ten per cent had mobile phones.
So if in only eight years since 1997 we have seen such dramatic technological and scientific change, then think of the impact in the next eight years of technology on occupations, industries, businesses and jobs.
And this is not, as is sometimes said, a race to bottom with China and India that can be met by protecting our home industries, shutting foreign goods out, and hoping the world will go away.
Because they aspire not to race us to the bottom but to be high skill, high technology economies, China and India are now turning out more engineers, more computer scientists, more university graduates - four million a year, more than the whole of Europe and America combined. And so the answer lies not in protectionism, hoping Asia will go away, but in radically upgrading our skills, science and technology.
Quote is from the Chancellor's speech today to the TUC.
