The conversation going on in front of me was such an outrageous cliché that I didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or to interrupt it. Maybe I should have done both.

The well spoken couple were discussing the topic that has become our national obsession: immigration. In particular, they were dragging out that tired old rubbish about “them” coming over here and taking “our” jobs.
This dreary recital of imagined wrongs was taking place in the checkout queue at a well known high-street store. The self-service checkout queue.

Now, I’m sure operating a supermarket till must be one of the most tedious jobs going. But it is a job. Or at least it was. On that particular day in that particular store there was one till operated by a human being and five or six automated checkouts with a computerised voice thanking you for shopping at…

Had their brains not been similarly automated, the anti-immigrant ranters in front of me might have noticed the obvious. That the people who used to run those tills hadn’t had their jobs taken by immigrants – they’d been taken by technology.

Well, you can’t stop the march of progress, you know. And in some ways it’s good not to.

I’m not sorry that children aren’t still being sent down mines and up chimneys, or that cities like Liverpool and Bristol aren’t still thriving on the slave trade. (Although child labour and slavery are still rife in some parts of the world, but that’s another story.)

But there are better and worse ways of managing change, and I’m afraid we’re not managing it very well at all just now.

It’s over 30 years since I was out on strike in a dispute over what was then called new technology in the newspaper business. The kind of jobs we were trying to preserve then are now history.

It’s more than twice that long since my parents were involved in a Labour Party working group looking forward to an era of greater automation. The optimistic post-war idea was that with less work to do, everyone would have more leisure time to enjoy.

The danger was always that what work there was would be unequally shared out. That some people would be overworked, while others had no work at all. Which is, of course, exactly what came about.

And not, I think, by chance or mistake. It suits the entrepreneur capitalist class to have a large pool of unemployed labour available, to keep down the wages of those in work.

That is why the captains of industry tend to be in favour of immigration. Though I’m sure in some cases kind-heartedness, human decency and the honest enjoyment of cultural exchange come into it too.

But the question that inspired Mum and Dad in the 1940s, and vexed us in the ’80s, remains at least as vital today. How should society manage a world in which more and more jobs are taken over by machines?

Bill Gates, who became the world’s richest person by owning of one of the companies responsible – Microsoft – has an idea about this. On the face of it, it’s not a bad idea, either.

He suggests that the robots which take over people’s jobs (presumably including self-service checkouts) should be taxed like human workers.

“Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things,” Gates said in a recent interview. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

I assume he means the robot’s owners – unless he’s contemplating a higher level of artificial intelligence than is out there yet.

Elon Musk, the high-tech guru and forward-thinking boss of the car and alternative energy company Tesla, has a different solution to the problem. “With automation, there will come abundance,” Musk says. “Almost everything will get very cheap. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better.”

And that, he believes, means people will have to be given a univeral basic income. Not – as at present – given benefits as long as they are “looking for work”, but paid not to work. It’s a crucial difference.

As Musk points out, there is a psychological cost too. “If there’s no need for your labor, what’s your meaning?” he asks. “Do you feel useless? That’s a much harder problem to deal with.”

I wouldn’t put money on America being among the first to deal properly with either the psychological or the economic problem, even though Musk has been named as a special advisor to President Trump. And I can’t imagine Britain being in the vanguard either. Meanwhile I’ll go on using the staffed till while I can.

So goodbye 2016, and good riddance. Let’s pray 2017 turns out rather better – but don’t bet your house on it.

A year ago I wrote here: “Amid all the apocalyptic gloom, there is a chance – just a chance – that 2015 will be remembered as the year things started to get better. The year the world looked over the edge into the abyss … and stepped back.”

Oh dear. I could hardly know then that the popular response to reaching the cliff’s edge would not be a mere step forward, but an enthusiastic leap.

I wasn’t predicting Brexit, or a Trump presidency, but then, who was? I did, in fact, describe Trump exactly 12 months ago as “frontrunner” – because that’s what the polls said at the time – but I never imagined that would last.

History is full of events, characters and direction changes that appear inevitable in hindsight but were unpredicted, unpredictable, beforehand. I fear 2016 was one such landmark year.

Not that I entirely believe all the talk – dangerous talk – about the rise of “populism”.

Why should racism, sexism, nationalism, war-mongering violence be any more popular, or “populist”, than more valuable values? 

I’m pretty sure they’re not. The danger is that the nasty parties, having achieved slender, even debatable, victories, have taken not only power but dominance of the public debate. To criticise, even to question, their position as victors is to be shouted down, belittled, threatened.

They claim to be “the people”, as if everyone else weren’t people. But to describe the self-styled “alt-right” (a.k.a. fascists) as populist is an insult to the populace.

It’s worth remembering that Hillary Clinton, for all her considerable faults, actually got 2.9million more votes than Donald Trump. 

And that however much the government – and, shamefully, the supposed opposition – may talk of “a clear mandate” or “the will of the people”, only about a quarter of the British people actually voted to leave the European Union.

It wasn’t the people that got us into these fine messes. It was a combination of misguided leadership, misled electorates, and serious flaws of democratic process.

We are where we are. But exactly where that may be remains unclear.

Even one of the greatest of American thinkers, Noam Chomsky, appears to have had crystal ball failure. His thoughts are generally too sophisticated and complex to summarise easily, but I’ll try.

Before the US election, he said a vote for Trump would be “a vote for the end of the world” – or at least for the end of life as we know it. Irreparable damage to the biosphere, that frighteningly thin layer of soil, water and air that supports all life.

A few days after the election, Chomsky found a brighter side to look on. He suggested then that four years of Trump might prove so devastating for America in the short term that longer-term prospects for a different kind of leadership would inevitably be improved.

It may be a slender hope. It may also be the only one we have right now. But we know how inevitability has a habit of shifting its ground. And how unreliable New Year predictions are.
 
 


A 'healthy' demand for warplanes and bombs
 
 
Round about the time Boris Johnson was putting his foot in it by telling the truth about Saudi Arabia and its “proxy wars”, a business conference was taking place in Palm Beach, Florida.

In it, investors were assured that things were looking up. That the Saudis’ various adventures – and the Syrian war which has brought such horrors to Aleppo and elsewhere – were yielding what one company vice president called “indirect benefits”.

Bruce Tanner of Lockheed Martin told the Credit Suisse conference that events in Syria provided “an intangible lift because of the dynamics of that environment and our products in theatre”.

This is not a play. What he calls a theatre, the rest of us call a war zone. Which is precisely where his firm makes its profits.

Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor jet was much in evidence this past summer in the skies over East Anglia, despite its “stealth” label. Demand for it and the new F-35 is very healthy in the Middle East just now. Healthy in a business sense, that is, not in a health sense.

At the same conference, head honchos for other military manufacturers were upbeat too. Raytheon’s CEO Tom Kennedy reported “a significant uptick” for “defence solutions across the board in multiple countries in the Middle East”. 

“It’s all the turmoil they have going on,” he explained, “whether the turmoil’s occurring in Yemen, whether it’s with the Houthis, whether it’s occurring in Syria or Iraq, with Isis.”

It’s an ill wind, and all that. And it’s not just the Yanks making a killing.

We may not share the Americans’ insane attitude to guns in our own homes and streets. But we still get a significant slice of our national income from making and flogging weapons for use elsewhere.

Britain is now officially the world’s second largest arms exporter. Which is why Boris got so roundly ticked off for upsetting the Saudis, now the world’s largest arms importer.

Doesn't it just make you proud to be British, and glad that we're "taking back control"?