Baroness Wheatcroft
Main Page: Baroness Wheatcroft (Crossbench - Life peer)
Baroness Wheatcroft (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, on securing this debate and opening it with such insights. There have been some excellent and wide-ranging speeches and, in particular, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Wyld on such a perceptive maiden speech. She is clearly going to be a great asset to the House.
We have heard about globalisation and its effect on jobs, but globalisation should be a force for good—a process by which the world is becoming increasingly interconnected, as a result of massively increased world trade and cultural exchange. Sadly, too often, it is not perceived that way, but seen as a negative and not working for the benefit of populations. This is not new. It is more than a decade since Samuel P Huntington, the American economist, coined the term “Davos Man”. This was meant as a critical term, symbolising those people who congregate in the ski resort every year to discuss what is wrong with the world and how they can put it right. Davos Man was the embodiment of the global elite.
More recently, David Goodhart, in his book, The Road to Somewhere, has drawn a different version of the global elite. He termed them the “Anywheres”, as opposed to the “Somewheres”. The Anywheres were the citizens of the world who made a lot of money at the expense of the Somewheres, people who were rooted in their community and suffering as a result of globalisation. This view permeates deep into the political world, of course. A senior politician quite recently said that if you were a citizen of the world, you were a citizen of nowhere; you did not even understand the concept of citizenship. If you were a citizen of the world, you were a rampant individualist with no care for anyone but yourself. Sadly, some people have given citizens of the world a bad reputation.
Nevertheless, I believe it is possible to be both a citizen of the world and a patriot, and that we need people with that global view to benefit our workforce generally and, more particularly, the workforces in countries that, for a very long time, have suffered. Global trade has been a force for good in many parts of the world and will continue to be so. It would be a great shame if our Government or others in the western world decided that, for the benefit of their own workforces—some of whom have undoubtedly suffered—they would close their doors and let the wider world suffer. We need to see global trade continuing. We also need to see the benefits being spread more fairly. Some changes in the global tax system, which I think now have some momentum behind them, may well bring that about.
Yesterday, the UN had a day’s major discussion on “The Future of Everything”—a broad subject. Sophia, a humanoid robot, was centre-stage, and the UN Deputy Secretary-General asked her what the UN could do to help people in many parts of the world who have no access to the internet or electricity. Sophia, very perceptively, said that:
“The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed”.
It needs to be.
Sophia’s well-informed response takes me to another area that people have been talking about today: technological change and, in particular, the future of work when artificial intelligence has such an impact. It will take over jobs. This may well be the first technological revolution that will not create jobs but destroy them. That is not a bad thing if it continues to create wealth. In the field of cybersecurity, for instance, artificial intelligence will be a great force for improvement. But it does mean that there will be people who will have to change the jobs that they do—perhaps many times, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, said. There will be a need for people to be adaptable and, as we have heard, to have soft skills.
One thing I find most rewarding about being in this House is the Lord Speaker’s programme, Peers in Schools. It is generally very uplifting to go into schools, but not always. At a fairly modern free school that I went to quite recently, the head teacher is striving hard and believes that he can get his pupils through their exams and to university if they want. His main concern was that they had no emotional intelligence, because they had no meaningful relationships with adults. Even more recently, I went to a school in Kent, where I learned that a neighbouring school with 1,000 pupils has more than 250 open child protection cases. If we are bringing up children in that sort of environment, they will not be fit for any workplace. There has to be change right at the bottom, in families and communities.