It is said that the military is always prepared to fight the last war and never the next. In the economic domain the same is true of politicians, who are generally at least a generation or two out of date. In Britain in 1913, there were 1.3 million miners, meaning that almost one in 10 men were working in the coal industry. By the early 1980s, there were less coal miners than people employed by Japanese inward investors in Britain, yet in terms of the political debate it would have been impossible to tell.

The same is true of the fishing industry, whose demise has been as comprehensive as that of mining, the two together making that wonderful Tory sound bite -- not that it would have been called that then -- "It takes some skill for the government of an island built on coal and surrounded by fish to organize a simultaneous shortage of both."

Manufacturing today, at one and the same time, is either transferring its operations to the low-wage, high-skill parts of the globe or substituting capital for labor in high-technology investment that empties factories of life and people. Service industries are little better. When you phone to make your airline reservation, you are as likely to be dealing with someone in Bangalore as Birmingham.