Long-Bailey is right – let’s use tech to make Manchester and Britain the workshop of the world once again

Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party have already transformed the nature of debate in British politics. Now Rebecca Long-Bailey, shadow secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy, has called for a transformation of our national conversation about technologyi n a vision so bold that it has echoes of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.

In a speech at the Labour conference Long-Bailey, this rising star of the British left’s politics, has called for the country “to harness the fruits of the extraordinary changes that are coming.”

This, she has argued, will stop Britain’s heritage as a proud industrial nation from being consigned to “the dustbin of history.” Once upon a time, her home city of Manchester served as a “workshop of the world” but now Britain has “the most regionally imbalanced economy in Europe.”

These days, almost half of Britain’s economic output comes from London and the south east, with the proud city of Manchester now more synonymous with football than with factories.

Technology though can serve as the great equaliser in this whole new ball game, as we stand on what Long-Bailey describes as “the fourth industrial revolution.” Even if the pace of change might be dizzying, technology has the power to transform the life of every British citizen, if utilised for the many and not the few. For this to happen though, there needs to be a programme of education allied to the harnessing of technology’s affordances.

Distancing ourselves ever further from our major European neighbours and soon-to-be potential competitors, Britain has allowed its industries and the skills of its workforce to decline over recent decades. Such a situation cannot be eradicated overnight or blamed on migrants. Similarly, the halcyon days are gone of communities building lives around the staple work of local coal mines or textile mills. Instead of a single job and skill set providing sustenance from the cradle to the grave, the future is one of education taking on that role.

The Labour Party has promised to establish a new national education service that empowers every citizen and looks after the needs of society from the cradle to the grave. Their hope is that by doing so, they can equip every single person in the country to obtain the skills they need to survive in a modern digital economy in which automation is certain to play an ever increasing role. That though can serve as a source of opportunity rather than threat if it is again harnessed properly, with a vision of bettering society.

Future developments in automation are likely to have a massive impact on the way we work today, with some experts predicting the risk of mass unemployment. However, Long-Bailey has argued that such developments can be used for the benefit of society as a whole, rather than creating an increase in “monopoly profits for the few, and increased exploitation for the many.”

This can be achieved by changing the nature of learning in the workplace, and investing more heavily in research and development. Tomorrow’s workplace learning is not going to be a series of training sessions in the use of technological gadgets that go out of fashion every six months, such is the speed of change. Rather, it’s going to be achieved by fusing together the powers of the human mind and machines that have reached the level of doing cognitive and non-routine work. Yes, we now have machines well on the way to thinking and feeling for themselves!

Though such information might not be new for the scientific community, broader society still needs to grasp this coming reality. We need a tech-savvy workforce, and one way of achieving this is to draw upon ideas from teacher education in the use of technologies. Today’s citizens need to be given a vision and set of guiding principles for the use of technology in the workplace rather than simply training in the application of tools to tasks. Rather than being put out of work by machines, people can use their time and their minds more creatively and productively to serve society. For that to happen, workers need to be educated, independent and trusted to work without exploitation or micro management.

Through applying principles of caring, sharing and learning we can create the conditions where great cities such as Manchester can once again take their place as workshops of the world.

We can develop new ways of working with technology where the fourth industrial revolution is one defined by people as much as machines. And for those who doubt it can happen, think of all that was made possible by William Caxton’s printing press in the 15^th century, and all that has changed since then as we move ever deeper into the digital age. We may have moved from ink to HTML, just as people moved from hieroglyphics to handwriting, but through the changes we still have words and communication between human beings residing at the heart of our actions.

Paul Breen is a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster. His Developing Educators for the Digital Age book is published this autumn.