It’s been a good day today: some insights have been forthcoming.

One I found especially welcome was from a threader who wrote to confirm the obvious truth that, while technology ensures fewer people will be needed to turn the wheels of commerce, more and more people are being born every day. Like many obvious things, this observation blows away a mountain of bullsh*t. If our job in future is to consume rather than produce, who is going to give us the money to do so?

And fairly closely connected with this, we are going to need some bright, practical people to handle this tricky transition. The problem is – and this is my insight for the day – while Labour is almost entirely commercially illiterate, the Conservative Party is equally socially illiterate. That is to say, Harriet Harman, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband have next to no idea of how to expand a business…..while David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson have less than an inkling as to the plight of innocently unemployed ex-wife single mothers who don’t see the point of working just to throw it all away on nursery childcare.

Let me tell all you cynical relativists out there: it wasn’t always like this. After 1945, in the Labour Party, officers who had seen deadly war action, trade union leaders, and principled intellectuals (many of them former Communists) predominated. The same officers were apparent in the Conservative Party, but also in there were One Nation middle class folks who had seen the working man at his most valiant, and self-made businessmen who had started from nothing. The Left had its hardliners and the Right had its snobs, but the majority overall had been at the coalface of life….and made up their own minds on that basis about which way to go.

Today, we have politicians who can’t make up their minds, for the simple reason that all they know is privilege, the  Party line, media training – and how to make nothing sound like something. Lacking any fresh ideas or new ideology, they fall back on tired ideas and discredited mantras. They have not the skills to gather empirical information and extrapolate from it, and so they disseminate the banal bigotry of focus groups.

Speaking as one who conducted them for over thirty years, I can tell you that focus groups can never assess what might be; rather, they will only ever play back what is. They are always reactive, and never creative. Which, frankly, is pretty much the same judgement I’d pass on the politicians who so regularly abuse them.

If you read out the preceding six paragraphs to a contemporary Western legislator, I can guarantee that the formulaic responses would begin with one of the following:

“Well, first of all I don’t accept…”

“Look, at the end of the day it is our job to listen….”

“I think we must stop living in the past and….”

“Whatever the too-clever-by-half researchers say, I have great faith in the wisdom of the common man…”

“We really must stop beating ourselves up and knuckle down to the job of…..”

“I sympathise with the point being made, but what we must remember is….”

All of these preface an answer to try and please everyone.

It doesn’t add up to leadership, and it never will.

Earlier at The Slog: Want to be illegally legal? Join the EU