Britain’s future may have come and gone before politicians noticed

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What Labour have achieved should be impossible. Yet somehow they’ve managed it. They’ve convinced people who are pro-Brexit that Labour are anti-Brexit – and convinced people who are antiBrexit that Labour are pro-Brexit.

Or, to put it another way: they’re alienating both the 52 per cent and the 48 per cent. And becoming the party of the 0 per cent.

On the one hand, they have Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, forensically probing for flaws in Brexit. And on the other, they have John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, who announced in London yesterday that: “It’s time we were all more positive about Brexit.”

To demonstrate his own positivity, Mr McDonnell promised that Labour would not block or delay Article 50, because to do so would put Labour not only “against the majority will of the British people”, but also “on the side of certain corporate elites who have always had the British people at the back of the queue”.

Which is interesting, because when he was campaigning for Remain Mr McDonnell suggested that the “corporate elites” – or, as he called them then, the “robber barons” – were actually in favour of Brexit.

Maybe the corporate elites have switched sides, too.

The bulk of the shadow chancellor’s speech yesterday was about the economy and jobs. A Labour government, he said, would “plan for the future”, “intervene for the common good”, and “create the wellpaid jobs we need”.

Yet he made this pledge without explaining how Labour would tackle the greatest threat to jobs that our society faces.

To be fair, Mr McDonnell isn’t alone in this. His counterparts in other parties have said little if anything about it, too. In the next 20 years, great numbers of people – workingclass and middle-class – stand to be made redundant by advances in automation, artificial intelligence and the internet. Yet major politicians are barely talking about it. I suppose we’ve been here before. Mass immigration from eastern EU states began in 2004, but mainstream parties treated it as a serious issue only after the breakthrough of Ukip a decade later. Nigel Farage may feel that he’s now won that argument.

But, if so, he’s won it too late. There is a bigger crisis coming – and when it arrives, it won’t be possible to blame it on foreigners.

Previously, Mr McDonnell has said Labour will “look at” the idea of a universal basic income – which would in theory save the obsolete from destitution. Provided he can work out how to pay for it, anyway.

Yesterday, though, we heard him mourning Britain’s “dead town centres”, without noting that what killed them – primarily, online shopping – is unlikely to prove a passing fad. He talked about creating “secure” jobs, without explaining how any job will be secure in a world where technology outperforms mere humans.

The shadow chancellor – like the rest of the political world – sounded as if he was planning for a future that has already gone.