Nothing like a bit of blue-sky thinking to brighten business prospects. The General Election season is quickly gathering pace. The political parties are engaged in either leading with or misleading about their ultimate post-election intentions and plans.

Business organisations and lobbyists are mulling over the contents of their own manifestos. They face the same dilemma as the politicians, how to handle what could be a double-dip recession at a time when government spending and borrowing is out of control.

Business will be on the receiving end of whatever unpleasant tax or spending medicine is doled out, while the new administration will be looking to the industrial and commercial sectors to deliver the growth the economy so badly needs. Some task.

But it is not too late for business to go on the offensive and take the opportunity for a bit of blue-sky thinking in their wish list to the politicos.

The British Chambers of Commerce has taken a modest stab by suggesting a reversal of last year’s reduction in VAT and increase in National Insurance contributions (NICs).

It wants next year’s increase in NICs abandoned and a one percentage point increase in VAT substituted. In short, shift the tax-raising burden from employers and employees to consumers.

The arithmetic works in favour of business, representing a saving of £5bn against an additional £4.5bn yield from VAT – but as a well-known jingle points out, every little helps.

There is of course an element of special pleading in the Chambers’ submission and arguments for shifting the basis of one particular tax yield. Nonetheless, the suggestion marks a departure from manifesto convention.

Reductions in government spending along with less red tape and tax relief for the small businessman have traditionally been the staple diet in the business submissions around election time to the political parties.

There is scope for variations on the BCC theme. The credit crisis and the flow of so-called initiatives from Government after the banks put up the shutters to help small businesses raise finance was a combination of a knee-jerk reaction and do-goodery.

In the second year – or maybe third for some – of the credit crisis there are lessons to be learned from the failure of some of the schemes and the rules attached to them without producing another complex set of arrangements.

The age of the “big idea” may have been consigned to the “something to forget” in the history books, but perhaps the time is ripe for something more practical like giving small businesses a tax holiday to encourage more investment, start-ups and job creation.

The small business organisations and lobbies might also achieve more if they temporarily, at least, formed a coalition to make a joint submission. There should be strength in numbers.

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/

Just when you thought it was safe to come out into the open. As if it weren’t enough that the euro is crumbling, that the banking sector is still vulnerable; that Britain is steeling itself for its biggest spending squeeze in living memory, along comes Barclays Capital with some really bad news.

Having slid its slide rule over Britain’s demographics, it is warning that the real threat to the economy is not the fallout from the current financial mess, but the weight our ageing population will impose on the budget.

It is hardly a new warning: economists were getting hot under the collar about this decades ago. Back in the early 1990s it was all the OECD and IMF ever talked about. In a few years, they said, the baby boomers will retire and before you know it Britain, and for that matter most of the Western world, will see the proportion of its population in a retirement balloon.

The consequences are depressingly predictable: the budget deficit will climb higher and higher as those pensioners collect their retirement and medical benefits – all to be paid by a shrinking core of taxpayers.

The difference between then and now is that the squeeze is finally starting – this year, according to Tim Bond of Barclays. The bank forecasts that in a relatively short space of time, the interest rate on long-dated gilts – which in turn determine interest rates throughout the economy – will rise from around 4pc to well over 10pc. It is hard to overemphasise the significance of this sea change. Put simply, for the next decade, life will become increasingly expensive for the average household, squeezing ever deeper into their incomes. Standards of living will diminish.

The analogies with the financial crisis are plain to see: for years, Britons have lived beyond their means, financing it by, in effect, borrowing off future generations, whether through debt, by creating unrealistic pension obligations or social welfare systems that simply cannot be funded without an ever-greater contribution from the working population. Demographics is destiny, they say, and the statistics suggest the UK is destined for a major squeeze.

As if evidence were needed, it was provided in graphic form yesterday by BT, which admitted its pension deficit has now risen to a staggering £9bn. Shocking as this is, it is only a microcosmic example of what has happened across the UK and other Western nations over past decades. Once the financial crisis is well and truly over, the time will soon come for Governments to work out how on earth they intend to honour these unwise contracts without consigning vast numbers of their population to economic stagnation.

http://www.askhowtoearn.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/

How bloggers and new media will make their presence felt in the coming general election.

You can see why the political parties are nervous about the general election. The media playing field on which it will be fought has a new, unfamiliar terrain thanks to online competition. Local newspapers may have closed or slimmed down, but political bloggers have forced politicians to rethink their relationship with the press.

What was once a cosy, exclusive Fleet Street corps of lobby reporters must now include irreverent, self-made stars of the blogosphere such as Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale. And new technology, from the online video that exposed Alan Duncan’s belief that MPs were forced to live on “rations” to the Conservatives publishing shadow cabinet expenses in real time, has changed the public’s expectations.

Set-piece campaigns, for instance, are now more problematic than ever before. A £500,000 Conservative poster campaign featuring an apparently airbrushed David Cameron was intended to get the election year off to a flying start. Within a few days, dozens of photoshopped spoofs appeared on MyDavidCameron.com. But new media also presents politicians of all persuasions with a chance to talk more directly to the public than ever before. Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, is one of many who have become adept at using micro-blogging website Twitter to speak simultaneously to constituents and the media.

Mr Cameron himself has assiduously used websites such as Mumsnet to reach out directly – with varying levels of success – to specific groups of voters.

And blogging tools and idioms, too, have allowed nimble new pressure groups such as the TaxPayers’ Alliance, widely seen as a deniable attack-dog of the Tory Right, to emerge.

The fact remains, however, that the audience for political blogs is fairly limited. It may no longer be possible to dismiss them as a small band of bedroom obsessives poring over the traditional media’s droppings, but newspapers will still lead in setting the tone of the popular campaign.

Yet while many newspapers will still drip daily scorn on Gordon Brown rather than Mr Cameron, the social media will also play a key role. The internet, after all, can provide good copy. It is for their impact on the sociology of the political class and the Fourth Estate that this generation of political bloggers will be remembered.

Since the 2005 election, we have raced past the tipping point. Facebook has 23 million British users. About half of the eligible voters are social networkers, sharing and seeking recommendations among peers rather than trusting broadcast messages. The real contest is not the three-way blogs/newspapers/politicians fight, but how effectively each can cast its bait into the social networking sites, and who will have the greatest effect.

So what can we expect from this campaign? There will be widgets explaining tactical voting options to more people than ever before. As a result, the numbers voting against parties rather than for them will increase. Small parties without the resources to hit doorsteps may use these tools to reach that swelling protest vote.

The major parties will have “deniable outriders” to do poisonous negative campaigning on their behalf. Politicians will get personally savaged. There will be more tenuous attack-oriented arguments – ones that journalists wouldn’t have touched in the past.

The most interesting contribution social media may make is that it could offer the Tories an opportunity to project themselves as a responsible government-in-waiting. Tory strategists have already acknowledged that public pessimism may hurt them: if things really are that bad, the Conservatives know there’s a risk that the public could put aside their distaste for Gordon Brown and stick with the devil they know.

This will be a “downswing” election dominated by spending cuts rather than promised tax-handouts. Being positive will be difficult, and attack-bloggers won’t exactly help. So to sell the idea that responsible positive action is possible in a restricted economic climate, parties need a “big idea”.

The Tories’ “post-bureaucratic age” narrative relies heavily upon dynamic collaboration, a hallmark of the social web. It aims to apply open-source thinking to convene good judgment from a disparate community and to cut waste by reducing pen-pushers and consultants and by automating processes.

One of the brains the Tories have turned to is MySociety founder Tom Steinberg. His fingerprints appear to be all over shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt’s pledge of £1 million in Cabinet Office funding to the best idea for crowd-sourcing public intelligence.Several politicians would be tempted by the reflexive offer to let voters “have your say”, but this is a cannier step. Mr Hunt is looking to get the public to help interpret and re-present government data.

The Conservatives need the social web to help create a positive, reassuring buzz around them. Offering a narrative that breaks the economic stalemate may be Cameron’s brightest hope. Playing a part in that may be the real impact that social media has on the 2010 election.

Paul Evans blogs at blog.localdemocracy.org.uk

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/

Securing work experience can be pivotal to a young person’s ability to pick the right career path for them, research has found.

Securing work experience can be pivotal to a young person’s ability to pick the right career path for them, research has found.

Almost two-thirds of all teachers polled by think-tank the b-live Foundation said that the strongest tangible benefits to students come from taking part in work experience.

To help, Business in the Community, an organisation backed by more than 800 companies, is running a campaign called Work Inspiration – www.workinspiration.com – which aims to create an additional 100,000 work experience places by September.

Over the next four weeks, the chief executives of four leading companies will explain how work experience played a role in their careers.

First, it’s Sir Stuart Rose, chief executive of Marks & Spencer (M&S).

Many chief executives have described their early career years as a period of false starts and attempts to work out what they were good at. Is that something you can relate to?

Yes, I worked for the BBC for two weeks in 1967 in the programming department at TV Centre in Wood Green.

I did my fair share of filing, but I was also used as a runner for messages, chased outstanding information, attended meetings and even drafted some copy for a BBC publication. It was heavily edited but that didn’t matter, it gave me a great sense of achievement.

The experience sparked an excitement and passion for business that has stayed with me ever since. It was my first taste of deadlines and priorities, my first experience of meetings and it taught me business basics like letter writing, planning, to-do lists and agendas.

Then I wrote to lots of companies looking for a job. The first company that wrote back to me and offered me an interview, second interview, third interview and a job was M&S.

How did you put these experiences to good use?

I took a great deal from my work experience into my first role at M&S. I hit the ground running and knew what to expect from my colleagues and those managing me.

Perhaps most importantly, it gave me a degree of confidence that enabled me to find my voice early on and make progress in what was a challenging first job.

I look back with great fondness on my time at the BBC.

Can you describe what your first jobs entailed? At the time, did you enjoy the work you were doing?

My first job was as a management trainee at the Oxford store.

Day to day I was working behind the pyjama counter for a lady called Miss Wootten. She was one of the old established supervisors, as we used to call them in those days, who were given a trainee to make or break – and they would make or break you if they didn’t think you were up to it.

At the time, it wasn’t up to the manager, it was up to the supervisor to say ‘he’s a goodun’ or ‘he’s not a goodun’.

I was always slightly on
the edge, she wasn’t sure about me.

On reflection, do you think they proved to be useful experiences or represent wasted years?

They weren’t wasted at all and, to be honest with you, I never looked at M&S as a place where I wanted to go to the top or to get a senior job.

I mean, it was a good company, I tried to do every job as well as I could and I tried to enjoy every job. I didn’t think “oh, I am only here for a year, I want another job”, I actually enjoyed the job that I was
doing.

The great benefit of the company then, and still is to an extent, is that I had about 14 jobs in about 17 years.

I was a trainee in a store and then I went to Marble Arch, then I went into the head office as a trainee buyer, then I became an assistant buyer, then I became an assistant merchandiser, then I became a merchandiser and then I went to foods, then I was in delicatessen then I was in wine, then I was poultry, then I was in meat.

So it was constantly changing. I learnt all different trades and I learnt about the business. It was a great experience.

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/

McDonald’s creates 5,000 jobs in UK after record sales in 2009.

McDonald’s will create 5,000 new jobs in the UK this year after seeing an 11pc rise in sales over 2009, chief executive Steve Easterbrook said on Friday.

The fast food chain, which has 1,193 outlets in the UK, saw sales rise by 11pc in 2009.

Mr Easterbrook said that McDonald’s had increased UK like-for-like sales by 30pc on a four-year basis. He said the new jobs would come from the opening of up to 15 new branches in 2010 and the extension of opening hours in existing outlets.

The strong UK figures came as parent company McDonald’s Corporation said global sales rose by 3.8pc last year. Sales in the US increased by 2.6pc, European sales rose by 5.2pc and sales in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa rose by 3.4pc. The company said that it served 60m customers a day in 2009.

Mr Easterbrook said that the UK jobs being created would take McDonald’s workforce to 85,000 in this country.

“In 2009 we thought we’d create 4,000 new jobs, in fact we created 6,000. This year we expect our growth to create another 5,000 new jobs,” he said.

He said that the company had responded well to the recession by tweaking its menu, improving the quality of its products and continuing to roll out a new restaurant format. The launch of freshly-ground coffee increased the number of cups of coffee that McDonald’s sold by 9m compared to 2008, Mr Easterbrook said.

He said that the chain’s performance over 2009 exceeded his expectations.

“The year started out strong and carried on throughout. The encouraging thing is that we think the job is only half way done,” he said.

McDonald’s UK has only refurbished half of its chain, with another 550 restaurants to go.

Jim Skinner, McDonald’s Corporation’s chief executive, said that the 2009 results reflected the “broad-based strength” of its global business.

“Our in-demand food and beverages, unparalleled convenience and superior value at every level of our menu enabled us to serve 60m customers per day during 2009, up 2m per day over the prior year. In addition, McDonald’s profitability increased as we marked our sixth consecutive year of positive comparable sales in every geographic segment and generated higher global revenues, operating income and earnings per share in constant currencies – all tremendous accomplishments given the tough global economy,” he said.

He added that the company’s sales trend has remained positive over the opening weeks of 2010.

“We will continue our fiscal discipline by investing prudently and returning excess cash to shareholders,” he said.

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/

There are over eight million people who are “economically inactive”, a record number according to the Office for National Statistics.

These include students, retired, parents staying at home to look after children, long-term sick and those who have simply given up looking for a job – “discouraged” in the euphemistic language of the statisticians.

The 8.05 million economically inactive are on top of the 2.46 million unemployed. Together they represent 21.2 per cent of the adult population.

The increase in economically inactive people, especially the growing numbers of school leavers that decided to go to college rather than spend months looking for a job, are the main reason why the growth in unemployment has been held in check, according to experts.

Corin Taylor, policy director at the Institute of Directors, said: “The number of people working part time, and the number of economically inactive mask the true impact of unemployment.”

The number of people unemployed fell by 7,000 in the three months to November to stand at 2.47 million. Many economists are now hopeful that this recession will see far fewer unemployed than during those of the early 1990s and 1980s – on both occasions the total jobless figure broke through the 3 million barrier.

George Buckley, chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank, said workers were more willing to accept low pay and shorter hours in return for keeping their jobs, in contrast to previous recessions when companies were not so flexible.

“These figures are encouraging,” he said. “In previous recessions it took years for unemployment to stop rising, but that hasn’t happened this time.”

But many warned that families would feel the impact of lower incomes for many years to come, with a record 1.03 million working part-time because they were unable to secure a full-time job.

A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: “The fact that tens of thousands more young people are taking up the Government’s guarantee of a place in education or training means that they are getting the valuable skills they need to get into work.”

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/

The gap between public and private sector wages has hit a record level, according to official figures.

Workers in the public sector are now being paid more than £2,000 extra a year compared with employees in the private sector, after public sector pay continued to race ahead of inflation.

The average public sector worker was paid £23,660 a year, compared with private sector workers who were paid £21,528 a year, in the three months to the end of November.

This is the first time that the gap, which has slowly widened under the Labour Government, has hit more than £2,000 and came as figures showed that the discrepancy between pay increases in the public and private sector had never been so wide.

The data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) prompted experts to warn that so far the private sector had borne the brunt of the recession and that the Government needed to take action sooner rather than later to tackle the growing public sector wage bill.

“Public sector pay has exploded out of control,” said David Frost, the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce.

The figures were published as part of the ONS monthly update on unemployment and wages, with many pleasantly surprised that the overall unemployment figure had dropped a by 7,000 to 2.46 million for the three months to November. Some are hopeful that unemployment, which many feared could climb well above 3 million, could peak at little more than 2.5 million.

However, the data on wages were far less encouraging, with average pay increases across all workers increasing by just 1.1 per cent, the lowest level since records began nine years ago.

Nearly all of the increase came from the public sector, with nurses, teachers, civil servants and other public workers enjoying an average annual pay rise of 3.8 per cent in the three months to the end of November. Meanwhile private sector employees saw their salaries rise by just 0.2 per cent, as thousands of firms froze their workers’ pay as part of a desperate bid to cut costs in the recession.

This gap of 3.6 percentage points is the widest ever recorded by the ONS.

John Philpott, the chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said: “I can understand the unease many private sector workers feel when they see their contemporaries in the public sector not only getting better conditions and pensions, but also better pay.

“But everyone knows the public sector gravy train is going to be derailed.”

Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Philip Hammond said: “We have the largest deficit in the G20 and no credible strategy to get a grip on it, which is threatening higher mortgage rates and higher borrowing costs.”

Experts gave warning that the dire state of the public finances meant that public sector pay increases had to stop.

Corin Taylor, policy director at the Institute of Directors, said: “The private sector has responded very flexibly to the recession by cutting pay and freezing wages. And that has helped people stay in a job.

“The public sector has got to follow suit. The Government has no choice. It is borrowing £178 billion this year and it is coping with the largest peacetime deficit. Something has to give. There will have to be a public sector pay freeze or public sector pay cuts. It will be painful but it is necessary.”

The public sector has continued to take on new workers in recent months, the statistics showed, with 6.09 million people employed by the taxpayer compared with 5.8 million a year ago.

Both the NHS and Jobcentre Plus have been hiring more people, even though Alistair Darling has admitted cuts will have to be made to the public payroll.

Over the last year, despite, last month’s recovery, 723,000 jobs have been shed from the private sector.

Mr Frost said: “This just isn’t sustainable. My members are telling me that they are losing workers to the public sector, because not only can they see the better holidays and pensions, but also now the better pay.

“The wealth-creating private sector is losing out to the public sector. And we will have to pay for this – through higher taxes. We’ve got to get a grip.”

For many years public sector workers were paid less than those in the private sector, with workers willing to accept lower pay in return for greater job security and better pensions. However in the last decade public sector pay has increased at a far greater rate, with GP partners now earning £107,000 a year and many head teachers in secondary schools paid more than £100,000.

Mr Philpott added that many of the most menial jobs in the public sector have been outsourced as part of Gordon Brown’s private finance initiatives, “leaving many in the public sector as well paid managers.”

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/

City’s financial sector to grow by 100,000 new jobs within 10 years, predicts hedge fund.

London’s role as a financial centre is set to be boosted by the economic growth of emerging market countries, according to a top City hedge fund.

“The idea that London is going to full of tumbleweed in 10 years is not credible,” Savvas Savouri, chief economist at Tosca, told the Financial Times – contradicting many bankers’ gloomy predictions about the demise of the City due to the Government’s perceived hostility to the financial sector.

Instead, Mr Savouri predicts that London will attract at least 100,000 new financial jobs in the next 10 years, as the growth of the Bric economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China – works in the City’s advantage.

“There are too many aspirational economies that don’t have infrastructures of their own. We have an affinity with India, with the Gulf, even with China – via Hong Kong. These markets will want a western hub,” he said.

Boris Johnson, mayor of London, last week added his voice to the throng warning of a City exodus due to the introduction of a 50pc tax on top earners’ and one-off levy bank bonuses. They mayor suggested that banks could move 9,000 staff out of London in response. Some hedge funds – such as BlueCrest Capital and Brevan Howard – have already relocated staff to Switzerland.

However, Tosca believes that concerns over taxes and regulation are unwarranted. “Taxes are rising and regulation is being tightened elsewhere too.” Mr Savouri told the FT.

His forecasts are modelled in part on the growth of the Japanese banking sector in London over the last 20 years. A similar per capita representation of Bric economies in the capital would create 180,000 new jobs, he said.

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/

Britain will turn in stronger growth than any other major economy next year, Goldman Sachs has declared, predicting a significantly stronger-than-expected recovery in the coming years.

The investment bank said that the pound’s 25pc depreciation over the course of the crisis would help boost exports, and broader economic growth, and turn the economy around. The forecast flies the face of the conventional wisdom, which has it that the UK will suffer a protracted, sluggish recovery, and could slide back into a slump.

However, it has also emerged that a key bellwether for economic growth, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s leading indicator, is now at its highest level since 1972, pointing towards a strong recovery.

In its key annual investment conference, Jim O’Neill, chief economist at Goldman, said that he expects the UK economy to expand by 3.4pc next year, compared with 2.4pc growth in the US and just 1.9pc in the eurozone. Although Goldman had always been more optimistic than most other banks about the UK’s prospects, the fact that it expects Britain to achieve even stronger growth than the US comes as a surprise.

The rebound is largely thanks to sterling’s sharp fall, which Goldman expects to increase demand for British exports, and to boost inward investment from overseas. However, it is also basing the forecast on hopes that the financial sector will recover enough to finance a surge in companies’ investment spending, which tumbled to the lowest level last year since the 1930s.

There are worries, though, that the pound’s depreciation may be stolen back off the UK in the coming months, with sterling rising against other major currencies as Britain’s prospects for recovery become clearer. The pound rose to a four-month high against the euro, and hit a two-month peak in its trade-weighted level, amid speculation that today’s inflation data will be higher than expected, and as UBS advised clients to buy sterling against the euro.

The forecast will underline expectations that the Bank of England will soon be forced to increase interest rates from their current low rate of 0.5pc. Ben Broadbent, UK economist at Goldman, thinks this will happen towards the end of the year, but the Bank will come under further pressure to consider an increase tomorrow, with Consumer Price Index inflation set to rise well above its 2pc target.

However, Goldman thinks that US interest rates will remain at their current effective-zero rate all the way until 2012 – far longer than most other institutions. In further evidence of the potential strength of Britain’s recovery, economists pointed towards the OECD’s leading indicator. At a level of 105.7, it is at the highest point since 1972, something which may point towards a sharp rebound from recession.

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/

The rapid pace of technology is creating ‘micro-generations’, where teenagers are left behind by younger siblings, says James Delingpole.

My 11-year-old son, like all 11-year-old sons, thinks his Dad is incredibly, risibly out-of-touch. He mocks me for using words like “video” when I mean “DVD”, for preferring CDs to free downloads, for watching TV on the television instead of on the laptop, and for wearing my shirt with one top button undone when obviously it should be two.

But what the poor boy doesn’t yet realise is that the last laugh will be on me. Whereas it took me three decades to become the embarrassing fuddy-duddy I am now, he and his nine-year-old sister are going to be past their best in less than 10 years. Such is the weird side-effect of our fast-accelerating technology: you’re past it by the time you hit 20.

This phenomenon of the micro-generation gap – where 16 year-olds sneer at 19 year-olds for being oh-so-square, Daddy-O – came to light six months ago, in a widely publicised report written by a teenager on work experience at Morgan Stanley. Teenagers, revealed Matthew Robson (then 15), in a report named How Teenagers Consume Media, use their laptops as radios (streaming music from, say, Last FM so as to avoid adverts and DJ prattle), get round high cinema prices by watching pirated DVDs, prefer Facebook to Bebo, and never use Twitter, which they consider a hobby for old people like Stephen Fry.

The last two points came as an especial surprise to us oldsters, who imagined that teenagers Tweeted at least as regularly as we did, and that Facebook was more of a student-age thing while people of Robson’s age preferred MySpace. But we can hardly be blamed for failing to keep up with each tiny micro-trend: not when a new one seems to turn up every couple of years.

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences of technology,” Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project told The New York Times last week. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

I’ve noticed this even in the tiny gap – exactly two years – between my younger children. Girl (9) is totally smitten with her Nintendo DS, as are most of her schoolfriends. Boy (11) considers that particular games console so impossibly uncool he won’t even borrow it. For him the only device worth having is an Apple iTouch, just like all his friends have got. This, I get the impression, has less to do with the joy of playing the games themselves than the matchless pleasure of running up huge and pointless bills downloading new apps from iTunes.

Before Boy and Girl came along I used to get all my techno advice from my stepson, Jim. But at 23, Jim is starting to seem dangerously passé. The other day we were playing on our new joint Christmas present to ourselves – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – on his Xbox, and wondering why the gameplay seemed to end after so few levels. After further inquiry Jim found the answer. “Hey, things have changed,” he said. “Nobody plays games on their own any more. They fight other people. On the internet.”

This is confirmed by research from Pew. Teenagers are much more likely to play online games than are twentysomethings (78 per cent versus 50 per cent), and also more likely to send instant messages (68 per cent versus 59 per cent). Which makes Jim as much a prisoner of his generation as I am of mine. Like so many kids of his era, he takes enormous pride in his ability to write text messages at high speed, because that’s what people born in the mid-Eighties trained themselves to do. When they hit their early teens and got their first mobiles, texts were the affordable alternative to phone calls, as well as the best way of communicating without being overheard by your parents.

For teenagers now, though, texting has been largely superseded by instant messaging – as Stephanie Lipman, a 17-year-old Londoner, explains. “I did text for a while, but instant messaging is so much better – like a constant stream-of-consciousness. You don’t have to bother with ‘Hello. How are you?’ or any of that. You just have this series of conversations with your friends which you can add on to when you’re in the mood.”

As Stephanie says, she just happened to be the right age for the right trend. Like most of her friends she subscribes to BlackBerry Messenger. When she was younger, BlackBerries were things that only businessmen had, but she came of age just in time to catch the tipping point for their transformation into the must-have teen accessory.

And what of the even-younger generations? According to Mizuku Ito, of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, they’ll make less distinction between online friends and real friends, and will be more discerning about what they choose to take from popular culture. And according to Larry Rosen, a California professor, they’ll be better at multi-tasking: his research has shown that 16 to 18 year-olds can perform seven tasks on average in their free time (texting, checking Facebook, watching TV, etc), whereas people in their early 20s can only handle six, while those in their 30s perform about five and a half.

My own prediction, from watching my 9 and my 11 year-old in action, is that kids will give up on conventional television. Boy and Girl now watch all their programmes via the internet on laptops, so that they can see exactly what they want when they want: Girl goes for Horrible Histories or cookery programmes on BBC iPlayer; Boy downloads the latest episodes of The Simpsons from the US. No one showed them how to do this, and they’re not especially techno-minded: they just intuited it in that scary way children do.

Will they all abandon printed books and start reading everything on Kindle? Or will it be the next micro-generation that does that? And will there be some kind of retro backlash where, in a statement of difference, kids start gravitating back to books and old-fashioned texting, or even vinyl LPs for their superior, warm, analogue sound?

The truth is we just don’t know, and anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. As The Spectator’s techno guru Rory Sutherland, aka Wiki Man, points out, there’s not even consistency among age groups around the world. “For example, US kids were much earlier adopters of instant messaging than British kids, except in odd pockets like Cleveland, Ohio – where texting was huge. And in Japan eBay isn’t big, but Yahoo is colossal. And in Poland, they don’t Tweet, they Gadu Gadu, while in India and Brazil they prefer Orkut to Facebook.”

All we can say with confidence about future technologies is that they’re not going to be the disaster we Luddite oldies instinctively fear. (Remember the fuss about how texting was going to wipe out a generation’s literacy, thanks to abbreviations like gr8? These were largely an urban myth: hardly anyone used them, and those who did were shown by research to be children with the higher reading ages.) And that, in another couple of years, we’re going to find ourselves more passé than we could ever have imagined.

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