The party leaders were right not to promise anything on AI and jobs. Nobody can yet say how many jobs it has cost

This paper's view is that the leaders' silence on AI and work is a failure. I think they were right to stay quiet, and that we are blaming the wrong thing.

Start with what the evidence says about British firms now. The government's own survey of 3,500 businesses found that most of those using AI said their staff got more done. Only about one in eight said their takings went up. A separate survey of its members by the British Chambers of Commerce, run with the University of Essex early this year, found that more than nine in ten firms using AI had seen no change in their staff numbers. This paper reported both on 28 September.

So picture the speech the leaders were asked to give. Promise to protect jobs from AI. Which jobs? How many? On the survey evidence we have, most employers using it say they haven't cut anyone.

A party that promised to stop job losses it can't measure would be making a promise it can't keep or check. That is the kind of promise this paper spends most days taking apart.

The unions' motion at Labour's conference is the honest version of the opposite view. It asked employers to show that AI restructuring won't undermine British jobs. Fair enough. But show it against what? There is no published count to show it against.

That is the real gap, and it is a dull one. Employers planning twenty or more redundancies have to tell the government why, on a form that has a box for new technology. This paper reported on 30 September that the number of times that box has been ticked has never been published. We have asked the Insolvency Service for it, and the legal deadline is 26 October.

Until that number exists, any leader who stood up and said AI is taking British jobs would be guessing. So would any leader who said it isn't.

The speeches were thin. I'll grant that. But a thin speech costs nothing. A confident promise built on no data costs a great deal, because the next government spends years defending a number nobody checked.

If I were writing the motion, I wouldn't ask for a regulator first. I'd ask for the count.

WHY IT MATTERS HERE

Before a government can protect jobs from a change, it has to see the change. At the moment Britain's own redundancy form records the answer and nobody publishes it.