The main losers, interestingly, will not be the less skilled workers - because so many of their jobs depend on face to face contact. You can't export the jobs of hairdressers, restaurant staff, and shoe salespeople. Nor importantly are these people's jobs threatened by immigration. Tyson said that the numbers were very clear that immigration didn't reduce wages. Further, Britain has been smart in that its immigrants are generally better qualified than its home workforce. (This, of course, is not good news for the countries the immigrants leave.) So immigration may be politically sensitive but its effects on jobs is tiny compared with bigger forces.

Nor will the losers be those with tertiary education. Indeed, globalisation may well push up the wages of these workers. The main losers will be the middle third, those whose jobs can be "modularised" and either exported to emerging economies or replaced by technology. If you spend most of your day working on a computer rather than serving coffee then your job is at risk.

Most of the audience were men in dark suits, and everybody who asked a question was an economist. Us "health people" were thin on the ground, and my mind turned inevitably to a book I published in the 1980s on unemployment and health (still perhaps available from disreputable, back street book sellers). At that time Britain had three million unemployed, and the evidence showed clearly that both unemployment and the threat of unemployment had a profound effect on health. It's not surprising because employment is the way that most people define themselves. Our first question of others is usually "What do you do?" If a third of us are going to lose our jobs there are likely to be major effects on health.