Cameron tries to talk the internet talk

David Cameron slipped into the net lingo at the Google Zeitgeist conference in Hertfordshire on Monday, talking about putting "well-being" at the heart of economic thinking.

In a speech to about 200 of Google's European partners and net "thinkers", Cameron played to his audience, saying he had tracked his own net performance with Google's new Trends device – an application which lets you see how many people are searching for given words or phrases, such as "David Cameron". He noted that his search appeal peaked on the day of his appointment last December and "it's been downhill ever since".

Apart from some product-placement mentions for BT, Innocent smoothies, and Craigslist as beacons of good employment practices and a principle he called "capitalism with commitment", Cameron devoted most of his speech to a call to put "well-being" at the heart of economic policy. It was fitting, somehow, for a speech delivered at a luxury health spa where members of the England football team are rubbing shoulders with the movers and shakers of the internet industry.

Mr Cameron said politicians should focus on GWB – general well-being – at least as much as they do on GDP. Describing the need to help people adjust to a fast-changing, rapidly globalising world, Mr Cameron said that thinking about what made people happy is "the central political challenge of our times".

Departing from Margaret Thatcher's famous questioning of the existence of something called "society", Mr Cameron said: "We do believe there is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state".

- By Peter Bale, Online Editorial Director, Times Online

Comments

[yesman]

Amazing rhetoric... and the million-dollar question is what makes people happy? My bet is that it is what makes the fickle middle classes happy...