The machines, which resemble small Walkmans, download songs directly from the internet, and then play back CD-quality music. But far from being music to the ears of the world's major record companies, the new products currently hitting the high streets at a fast and furious pace are a gift for bootleggers and copyright pirates, who are already stealing more than pounds 3bn world-wide from the profits of the big record companies The issue is a particularly important one for Britain. AS THE digital revolution takes off in earnest, an orchestra of new recording devices is flooding on to the market. If he were candid, he would say: "We've had one or two good ideas. Fewer than we thought now that we've learned from the financial crisis Suggestions welcome.". But the unswerving faith in meeting business targets as an end in life is what UK plc is up against, not only from competitors in the US, but also Asia and Germany.The Chancellor will, no doubt, strike a balance between sounding tough and cautiously optimistic on Tuesday.

But the American manager was so dedicated to his job and GE that he beat them down. Everything they threw up as cunning obstacles, he doggedly batted down.Britain under Labour, thank the Lord, is not about to reorganise along the lines of GE's quasi-totalitarian culture. They tried every trick to avoid committing themselves to the new targets. Three years ago I watched an American middle manager employed by General Electric of the US chew out the Hungarian bosses at a GE light bulb plant for not meeting their targets.

The Hungarians were sophisticated former Communist Party apparachniks, and they used their considerable wiles to excuse their performance. But with each passing day, the New Deal looks more like an Old Labour job-creation scheme with a few bells and whistles attached. The risk is that it will not accomplish very much and the pounds 5bn in windfall taxes raised for it will have been squandered.It may be beyond the scope of any government, but the fundamental task facing Labour is to graft the best of British culture - inventiveness, individuality, steadiness, scepticism - on to the new imperatives for UK plc to compete harder against other industrial nations.These imperatives are real. The New Deal, for example, has been billed as a cornerstone of its plan to gear up our labour force, and so position UK plc for a bigger slice of the globalisation pie. It is now hoping that financial crisis will prove nothing more than a hiccup in this plan. If, however, the recession is deep, or if the financial crisis has revealed a structural flaw in the globalisation model, then the Government has no fallback position.As the air hisses out of the global asset bubble, indeed, the true contours of many Labour economic programmes are being ruthlessly exposed. The problem the Government has is that it conceived its economic programme during the 1990s boom It bought into globalisation Washington style.

It launched a long-term programme to improve productivity in the belief that globalisation would give it time to see this programme through. There is, furthermore, little doubt that UK plc needs to up its game in terms of productivity. The Government is probably better placed than any previous Labour government, or indeed the government of John Major, to hang tough in the face of the inevitable calls for tax and spend. He will try to show that, despite lower forecasts for growth next year, he can deliver on what the Government has promised in terms of educational and health improvements and a measured scaling back of the welfare state.Second, he will dwell on the need for UK plc to become more productive as the opportunities for our exporters get scarcer in the face of an expected downturn in world trade.Mr Brown's numbers probably will add up, with a slight tweaking here and a marginal additional cutback there. But it was Washington that failed to pre-empt the firestorm of events that dented faith in globalisation in the first place.So where does this leave New Labour? We shall know more on Tuesday after the Chancellor makes his pre-Budget statement. The leaks coming out suggest Mr Brown will ram home two points.