Britain is beset by low productivity and stagnant growth, and things are not getting better. In the public sector, productivity stands at 7.4 per cent lower than it did before the pandemic. Until we can generate more growth in the economy, we cannot grow richer and real wages cannot grow.

An uncontroversial statement, you might think – even if opinions vary on what to do about it. But no. There are people who genuinely don’t want economic growth, who think it an evil that must be ended. Take a comment piece published late last year in the normally sober pages of the scientific journal Nature. Under the title ‘Degrowth Can Work’, it declared that: ‘Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and wellbeing.’

The lead author was Jason Hickel, a visiting fellow at the LSE who on Newsnight in 2017 came up with the unusual theory that there are too many jobs in Britain. Humans, he said, are ‘overshooting our planet’s bio-capacity by 60 per cent’, and the only way to save ourselves is by ‘introducing a basic income and a shorter working week which would allow us to get rid of unnecessary jobs and redistribute labour’. Never mind the pain that follows every time GDP growth dips into the red. Never mind the despair created by falling real incomes. If we all worked less we would be far happier. Who gets to decide what is an ‘unnecessary job’, Hickel didn’t say. Many, I suspect, might well choose to nominate the LSE’s visiting professorship in International Inequalities as one of the jobs to go.

Another of the Nature authors is Tim Jackson, who runs a green thinktank called the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity. Jackson has written a book called Prosperity Without Growth, and accused Rishi Sunak of pursuing a ‘fetish’ of growth. It is clear, he says, that ‘we’re already living in a post-growth world. And it’s time to take that challenge seriously. To focus on protecting wellbeing. To distribute wealth fairly. To invest in the care economy. To improve education’. That tax revenues from healthy businesses might be useful in improving education and the care system does not appear to enter his thinking.

Then there is Bill McGuire, a volcanologist who’s now emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL. He has called for ‘the contraction of the global economy until it reaches a sustainable steady-state that fits with a level of greenhouse gas emissions compatible with keeping rising temperatures this side of the 1.5 degrees guardrail’. For McGuire, the government’s ambition for ‘green growth’ doesn’t cut it – no, to save the world we have to shrink the economy: less wealth, less stuff. Especially less stuff. In June, McGuire tweeted a photo of a container ship arriving at Felixstowe with what he said was 24,000 containers. His caption read: ‘More than anything, this image encapsulates everything that is wrong with our society.’

But how did he know what was inside all those containers? Was it all frivolous stuff like toys for Christmas crackers or might there have been, say, some PPE bound for NHS hospitals? Unless McGuire wears only locally sourced knitted underwear, my guess would be that something on that ship, or another like it, is found in his home.

It would be easy to dismiss the ramblings of Marxist academics. After all, the idea of ‘degrowth’ has been around since the 1970s without obviously harming anyone. The term, it seems, was coined by the Austrian-French economist André Gorz in 1972, the era of Dr Schumacher’s book Small Is Beautiful. Hickel has written the similarly themed Less Is More.

Yet the idea that economic growth is an evil seems to have become a lot more mainstream of late – fed, inevitably, by climate hysteria. One of the degrowth movement’s bibles is a bestseller called Doughnut Economics published in 2017 by Kate Raworth and inspired by a diagram she drew when working for Oxfam. It consists of an inner circle where people are impoverished and suffer from poor health, education and so on as a result. Then there is a ring in which everything is just right: the world is consuming just enough to make everyone happy. Beyond that is an ‘ecological ceiling’, outside which lies overconsumption, with attendant disasters such as biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change.

It is a crude and preposterous thesis that doesn’t stand up to examination. There is a weak correlation between wealth, pollution and overconsumption of resources. Some of the most polluting societies in history have been relatively poor, such as the former Soviet Union, which out-belched the world in toxic smoke and effluent but failed to feed its people properly. The English woodlands were mostly stripped in medieval times; in our vastly wealthier country we are replanting them at record pace. The thesis ignores the possibility that technology could ever make things cleaner and consume fewer resources.

Nonetheless, as I say, such attitudes appear to have seeped into the wider population – including among people unlikely to have read Raworth or Hickel’s books. Last month, the National Grid launched a scheme to reward those who used less electricity between the hours of 4.30 and 6 p.m. to try to avert blackouts as an anticyclone becalmed the nation’s wind turbines. It is not surprising, with energy bills so high, that people sought to take advantage of the chance to save £20 (although in practice some complained they were credited only five pence). Yet what was surprising was the zeal with which some reacted. Turning off their domestic appliances became raised to a matter of religious observance. A woman from Inverness told the Guardian how she and her partner brought dinnertime forward to 4.30 and then sat with candles and wood-burning stove. They had even turned off the electric foot-raiser on their sofa. ‘If this can help prevent the National Grid using coal-fired power then we’ll feel like it was really worth it. Part of this for me is learning how to deprive myself of something,’ she said.

There’s the point: it is one thing to advocate the end of economic growth if you have no actual fear of poverty. If you are struggling to keep yourself warm and fed, on the other hand, the idea of self-denial – still less of shrinking the economy – is going to have rather less appeal. Degrowth is a middle–class luxury, an indulgence to be conducted from the comfort of your sofa with its electronic foot-raiser. It revolves around matters of taste as much as the environment. People who express disgust with consumerism have a tendency to disapprove of other people’s while overlooking their own. Those who boast of buying less stuff are often not averse to the odd skiing holiday – as the holiday snaps of Extinction Rebellion activists have attested.

Bizarrely, the idea of degrowth trips off the tongue of some of the very same people who on another day will complain the loudest when incomes fall. Former Green party leader Caroline Lucas denounced Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement as ‘ideologically driven Tory austerity’. The problem, evidently, is Tory austerity rather than the much better-flavoured Green party austerity, because Lucas doesn’t seem to be a great believer in people becoming better off. In 2021 she complained that ‘The endless pursuit of economic growth, as the lodestar of government policy, is what is driving the climate crisis’. If a shrinking economy does not amount to austerity, I don’t know what does.

If you are a nurse, ambulance driver, driving examiner or a member of the many other groups who have been striking about the failure of your wages to keep pace with inflation, your enemy is not Hunt; it is the degrowthers. It is they who want to reduce the buying power of your wages year on year. If a Conservative minister were to say ‘Nurses, why don’t you forget your pay claim and learn to live life with less, to concentrate on mental wellbeing rather than material goods?’ the sky would fall in. Yet the traditional left, which seeks a fairer slice of the national cake for working people, has yet to collide head-on with those who want to reduce the size of the cake altogether. These ideologically opposite positions cannot evade each other for ever. Sooner or later the likes of Jason Hickel will find themselves in the same room as Mick Lynch and will have to argue it out.

Liz Truss was ridiculed for talking about the ‘anti-growth coalition’. She certainly went over the top, making it out to include people who do favour economic growth, such as some of her former cabinet colleagues. Yet there really is an anti-growth tendency, whose ideas are filtering down into terribly well-meaning middle-class people. Anyone who thinks the Tories have been inflicting ‘austerity’ on the country for the past 13 years should be looking over their shoulder for the people who genuinely want to shrink the economy.