THE ANTI-GROWTH MOB ARE A GROWING MENACE

HAVE you heard of Kate Raworth? I hadn’t until she rolled up on the BBC’s Today programme, as a critic of the PM’s ‘growth’ agenda.

Turns out that Raworth is the founder of something called Doughnut Economics, which regards the very pursuit of growth as catastrophic, on environmental grounds.

Interviewed with polite scepticism by Justin Webb, she went on to say it was only the richest who benefited from growth, and that ‘we have not taxed the richest in society’. What? Not at all? Reality check for Kate’s benefit: the highest-earning one per cent (those earning at least £160,000) pay around 30 per cent of all income tax. It is the poorest who, quite rightly, do not pay income tax (you need to be earning £12,570 before doing so).

Raworth also declared: ‘All the evidence shows that when economies aim to grow, it’s the richest, the already rich, who are enriched.’ But the most important point is that it is economic growth which has done more than anything else to lift the world’s least well-off out of poverty. We are principally talking about China, but not only China.

The non-partisan Centre for Economic Policy Research set this out in a paper by three of its researchers, entitled ‘Growth still is good for the poor’. Analysing figures from 118 countries, they concluded: ‘Our results underscore the importance of overall growth for improvements in living standards among the poorest in society. The good news is that policies that promote economic growth will, on average, also raise incomes of the poor, thereby promoting shared prosperity.’

We might also quote the writer Tom Chivers, winner of an award from the Royal Statistical Society: ‘Economic growth saves children’s lives. That is one of the most basic, starkest facts about the modern world. There is a thing called the “degrowth movement” which wants to stop economic growth. And yes, this would lead almost inevitably to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of children a day.’

And here’s another fact: Kate Raworth sits on a World Health Organisation advisory council. What a joke.