NOBODY now reads the great 19th-century Scottish liberal and Chartist Samuel Smiles (he was fond of citing “Nobody” as a villain in his attacks on laissez-faire policies). That is a shame, but you can guess why from the titles of his books: Thrift; Duty; Character; and Self-Help. Nowadays, there’s little appetite for any of these things, so popular with the Victorians, and so crucial to the advancements in prosperity and well-being during their era.

Indeed, quite the opposite things are the plat du jour. Last week, The Guardian ran an article complaining that supermarkets were “bombarding” their customers with cheap meat.

Perhaps, like the umbrella group Eating Better, which represents public health bodies, charities and pressure groups such as Greenpeace, WWF UK and the RSPCA, you are outraged that the Big Four of retail food capitalism are offering shoppers more stuff for less money. Or perhaps, with inflation around eight or nine percent, and even higher on everyday items – of which food, energy and fuel are the outstanding examples – you’re grateful that, as one of those firms puts it, “every little helps”.

READ MORE: Herald View: Time for Sunak to consider a windfall tax on oil and gas? 

The complaint seems to be that the supermarkets are not doing their job which, whatever you might think, isn’t to try to attract customers by selling them things they want more cheaply and profitably than their competitors, but to encourage a reduction in meat eating. This same report actually complains that the UK government’s impending ban on pre-watershed advertising of “junk food” (a meaningless category that includes such things as raisins, cheese, pesto, olive oil and honey) will only affect about one per cent of discounted supermarket items.

My complaint, by contrast, isn’t about the vegetarian agenda – many prominent people, including Adolf Hitler, Jeremy Corbyn and Ted Bundy, have been vegetarian – but about the claim, now widespread, that consumption and consumerism are in themselves a bad thing. The Scottish Greens, for example, as well as peddling the falsehood that vegetarianism is automatically healthier and more green (an assertion that depends on all sorts of other factors), also operate on the assumption that growth is not only undesirable, but harmful.

Yet global economic growth is the single most important thing in determining almost every aspect of human wellbeing. To go back to Smiles, he maintained that “the spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual”, but the same thing is true in spades for communities and nations.

When Smiles was born in 1812, nowhere in the world had an average life expectancy beyond 35. After the industrial revolution and growth of free trade (both things Smiles enthusiastically supported), that had grown, by 1950, to 60 in nations that had adopted those principles, though it remained low in Africa and large parts of Asia.

In the past 70 years, globalisation and neoliberalism – precisely the things that horrify the “progressive” Left and the anti-growth cranks – have raised life expectancy to well over 60 in all but a handful of countries. By 2015 China, for example, had increased average life expectancy by 35 years; in the same period, it’s doubled in India and much of Africa and South America, and in every rich country the average age at death is now over 80 (bar America, where at the last count it was 79).

Environmentalism and other forms of social transformation need not in themselves be barriers to growth. We feed many more people than ever, and better and more than ever, with a reduced area devoted to agriculture and livestock. Arable land use has declined in every region since 1960, while the population of the world has doubled. It is trade and efficiency, rather than more extraction of natural assets, that makes the difference.

Economic growth is driven, as Adam Smith pointed out some 250 years ago, by innovation, specialisation and trade, and not merely by material consumption. It does not have to mean over-exploiting the planet or depleting natural resources: just look at the prosperity driven by renewables or increased access to information or services.

So it is profoundly depressing that the UK appears to have given up on economic growth as a priority for policy or – in the case of many on the Left – actually to see it as an obstacle to improving people’s lives. In the past 16 years, real GDP growth has only once (2017) exceeded the Treasury forecast; on average, it’s come in almost 6 per cent below those predictions. Our trade-to-GDP ratio is woefully below the rest of the world’s: they’ve had an 8.2 per cent rise in exports, we’ve had a 14 per cent fall.

That is, of course, not the only component of the economy; services, finance and technology are now much more important than traditional sectors. Services are 80 per cent of GDP, for example, while fisheries are 0.1 per cent. But the Treasury’s approach over the past decade or more has been dismal even in the areas where the UK ought to be relatively strong.

The usual pattern after economic shocks is that, after a period of recession, the economy returns to the trend present before it. That’s what happened after the inflation of the 1970s, the unemployment of the 1980s, and John Major’s self-inflicted recession of the 1990s. But it hasn’t happened since the financial crisis of 2008, or after the subsequent shocks of the Eurocrisis in 2010 and the fall of Sterling after Brexit.

It’s obviously too early to tell how bad things will get after the pandemic, and the energy and food price spikes – now being made even worse by the war in Ukraine. But the Chancellor and the Office for Budget Responsibility seem to be working on the assumption that this damage, colossal though it has been, is also irreversible.

If lower capital and fewer people working means lower growth, it’s also true that higher demand encourages new businesses and innovative ways of working. And we know, as the past two centuries have shown, many of the levers for promoting growth and productivity.

One is trade. Brexit was supposed to provide an opportunity to improve that; in theory it could, but no one is doing anything about it. The other is lowering taxes. Yet under the current government, they are at their highest ever rate, and, under the Chancellor’s latest plans, the tax-to-GDP ratio will rise by 3.3 per cent. He clearly thinks we’re helpless in the face of adversity, but we need not be. But unless we go for growth, heaven help us.