Five years ago, we were beginning to face the imminent reality of lockdown. We were confronted with an uncertain future in which our habitual ways of coping, succeeding, displacing and overworking were going to be put mercilessly on hold because of an unprecedented existential threat. And for a few months we lived through a see-saw of emotions: public and private grief at the scale of loss; anger and confusion over the restrictions imposed, withdrawn, re-imposed; exhaustion at the pressure of sustaining basic public services – and also a kind of guilty, sporadic excitement at possibilities we hadn’t guessed at. Clearer skies, silent roads; time; a sense of what mattered and who mattered, to us as individuals and to the whole of society. Fragile shoots of some sort of renewed spiritual imagination pushed a centimetre or so through the soil.
Our capacity for not learning from crises, however, is impressively well developed (as it proved to be after the financial meltdown of 2008). After a few years of floundering and posturing, we are back where we were, our fingers firmly in our ears about the nature of international crises, medical or environmental, engaged in a hectic struggle to prove that we are not going to be “defeatist” about our economic future. We are back with the supercharged language of “growth” as the all-sufficient and self-evident goal of national life – cheered on by a global turn to bloodthirsty competition and the prospect of futile, theatrical trade wars.
Being “anti-growth” – or, in the new vocabulary of the past few months, being a “nimby” or a “naysayer” – is high on the new catalogue of deadly sins. But before we settle down with our new government’s rhetoric about growth as the priority that trumps (I use the word advisedly) every other social or environmental goal, it is imperative that we ask what is meant by this language. What is it we want to “grow”?
We are constantly being fed a narrative in which growth is something that needs no explanation or justification. We are being hypnotised into the position of the gangster (played by the immortal Edward G Robinson) in the Bogart/Bacall classic Key Largo, who, challenged as to what he really wants, agrees that the answer is simply “More”.
But there are some better answers that could be given – answers that correspond more to what actual citizens might say they hope for from public policy. I’ve been working with the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (Cusp), led by Prof Tim Jackson at the University of Surrey, where some of these possible answers have been analysed and “road-tested” in a series of wide-ranging public conversations. The evidence emerging is clear. Those involved in these conversations – and the very diverse social and economic groups they represent – are convinced that stable, successful, confident and positive societies are not produced by the pursuit of growth for its own sake, but by clarity and purposiveness about what growth is supposed to serve. People look for more stable patterns of employment. We want opportunities for secure work and fulfilling leisure for ourselves and our children – dependable public services and affordable housing. We want – a fundamental matter, surely – resilience, a durable, trustworthy environment rather than a state of fevered anxiety. We want breathing space, literally and metaphorically: it’s no accident that “breath” and “spirit” are the same word in so many languages.
“Growing” an economy against such a backdrop should mean growing the capacity to sustain all this. But isolate growth from public good (let alone environmental security), and you are simply planning for breakdown: individual psychological collapse in varying degrees of seriousness and collective implosion as limited resources run out, competition becomes more violent and gross inequalities of power are intensified. And, as Donald Trump’s second presidency is already showing us, one of the early casualties of a mindless focus on local growth detached from the realities of the natural and the human world is the rule of law, national and international – the protocols and skills we put in place to make power accountable.
So when we hear politicians – and especially politicians of the left who are supposed to have some investment in the hopes and ideals just mentioned – appealing to the imperative of growth, we should be asking insistently what the word means, what we are supposed to be growing into or towards. So far, we have heard dismayingly little from government about how we are to develop towards a genuinely resilient society – resilient in the sense of being able to cope with unprecedented challenge without losing our commitment to one another’s wellbeing and safety.
The uncomfortable truth is that in our present global context, growth frequently means the opposite of such shared responsibility. Concerns about profit weaken accountability; the distance of workforce from decision-making reinforces alienation and insecurity. Who specifically wants this? Presumably those whose profits are most at stake. Is it that impossible to turn this into an argument for growth understood as the building of a durable tax base, with incentives to plough back profit into job creation?
“Public opinion research shows that the vast bulk of the population are more progressive and ambitious than what political parties present as being in the centre.” This is one of the conclusions of the Common Sense Policy Group (including Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, whose classic study of equality and wellbeing, The Spirit Level, first published in 2009, is still both admired and ignored by policymakers), at the end of its 2024 collection of “manifesto” essays, Act Now. The work of Cusp suggests the same conclusion. There is growing evidence, set out in detail in the essays in Act Now, that policies capable of creating resilient wellbeing without assuming an endless spiral of simple economic expansion – such as universal access to essential goods and services, reducing working hours, and introducing carbon and wealth taxes – are not utopian fantasies.
What if we marked the fifth anniversary of the beginning of lockdown with a speech or two from government starting from here – from the urgent need to demystify the fundamentalism of growth-in-the-abstract and to articulate something of what we want prosperity for? To encourage us to be clear about where we want to be as a society, in terms not just defined by possession and control but alert to the hunger for belonging, dignity, stability, a legacy worth passing on to a new generation? It might begin to look as if we were not, after all, incapable of learning. It might suggest that government was not wholly uninterested in building a new consensus around security, respect and hope.
Rowan Williams is the former archbishop of Canterbury
