Growth at all costs is not a sustainable policy

The key task should be to ensure that essential services improve the wellbeing of individuals and local communities, writes Peter Riddle. Plus letters from Sheila Triggs and Stephen Smith

A key lesson for the UK from the US midterm elections is that a different approach to managing the economy is essential if Labour hopes to retain power in two years’ time. Voters in the UK will judge Andy Burnham’s government just as harshly as American voters have judged Donald Trump if they too feel the economy is not working for them.

Meeting the rising costs of food, utilities, transport and housing has become a daily challenge for millions of people. The pain of rising costs is compounded by a collapse in the quality and reliability of many vital public services and a sense that many people feel that their community life has become more fractious, fragile and unsafe.

Burnham, on becoming prime minister, discredited the previous 40 years of neoliberal economics because it had not delivered perceptible benefits for much of the population. In his quest to replace these outdated orthodoxies with a different kind of economics, he would do well to read the work of Karel Williams and Sukhdev Johal, referred to in your editorial (The Guardian view on Labour’s growth obsession: a different economics is possible, 3 November).

The pursuit of economic growth can swiftly be sabotaged by unpredictable global forces and events beyond a nation’s control and risks repeating the errors of the past. Burnham’s strategy of focusing on small fixes that will give people breathing space has been generally welcomed.

Williams and Johal build on that approach by proposing a more forensic and wide-ranging strategy. They argue that the key task of government should be to ensure that essential services, such as health, education, housing, transport and welfare, all contribute to improving the collective wealth and wellbeing of individuals and local communities.

For several decades voters have felt that successive governments have dismissed their concerns and failed to address those things that have most impact on their daily lives. The question remains as to whether Burnham’s government has the courage to do things differently. Peter Riddle Wirksworth, Derbyshire

Thank you for the editorial challenging Labour’s obsession with economic growth, which addresses the need for a more equitable distribution of wealth.

However, we must go further and address the lack of our depleted planet’s resources to allow for endless growth. Growth demands the seeking of new frontiers to extract more coal, oil, gas, timber, minerals and food. More than we need. This is intrinsically colonial, maintaining the global south as a source for the expansion of wealth in the west. It is also exacerbated by the vast resources being wasted on wars and the world’s military budget.

The urgent need, essential to avert climate disaster, is to reduce the world’s consumption of energy and material goods in a way that is globally just. Sheila Triggs Orpington, Kent

Your editorial on Labour’s obsession with growth was helpful in its reminder that redistribution is the forgotten instrument of such change. Such a reminder is also very timely, however, because the many environmental crises require a radical change in our culture in order for us to turn away from the impossibility of never-ending increases in mankind’s material claims upon the planet.

There will be no meaningful attempt to address these crises as long as the priority always remains the expansion of the human footprint, with all that implies for planetary health. If the insane momentum of “growth” towards inevitable collapse eventually ceases (it is slowing now in many western countries), the insanity of the inequalities of our current world must also be recognised. Radical redistribution is the only social alternative that can offer hope. Stephen Smith Glasgow