Donald Power, Dr Neil Lancastle and Andrew Risby respond to an editorial on Britain’s broken economy

Re your editorial (The Guardian view on Britain’s broken economy: ‘That’s your bloody GDP, not ours’, 13 February), we are frequently reminded of the inadequacy of GDP growth as an objective, given that it includes the money spent on dealing with pollution, sickness, crime etc. But nobody gets out of bed thinking, “I have to grow GDP today”. We’re thinking about how to earn a living and pay the rent. Nobody, that is, except the chancellor, for whom “growth is the No 1 mission” that “underpins everything else” – schools, hospitals, net zero.

Yet decades of growth since the 1960s have left us with thousands of food banks and facing an environmental abyss. The idea that only more growth will allow us to protect the planet is like saying we can only finance the fire brigade by selling petrol to arsonists.