Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable

experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC

makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

I have three priorities for our economy.

Growth, growth.

Remember that less than two months ago.

In our shell-shocked world of post-trust politics, you no longer hear the clarion cry for economic

growth called forth in quite such strident terms.

It is of course still there as an objective. The government and the Labour Party are agreed we need it and differ only over the means we use to secure it.

But other ambitions, financial stability, economic competence, balancing the books and

defeating inflation are in the immediate term higher up the agenda. We thought we should use this pause in the worship of the great

growth God to reflect a bit on what growth actually means and to ask whether it

really is something so

devantly to be wished for.

Just growing is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Growth for its own sake means nothing.

Unfortunately, that's what we've been fed. There are also those economists who hold, mostly for reasons connected with climate change,

that we should engage reverse gear and go for de-growth, shrinking our economies instead of growing them.

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