WHETHER it is in the UK, EU or South Africa, governments around the world are scrambling to find the right policies for boosting GDP growth, currently the mother of all macroeconomic metrics to which governments across the political and ideological spectrum seem to aspire to.
It is turning the world of traditional right- and left-wing politics upside down, to the extent that Rachel Reeves, the UK Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, traditionally of a democratic socialist ilk, has embraced growing the economy as a priority seemingly at any cost with a messianic fervour, destroying hitherto sacrosanct policies such as universal winter fuel payments to pensioners, which are now subject to means testing, and adopting measures more akin to creeping austerity, which would have been anathema to her predecessors.
With…