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LIKE many people in the UK, I found out last month that I am a member of a sinister organisation called the “anti-growth coalition”. Our ex-prime minister Liz Truss (who resigned as I was writing this) first used this inane slogan at the Conservative party conference and trotted it out at every opportunity afterwards.

In case you missed it, the coalition includes Remainers, environmentalists, trades union members, protesters and people who live in north London townhouses and appear on the BBC. I tick a lot of those boxes. OK, all of them. (I am also a proud member of our home secretary’s “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati”.)

You have to hand it to the Conservatives: they have excelled at coming up with pithy, three-word slogans to get their divisive messages across. But under the hapless Truss, even that dubious skill deserted them. “Anti-growth coalition” is a total dud, like a small child copying the general form of a joke, but not knowing how punchlines work.

It is also grotesquely wrong, especially in its smear on environmentalism. A few days after Truss started tossing the slogan about, I watched an online run by and Natural England. One speaker was , an environmental economist at the UK’s University of Exeter and a former adviser to seven environment secretaries, including Truss. He poured gallons of high-octane scorn on her flagship “idea”. “The UK is in danger of becoming a looking-glass state where protection of the environment is portrayed as ‘getting in the way of growth’,” he said. “This view is specious, wrong-headed, outdated nonsense – and it’s dangerous. The economy is totally and utterly dependent on the environment.”

Consider the then energy secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg’s insistence that the UK “must get every cubic inch of gas out of the North Sea”. He then put our money where his mouth is, pledging £90 billion of public money to subsidise fossil fuel exploration on the grounds that it would lower energy bills and is greener than importing gas. This latter claim may be true, but that is besides the point: extracting yet more gas is climate suicide and is economically illiterate. As Bateman pointed out, it takes an average of 15 years for a fossil fuel project to go from discovery to production, by which time the world will have moved decisively away from fossil fuels and nobody will want to buy the stuff. It will be £90 billion wasted.

Not to mention the fact that solar and wind power are already cheaper than gas, and that by investing a fraction of that £90 billion in both, the UK could have a green, cheap and secure energy system in a few years.

And yet, another plank of Truss’s dash for growth was to ban solar panels on farmland, partly because she prefers to look at baa-lambs . She evidently doesn’t know that sheep farming is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and without anti-free-market government subsidies. Let’s hope her successor, Rishi Sunak, takes another tack – as over the Tory party’s threats to tear up plans to pay farmers to become stewards of nature.

The (ELM) scheme was designed to replace the EU’s agricultural subsidy system, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), a move seen by many pro-Europeans like me as the one positive outcome of Brexit. Under ELM, farmers would be paid for environmentally friendly land management, instead of being subsidised to produce as much food as possible, the costs to nature be damned. That was how CAP worked and it was an environmental catastrophe.

Truss’s wrecking crew reportedly wanted to go back to something similar, on the spurious grounds that ELM is a threat to food security. They are presumably unaware that in the UK could be viable without subsidies if the animals were reared in newly restored woodland. Baa humbug.

At the online event, , chair of Natural England, summed it up nicely. “Too many people seem blind to the fact that our economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature, with our entire way of life sustained by ecosystems as diverse as soils and the sea. Nature is the basis of our food supply, clean water, air and vital for human health and well-being. Degrading those key services means money has to be spent dealing with the fallout, money that could be better spent elsewhere.”

Too many people indeed, and far too many people in positions of power. There is an anti-growth coalition in the UK. It is led by the dinosaurs who think that conserving the environment and economic progress are mutually incompatible.

Graham Lawton is a staff writer at 91av and author of Mustn’t Grumble: The surprising science of everyday ailments. You can follow him @grahamlawton