On the day your front page announced that the UK is back into recession (Just like 1975, 26 April), on page 17 you covered a report from the Royal Society which says high consumption in rich countries needs to be reduced rapidly to avoid "a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills" (Report, 26 April).
Whether it is called "double-dip recession, "stagnation" or "flat-lining" (as Ed Balls puts it – accompanied by a level movement of his hands), it is, in effect, part of the answer to reducing the consumption levels which our scientists call for.
We are in a time of zero economic growth. Where are the economists and politicians prepared to welcome this? Where are the thinkers and doers that recognise that an end to economic growth, with a redistribution of wealth, is an essential part of preparing for the climate problems of global warming and the transport problems of peak oil?
Michael Bassey
Coddington, Nottinghamshire
• Will Hutton (Kamikaze chancellor, 26 April) is right about the economic effects of the austerity programme but wrong to assume Cameron and Osborne have "a primitive view about what makes capitalism tick".
They understand exactly what they are doing. They have their own hidden agenda: reduce benefits, undermine the already inadequate social security net and price the unemployed into work. If the unemployed do not take the jobs, send them up north, and keep London and the south-east for the non-tax-paying, non-domiciled rich.
Their agenda is vicious, uncaring and immoral, but if we carry on laying down they will carry on walking all over us.
Michael Gold
London
• I enjoyed Will Hutton's piece but he seems to miss a fundamental point. The swingeing cuts to public services and to welfare, which self-evidently undermine a UK economic recovery, are driven by a rightwing "small state" ideology rather than economic necessity. The endlessly trumpeted need to reduce the UK's structural deficit, with which Hutton rightly finds fault, seems to be a deliberate cover for this policy. It saddens me that the general public, misled by much of the media, have failed to see through this lie.
The frequent ministerial chorus of "We have to clear up the economic mess left to us by Labour" (ignoring the fact of a global banking crisis in 2008) whenever the next turn of the screw is announced, reminds me of the endlessly repeated lies by Blair, Straw and their acolytes about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, used to soften up the British public in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war. Different politicians, different topic, same technique to manipulate us all.
Peter Wilkinson
Surbiton, Surrey