THE UK Government keeps telling us that we’re seeing an “economic recovery”, and even many opposition politicians seem willing to go along with that claim.

I think it’s very dangerous to call what’s happening a recovery.

If you’d been treated for an illness or injury and your doctor announced that you had recovered, you might reasonably think that the injury is healed, or the disease is gone.

It doesn’t seem to work that way with the economy.

The economic symptoms might change over time, but the underlying disease is still there.

We’ve had a long term problem of low productivity, and the Government’s response to the recession has done nothing substantial to turn that around.

Right wing politicians are obsessed with the level of government debt, but that’s cheaper and far smaller than the private debt which hangs around the necks of households, businesses and financial institutions. Focusing only on reducing the public debt, to the exclusion of action to make the economy more productive, means private debt can only grow even further.

And of course the people who bear the greatest burden of the cuts will be those who are most exposed to expensive debt from online and high street lenders, while wealthier people still have access to cheap money.

Our problem of inequality has kept getting worse too.

As the High Pay Centre this week revealed, the average salary of FTSE100 chief executives is now an eye-watering £5 million.

That’s 183 times the median full time salary, which stands at just over £27k.

This ratio of high to low pay had been growing for many years before the crash, and the gulf has widened even further since then.

In fact the problem is even deeper than the figures above suggest, since many of these companies have enriched themselves by casualising work to avoid providing holiday pay, sick pay or other protections, or replacing full time salaried staff with zero hour contracts and with people who’ve been forced into unpaid workfare programmes.

So the real average income of working people is even lower, and that’s before we even think about those who can’t work, or who can’t find work.

And of course our economy is still fatally dependent on activities which are systematically destroying the life support system that our environment provides us with.

From the relentless consumption of finite resources to the pollution which puts all our lives in immediate and long term danger, the rhetoric both Scottish and UK governments use about “sustainable economic growth” is utterly divorced from reality.

A “recovery” that’s unproductive, which generates wealth from the destruction of the world around us, and which distributes that wealth so unfairly is no recovery at all.