Checking The Bank

Even Mervyn King now regrets that Gordon Brown and Tony Blair reversed one of Labour’s greatest achievements and ended democratic political control over monetary policy. That reversal must itself be reversed as a matter of the utmost urgency.

Attlee never went through with the 1945 Manifesto commitment to nationalise the clearing banks. At the time, he was probably right. But he went through with the nationalisation of the Bank of England.

And the man who reversed that assertion of democratic political control over monetary policy went on to learn how right Attlee had been. An independent central bank, or anything like one, is an intolerable alternative government.

As even the head of that alternative government now recognises.