Despite a prolonged period of growth weakness in the advanced economies if oil prices have remained firm over successive months, when the global economy returns to a durable phase of higher growth, oil prices could only harden further, unless some technology breakthrough improves availability of alternative sources of energy significantly, which though looks quite unlikely.
The fall in house-building, because it brought forward our own slowdown, reinforced the message from the world. (ii)  Because inflation was not threatening to rise above our target, we had no conflict of objectives, and so could act quickly.