This means that we can and do make judgments about the period over which we should return inflation to target in the wake of a cost shock, notably at present. But we are not in a position where individual members could choose to subordinate the achievement of price stability to that of stabilising output. 2  For a more extended discussion, see Tucker P M W (2007) ‘Central Banking and Political Economy: the example of the UK’s Monetary Policy Committee’ speech at Inflation Targeting, Central Bank Independence and Transparency Conference, Cambridge, Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin Q3 2007, pp 445-452. 2  BIS Review 96/2008  At the other end of the spectrum, our month-by-month votes on Bank Rate are individualistic in precisely Blinder’s sense. And, as he says, that has clear implications for how we convey those decisions. The minutes take primacy. That is partly because it is more difficult for us than for some of our peers to release an informative statement immediately after the policy meeting: if you don’t know what you’re going to decide, it is pretty hard to prepare a draft in advance! Each individual member is obviously in a position to summarise their views. But we could not sensibly have nine individual statements without risking what Alan Blinder calls cacophony. Also, such statements would have to be prepared in advance, so there would probably be less listening and engagement at the policy meeting itself.
I have comments in three areas: the political economy genesis of the UK’s system; how it bears on the communication of monetary policy or what Blinder called the ‘cacophony problem’; and a plea for Blinder to widen his enquiries beyond interest-rate setting. Political economy and one-member/one-vote Modern Britain has no tradition of non-elected officials taking major executive decisions affecting the whole of the nation. This is in marked contrast to say the US where, at Federal level, the President is the only member of the executive to have reached office via the ballot box. Nor in the living memory of the UK people have we had any crises of democracy, so we have not developed national institutions, such as Germany’s Bundesbank, whose place in society was not mediated via our democratic processes. In consequence, when debates about the possibility of central bank independence got underway in earnest from the mid1980s, a widely perceived stumbling block was that central bank officials could not account personally for their decisions on the Floor of the House (of Commons). There was a democratic deficit. Resolution came via the political cost of the failure of other approaches to monetary policy, in which Ministers running for re-election decided rates; the happenstance of the development during the 1980s and 1990s of influential committees of Parliament, before which central  1  See http://econ2008.bankofcanada-conference.ca/wp-content/blinder.pdf  BIS Review 96/2008  1  bankers could (and frequently do) appear; and specific design features of the monetary regime itself.