In other words, central bankers seemed not to believe research results suggesting that the welfare benefits of macroeconomic stabilisation were small. 14 Caring passionately about the benefits of price stability is part of what makes us – a bunch of “conservative central bankers” 15 – suitable for the job. Environmental conditions for independence: institutions One might think that would be it; that independence would follow from a consensus being established around those ideas and values. Not at all, and for good reasons in the UK context. I recall 16 various arguments being advanced through the 1980s and into the 1990s against independence for the Bank. Mostly, they had their roots in the Bank comprising unelected officials, without a democratically elected minister as its head. Thus, the then Governor was told in the very early 1990s that if the Bank ever combined responsibility for bank supervision with monetary policy it would be “an overmighty citizen”. More important, a number of commentators argued that it was a real obstacle to independence that  12  O. Blanchard and S. Fisher in “Lectures on Macroeconomics”, MIT Press 1989, state that “money is said to be neutral if changes in the level of nominal money have no effect on the real equilibrium. It is said to be superneutral if changes in money growth have no effect on the real equilibrium.” (note 8, page 207).
My reluctance to go down that route stems from a concern that we would slip towards a degree of individualism where members were no longer listening to each other. It would not be possible for members to polish their statements after the meeting, as they would then be able to tweak their text, ever so slightly of course, in the light of the market reaction to our decision and so on. So highly polished statements would be brought to the meeting, with perhaps even a degree of competition in the depth of the analysis or the beauty of the prose. But the very point of a committee is that we 26 should listen to each other, and then make up our own minds. That includes trying to persuade one’s  unexpired parts of the terms of existing Committee members, but do not include the terms of Howard Davies and David Walton. 25  For example, Weber, A., 2007, “Monetary policy strategy and communication”, speech at the Deutsche Bundesbank/Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland conference on “Monetary policy strategy: old issues and new challenges”, Frankfurt, May 2007. 26  See section on “Does discussion help?” in Lombardelli, Proudman and Talbot, op. cit., page 199. 6  BIS Review 66/2007  colleagues. Over the years, 27 I have definitely seen occasions where individual members have altered their position during the course of a meeting.