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Always enjoy your speaking notes, Richard. I’ve taken to laying mine out in similar fashion. Anyway, I like the idea of splitting the Treasury and (re) creating a Dept for Economic Affairs. But I can see some scope for less than helpful interaction between that and the BoE given what you outline as the revised role for that institution.
Personally I’m not a great believer in letting the BoE take the lead in anything apart from what used to be its core functions. It was given “independence” primarily to allow Chancellor’s (and the Treasury) to escape responsibility for policy failures (as indeed was the case across Whitehall with the “agencification” of government department and functions through the 1990s and early 2000s), as with the writing of the rather silly letter of apology/explanation when inflation targets are not met.
So, in any rearrangement such as you propose I’d want to see the DEA clearly allocated overall responsiblity for economic affairs and mechanisms put in place to ensure that we don’t then end up with the infighting and deliberate undermining of one department by another that’s been a feature of these arrangements in the past.
Agreed: the BoE has to be the servant of the government
It is not a separate economic authority in its own right and should never have been allowed to think it was