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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

It is a pleasure to agree with the hon. Gentleman. I seem to recall that section 11 of the Bank of England Act 1998 defines clearly what the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee is all about; it is achieving the target that the Chancellor set. It is interesting that the previous Chancellor reset the inflation target from 2.5 per cent. to 2 per cent., just as we ran into the first serious series of commodity price rises that we had experienced for a long period of time. It is interesting to speculate as to whether we conspired to have a more difficult monetary situation simply by decreasing the target for inflation by a half of 1 per cent.