Bank of England ‘must be held to account’ for not acting to avert crisis
AS the Bank of England is slammed by Andy Haldane, its former chief economist, for squandering the chance to tackle the cost-of-living crisis, Lord Willie Haughey has warned the Bank should have been ahead of the curve months ago in tackling the prospect of rising inflation.
Speaking on the Go Radio Business Show, Lord Haughey said: “We’re not rocket scientists. We have just been looking at the data. So where has the Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey been? He’s buried his head in the sand for months and months.
“The experts will tell you you’ve got to lift interest rates, which will not be good for anybody at the moment. That’s certainly not going to help the cost-of-living crisis.
“What we need is some clever people to make some clever decisions over the next few weeks… not the next few months.”
With many observers
predicting inflation will rise above 10 per cent, Sir Tom Hunter voiced his own concerns the UK could soon be looking at stagflation.
“I haven’t heard the word stagflation for many a year,” he told the show’s host Donald Martin, editor of
The Herald and Herald on Sunday, “but we’ve a war in Europe. My goodness!
“There is not one person listening to this show – unless it’s Andrew Bailey and Rishi Sunak – who can do anything about these things.
“You as a small business owner, you as an entrepreneur, all you can do is take that information and say, ‘What does it mean for my business? How do I serve my customers better? How do I make my business more efficient?’
“Because the big things you can’t do a thing about.
“There are people out there who should be doing something about it, and even they’re not doing anything about it. But you can get yourself down in the dumps about this. I would say worry instead about the things you can sort.”
Lord Haughey agreed, adding: “It looks like Andrew Bailey has been caught sleeping at the wheel. The buck’s been passed to Rishi Sunak to try to fix things but I think the Bank of England must be held accountable for the lack of movement over the past few months.”