The satirist Peter Cook had a famous skit in which he played a second world war RAF officer sending a pilot on a suicide mission to Germany. “I want you to lay down your life, Perkins,” Cook’s character says. “We need a futile gesture at this stage. It will raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate, Perkins, pop over to Bremen, take a shufti, don’t come back.” There are some among Mark Carney’s critics who think the actions taken by the Bank of England last week fall into the “futile gesture” category. They dispute the governor’s assertion that the package of stimulus measures agreed by the monetary policy committee was ... (Read the full story)
