There is I suppose the possibility that Wim Duisenberg the ECB president has experienced a blinding flash on the road to Damascus

There is, I suppose, the possibility that Wim Duisenberg, the ECB president, has experienced a blinding flash on the road to Damascus, but it would take quite a change of heart for him to push the consensus towards a rates cut.The last time he spoke publicly on these issues, he seemed to be saying that a rates cut would make no difference in stimulating growth in any case. Structural reform was the answer, he said, not monetary policy It might, on the other hand, help. The ECB’s own rules require him to keep inflation below 2 per cent, but if Mr Duisenberg thinks rates will make no difference to growth, they won’t make much difference to inflation either. We can but hope he’s seen the error of his ways.Then finally, there is our own Monetary Policy Committee. Of the three, the Bank of England is much the most difficult to double guess.

The last meeting was split, which might indicate an easing bias. On the other hand, it is hard to argue that things have got noticeably worse since then Rather the reverse, in fact. There’s been a significant rally in the stock market, the depressed state of which was a major cause for concern at the last meeting.What’s more, Mr Duisenberg’s observation about monetary policy being impotent may have some validity here in the UK. The key factor affecting business confidence in the UK continues to be the state of the world economy, and particularly that of Europe and the US. A rate cut here in the UK may not help confidence very much, especially if one of its effects is to drive up long term interest rates. Much more useful would be cuts elsewhere.On the other hand, it would provide further support for the housing market. Already in the latter stages of a bubble, the Bank is desperate not to inflate it any further.

The case for an MPC rate cut isn’t so clear cut.Broadband BritainPeople have been calling for British Telecom’s breakup ever since it was first privatised. It’s such a perennial thing that another such missive would scarcely be worth mentioning were it not for the fact that the new chairman of Ofcom, Lord Currie of Marylebone, has himself written in a similar vein. As chairman of Ofcom, the Government’s new super regulator for the communications industry, Lord Currie will shortly be responsible for regulating BT.All of which makes the latest report from Demos, a left-leaning think tank with influence at Number 10, a lot more interesting than it might otherwise have been. The writers, James Wilsdon and Daniel Stedman Jones, argue that for broadband to be given a proper chance in Britain, BT needs to be broken up, with some form of structural separation of the local loop from the rest of the business. For choice, they would put the assets into some form of “not-for-profit” vehicle, a bit like Network Rail, because of “growing public concern about the ability of some privatised infrastructure companies to manage natural monopolies”.Perhaps the writers are too young to remember what BT was like before it was privatised. In those days you had to wait your turn to get a telephone connection, prices were more than 100 per cent higher in real terms than they are now, and quality of service was so abysmal that you sometimes wondered whether you were in the developed world at all. Public ownership and control are no guarantee of public interest, it would seem.