Over the last year or so, we have been doing feasibility work on reform of the way central banking works in the UK. We have been assembling material for arguing that the UK central bank should be more representative of the various economies that make up the UK.

We saw the need for a bank that was less merely a creature of Downing St and Westminster (see our previous work on this - Would an American model be better?)

In this recent crisis, what none of our supposedly national media have noticed is that the further a bank has been based from London,the more likely it is to have ended up in a mess. (see our page on regional banking.)

We were looking at models of regionalised representation such as can be found in Europe, Canada and the USA. While none of us would ever claim to be able to abolish ‘boom and bust’, we hoped that through more responsive and proportionate control over inflation and credit, we could allow the UK economies to find their way towards a more sustainable path: one on which the local economies could come into their own and be a stable base on which to come to terms with our resource predicament and climate change. We thought that a central bank made up of representatives of different parts of the country would be more consistent at implementing a Prosperity and Inflation framework such as we have been proposing.

We were active in seeking to foster the discussion, but increasingly, decision-makers and commentators' attention was focused on the mechanical responses to bank failure and bail-out rather than the path to future success and sustainability. No one was publically talking about the government taking a stake in the banks' ownership as a way forward until only days before it actually happened.

Andrew Lydon