Jeremy Corbyn Will Sack Bank Of England Governor If They Oppose His Economic Plan

Jeremy Corbyn would sack the governor of the Bank of England if they opposed his economic plan, the Labour leadership candidate's economic adviser has said.

Corbyn wants the Bank to print money in order to fund extra infrastructure, housing and transport projects. A plan he has dubbed "quantitative easing for people".

Speaking to BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Monday morning, Corbyn adviser Richard Murphy said the Bank's governor should not be able to block the policy should Labour win power in 2020.

"Bank of England governors are responsible to democratically elected politicians. If we have governors who think they are over and above the rule of democratically elected politicians then I am afraid to say, yes, they should be on the next plane," he said.

Gordon Brown made the Bank independent from government shortly after Labour's 1997 landslide election victory. But Murphy said not only was the idea it was free from Treasury interference was a myth, it was not desirable.

"There is no such thing as Bank of England independence. There never has been. It is fiasco put together, a facade created to appease people, to put forward presentation of something that doesn’t exist," he said.

Corbyn's plan to print money has been attacked by the other Labour leadership candidates. Writing in The Guardian on Sunday, Yvette Cooper said Labour "can’t pledge to just print more money year after year to pay for things we want" as voters would not find it credible.

"Jeremy’s plan for quantitative easing for infrastructure won’t work. It’s one thing to use QE to boost liquidity when the economy has crashed," she said.

"But if you try it when the economy is growing, you push up inflation, destroy confidence in the currency, lose jobs and investment, and create a cost of living crisis too. So while many economists agree there should be an alternative to Osborne, they don’t mean printing money to do it."

But Murphy told the BBC that Ed Miliband lost the election in May because he failed to oppose David Cameron's austerity policies strongly enough.

"Ed Miliband and Ed balls went to the country saying they were going to deliver austerity-lite. As a result people said: 'if I am going to vote for austerity I might as well vote for austerity full', which is George Osborne," he said.

"The young simply didn’t turn up because there was no option for them that they thought was in any way tenable.

"My argument is people have said: 'at last, here is an alternative which does restore confidence in the political system because it saying something else is possible'."