‘A sense of the systemic’: the Bank of England and the language of inclusive capitalism

Abstract

Successive crises – social, environmental and political – have led some in global governance circles to advocate a more ‘inclusive capitalism’. In this article, I show how this postcrisis language of inclusive capitalism was used by a specific subset of officials within the Bank of England: Those with high levels of experience in public sector and international official institutions. It is argued that these officials are ‘organic intellectuals’ who mobilise their experience of inter-institutional collaboration as a deliberative model for solving long-term social problems. The institutional experience of these officials and their concern with crises of trust in expertise facilitated the adoption of these models of communicative intervention. I draw on a novel dataset of Bank officials’ career data and speeches, as well as twelve interviews with current and former Bank staff, to show who used this language, in what settings and what motivated its adoption. The article makes a novel contribution to debates about the motivations of key figures in central banks, suggesting that their actions go beyond reputation defence to encompass an expansive worldview of how capitalism might solve its myriad crises.

Keywords:

• Central banks
• Gramsci
• social governance
• intellectuals
• crisis politics

Introduction

In his 2021 manifesto Values, former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney recalls that, ‘Over my career, I have tried to build a better world for all’ in collaboration with ‘business, labour, academia, religion, philanthropy and politics’ (Carney, 2021, p. ix). Despite these efforts, he writes, ‘some dismiss me as a member of a global elite. If that means someone who understands how the world economy works, can navigate its waters and speak its language then I’m guilty as charged’ (ibid.). Carney’s efforts to ‘build a better world for all’ saw him at times adopt a campaigning posture quite at odds with the stereotype of the reputation obsessed ‘conservative central banker’ (Rogoff, 1985). In his willingness to raise issues from inequality to climate change, Carney encountered frequent criticism from both Conservative politicians and the right-wing press. This article shows how, during his time at the Bank of England, Carney’s ideological concerns with how capitalism ought to be governed affected how the Bank communicated and engaged with the public. The notion of ‘inclusive capitalism’ formed the substance of a novel, potentially hegemonic ideology to legitimise the governance of postcrisis capitalism. New techniques of ‘social governance’ would form the method for making capitalism more inclusive: A shift from utility to wellbeing; from market forces to conscious governance; from narrowly economic data inputs to consideration of diverse social inputs in the formulation of policy. ‘Managing’ and ‘moderating’ market forces in this way would, Carney argued, make growth more ‘inclusive’ and help to build a ‘globalisation that works for all’ (Carney, 2016).

The idea of ‘inclusive capitalism’ gained popularity among officials, regulators and some business leaders after the global financial crisis (GFC). At the 2014 Conference on Inclusive Capitalism, then-International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde exhorted businesses to help heal ‘divisions’ and ‘disparities’ that can undermine ‘democracy’ (Lagarde, 2014). As Carney put it at the same conference, the ‘social capital’ of contemporary market economies had been badly damaged by the GFC and its aftermath. He argued that ‘unchecked market fundamentalism’ had eroded ‘the social capital essential for the long-term dynamism of capitalism itself’ (Carney, 2014a, p. 3). As the Committee on Inclusive Capitalism (CIC) (where Carney is now Co-Chair) puts it, in an era of ‘unprecedented technological advancement, climate disruption, public health crises and social unrest’, institutions at every level of society need to ‘promote a more sustainable, trusted, equitable and inclusive system’ (Committee for Inclusive Capitalism, n.d). As Carney’s tenure at the Bank progressed, this vision of inclusion was given substantive form in new communicative measures, which prioritised the inclusion of diverse social voices in deliberative fora through which consensus about policy could be rebuilt (Haldane, 2019).

The article asks how this vision of inclusive capitalism affected the Bank’s communication during and after Carney’s tenure as Governor from 2013–2020. It adopts as an analytical tool the notion of Carney—and others like him—as ‘boundary walking’ organic intellectuals of global capitalism (Coombs & Thiemann, 2022; Gramsci, 2005; Section One). Boundary walkers move between institutional fields—in this case, the spheres of multilateral governance and of local communities—and translate practices and ideas into different contexts (cf. Ban, 2016). In the process, they re-draw the boundaries of those institutional fields. In this case, senior Bank officials established new deliberative social fora explicitly on the model of deliberative multilateral spaces. In doing so, they attempted to construct a new set of institutional boundaries around the ‘social’ as a space of consensus formation, which existed in contrast with the excesses of both the market and partisan politics. Organic intellectuals synthesise diverse technical and normative ideas in order to produce a relatively coherent and legitimate way of governing capitalism. Carney’s prominence is explained by two features of the postcrisis landscape. The first is increased opportunity for inter-institutional cooperation between non-majoritarian global and domestic regulatory institutions, which strengthened the role of global capitalism’s organic intellectuals. The second is the growth of public discontent with the prevailing domestic political consensus and the breakdown of ‘liberal value systems’ in the United Kingdom (UK) (Davies, 2021; Wood & Ausserladscheider, 2021), which weakened the formal political sphere. These two sets of enabling conditions are particularly marked in the UK, where reform (Financial Service Act 2012) and political divisions (Brexit) are both particularly notable. These conditions have been accompanied by continuous questioning of the Bank’s authority and credibility from within the ranks of the ruling Conservative Party (May, 2016; Economist, 2022). It is for this reason that I adopt a single case study approach, which allows for a detailed focus on the Bank’s internal and public response to this set of economic and political tensions. As former Bank Chief Economist Andrew Haldane acknowledged when interviewed for this article, his efforts to develop a more deliberative and inclusive communications style were partly an attempt to combat falling trust in public institutions:

There’d been a bit of fracturing of public trust around the time of the GFC… faith in bureaucratic institutions, the pillars of the establishment, [had been] gradually denuded over time. Big banks bad, big tech bad, big government bad, big central banks bad… There was a sense that the system wasn’t working – that’s what the Brexit vote was about as well of course. If the system wasn’t working, who are the stewards and safeguards of the system? Well, it’s those institutions – they ‘run the world’ (Interview K).

Here, Haldane suggests that the concern was not only to defend the Bank’s reputation, but—less self-interestedly—to defend the legitimacy of the governance of global capitalism.

In order to demonstrate the effect Carney’s idea of ‘inclusive capitalism’ had on Bank communication, the article employs two research strategies. In the first, text analysis techniques are used to measure the use of the language of inclusive capitalism by senior officials within the Bank over time and across institutional spaces (Section Two). This analysis demonstrates an empirical association between inclusive capitalism language use and a key subset of actors: Those, like Carney, with experience of work in the postcrisis official and public sectors (that is, in my analytical framework, the organic intellectuals of global capitalism; Section One). Additionally, this analysis points towards a process of boundary walking: The inclusive capitalism language was translated from the institutions of multilateral governance to those of the domestic private sector. In the second research strategy, evidence of this process of translation is provided through analysis of strategic documents, public statements and interviews with some of the key players at the Bank (Section Three). This section demonstrates how the notion of inclusion was embedded within Bank communicative strategies and substantiates the analytical link between inclusion and new forms of social governance. In the postcrisis period—and accelerating after the Brexit vote—Bank officials implemented new, participatory communicative policies (in particular, the Bank’s deliberative and participatory Citizens Panels). These would seek to engage citizens and local communities in the deliberative formulation of policy. Such communicative measures were, then, inclusive capitalism in microcosm: They put into practice the new, potentially hegemonic mode of governing global capitalism by supplementing purely economic data with what Carney calls ‘social values’.

These findings have implications for both academic and public understanding of the politics of central banks. A long-running justification for central bank independence (CBI) has been that an unelected technocrat will derive their legitimacy from their reputation for sound decision making rather than electoral success. This should incentivise ‘conservative’ decision making on the part of central bank officials (Rogoff, 1985). In the precrisis policy framework, the single lever of short-term interest rates was to be used only to correct for short-run deviations of inflation from a pre-committed target. By targeting price stability, conditions for stable growth and optimal levels of employment (as given by the long-run supply capacity of the economy) would be met (Goodfriend, 2005; Woodford, 2003). Communicative transparency was seen by central bankers as a corollary of this independence: It signalled policy to markets and gave an explanation for those signals (Blinder, 2004; Blinder et al., 2022; Tucker, 2018). In the view of critics, the independence of monetary policy shifted a crucial area of macroeconomic decision-making from the arena of democratic contestation to one of technocratic deliberation—so-called depoliticization (Burnham, 2001). This allowed politicians to shift the blame for unpopular interest rate decisions and to gain credibility in globalised financial markets (Dellepiane-Avellaneda, 2013; McNamara, 2002). Since then, political economists have developed sophisticated analyses of the political consequences of monetary policy independence. In the postcrisis era, many have focused on the covert support of central banks for government policies via their asset purchase programmes (Green & Lavery, 2017; Sokol, 2022; van Doorslaer & Vermeiren, 2021). This increased role of central banks in supporting government policies has raised questions around their political legitimacy (Dietsch, 2020; Dietsch et al., 2018; Macquarie, 2022). Others have highlighted central banks’ infrastructural role in reproducing financialised capitalism (Braun, 2020; Gabor & Ban, 2016).

In this view, central banks’ communicative activities are seen as attempting to legitimise the status quo, rather than merely providing a technical justification for their decisions (Braun, 2016). In postcrisis studies of the politics of central bank communication, the underlying cause of communicative change is generally attributed to the need to defend depoliticization and central bankers’ reputation for independence. Central bankers are seen as needing to maintain their authority, while avoiding too much visibility (Best, 2022). Braun (2016) argues that the Bank of England was moved to counter public misperceptions about modern money creation in order to defend itself from public accusations that it was merely ‘printing money’ via its asset purchase programme. Moschella et al. (2020) show that the European Central Bank (ECB) refocuses its communicative efforts towards greater social participation and wider issue areas in situations of negative public sentiment. Others working in a similar vein have persuasively demonstrated the increasingly strategic use of communication by central banks, non-majoritarian regulators and international official institutions (Koop & Lodge, 2020; Moschella & Pinto, 2019; Reh et al., 2020). Through the use of public participation and social governance techniques, the regulatory state has become more ‘responsive’ to public demands (Koop & Lodge, 2020). In these studies, the motivation behind such efforts is ultimately a self-interested one: To defend central bank reputations and reduce politicization. Clarke and Roberts (2016) relate Carney’s performance of ‘rational’ and ‘noble-minded’ financial masculinity to renewed efforts at depoliticization. Rather than create a new type of politics, they argue, financial governance reforms substituted the aggression of transnational financial masculinity with a new type of cool-headed patriarchal masculinity. This has been accompanied, Waylen (2022) argues, by the selective co-option of (liberal) feminist principles of inclusion within global financial governance discourse. Although insightful, these studies share a basic premise: Change in central banker and other regulatory communication is basically self-defensive, seeking to alleviate political pressure through strategic co-optation of outside discourses.

By contrast, this article suggests that the cause of communicative change at the Bank in the postcrisis era was the perceived need to find a new governing principle for globalised capitalism. Aligning themselves with the defence of global capitalism, rather than just the defence of their own independence, could as easily raise the level of political scrutiny for central bankers as reduce it. This suggests that implicit models of officials’ conserving and self-defensive behaviour do not fully capture the effects of ideological worldviews on both policies and communications. The findings chime with work on the search by policymakers for a ‘macro-morality’ (Baker, 2018; Best & Widmaier, 2006) or vision of ‘legitimate social purpose’ (Baker, 2018; Ruggie, 1982), but offers a theoretical reason for why policymakers might undertake such efforts. By conceptualising key officials as Gramscian organic intellectuals, the article contributes a new way of understanding how and why central banks are increasingly willing to risk their reputations when attempting to lead in diverse policy fields from global warming to economic inequality. Scholars in International Political Economy (IPE) have found only modest evidence of ‘ideational’ change within central banks since the GFC (Arbogast et al., 2023; Levingston, 2021; van ‘t Klooster, 2022). Despite these modest changes to policy views, there remains a lingering sense that something larger has shifted in the worlds of central banks and global governance. This study identifies the way in which one particular group of central bankers—a small subset within the Bank—maintained their basic policy views, but significantly adapted their wider view of how capitalism in general should be governed. In principle, then, the same methods used here could be applied to other (particularly rich economy) central banks. By using a Neo-Gramscian lens (outlined in Section One), the article draws attention in new ways to the ideological worldview of particular central bankers and the role this has played in efforts to re-legitimise global capitalism. If these central bankers have not yet managed to revive that system’s prospects, it is not for want of trying. The article therefore suggests that closer attention needs to be paid to changing technocratic-political ideologies in the disputed politics of global capitalism.

Carney’s career since the end of his tenure as Governor has been marked by an increasingly open flirtation with what might be termed global progressivism (as appearances at the 2023 Global Progress Action Summit and UK Labour Party Conference attest). This global progressivism—with its emphasis on inclusion and social governance as part of the effort to build a new form of global capitalist stability—contrasts sharply with destabilising political and economic tendencies, from the Liz Truss government to Brexit. The article suggests, then, that Carney and those like him wanted to re-legitimise global capitalism precisely in order to combat these destabilising tendencies (which had created, in Carney’s words, an ‘Argentina on the Channel’) (Bins, 2023). Indeed, as the analysis below suggests, the Bank has not entirely reverted to the pre-Carney norm since his departure. The partial incorporation of Carney’s brand of global progressivism within the Bank along with the rightward drift of UK politics suggests there may be further confrontations between these two political tendencies in the future.

Boundary walking organic intellectuals at the Bank of England

This section outlines the theoretical characterisation of Carney and others like him as boundary walking organic intellectuals, which informs the subsequent empirical analysis. This theoretical approach is used to help account for the reasons why some senior Bank officials were willing to adopt the language of inclusive capitalism along with new forms of deliberative social governance in spite of the risks this posed to their reputations and the possibility that this could draw the Bank into political disputes. The approach outlined here aims to achieve two things. First, it aims to show how the likes of Carney used ideas first popularised in multilateral governance venues in more local contexts. The concept of boundary walking provides a theoretical means of describing this process. Second, it aims to provide a more expansive means of accounting for communicative innovation than the self-interested and defensive one implicit in the literature described above. The notion of Carney and others as organic intellectuals of global capitalism aims to achieve this. It does so by theorising organic intellectuals as performing the intellectual labour necessary to create a consensual basis for governing capitalism. This theoretical approach should help to capture a shift in these central bankers’ attitudes to social governance that has otherwise been hard to pin down in studies of the politics of central banks.

In what follows, I characterise the ideas associated with inclusive capitalism as a potentially hegemonic ideology novel to the postcrisis period (a decision I explain in the next paragraph). Although it is not possible here to fully account for the source of the inclusive capitalism ideology, it was popularised in certain governing circles—particularly among central bankers and other economic technocrats—after the GFC. In practice, inclusion was to be achieved through social governance techniques (an association explored in more detail in Section Three; see also Davies, 2015; Haldane, 2019). Having been popularised in the sphere of multilateral governance, these ideas were then subject to a process of translation for local contexts by key officials within the Bank. In particular, former Bank Chief Economist Andrew Haldane saw new deliberative communicative initiatives as a key part of the re-construction of ‘community’, which he contrasted with both the state and the market (a so-called Third Pillar; see Haldane, 2019, and Section Three). What needs to be conceptualised, then, is how this process of translation came about. In a recent contribution to the social studies of central banking literature, Coombs and Thiemann (2022) argue that central banks are boundary walkers. Situated between both states and markets, they use their power to re-draw the boundaries between institutions and spheres of practice. Independent central banks—which became a prevalent feature particularly of rich economies from the 1990s onwards—represent the outcome of one such shift of institutional boundaries. This capacity for boundary walking also aptly captures the alliances formed between central bankers and academic economists in the formulation and propagation of ‘macroprudential’ financial stability issues (Thiemann et al., 2021). In the next section, I use quantitative text analysis techniques to trace how the language associated with inclusive capitalism was adopted by certain Bank officials and was translated between institutional spheres. Associations between use of this language in public speeches and career background, institutional setting and time period are traced. I argue this suggests there was a process of translating these ideas for domestic audiences as Bank officials attempted to advocate new forms of inclusion and social governance.

Characterising this set of ideas around inclusive capitalism and social governance as a novel, potentially hegemonic ideology for governing capitalism, I then deploy a Neo-Gramscian lens to help account for why the language was adopted and how it was put into action. Carney and other senior Bank officials—particularly those with extensive experience in the public and international official sectors—are seen as Gramscian organic intellectuals. In Gramsci’s discussion of intellectuals, social classes with their basis in the relations and forces of production are seen as producing intellectual strata (technicians, economists, lawyers, etc.) who specialize in performing bureaucratic and political functions on behalf of these classes (Gramsci, 2005, pp. 4–5). Organic intellectuals organise the thought and practice of dominant or rising classes through their specialised expertise. In doing so, they articulate a relatively coherent ruling ideology, which can at the same time appeal to the basic needs and norms of other classes: A potentially hegemonic ideology. Such ideologies may or may not achieve something approaching hegemonic status as they vie with alternative ways of conceptualising legitimate governance in a contested political sphere. These organic intellectuals acquire increasingly ‘directive’ (and political) autonomy within the vast ‘democratic-bureaucratic’ apparatuses of rule (7). The intellectual labour—ideational, but also practical, managerial and administrative—performed by these organic intellectuals thus acquires its own autonomy as distinct from both political governance (the state) and economic governance (the market). They thus wield real power and influence. Following this theory, I situate Bank officials as seeking in the postcrisis era to articulate a new legitimising framework for global capitalism, not just for central bank independence. The vision of a more inclusive capitalism, to be achieved through new processes of social deliberation that would imbue policy outcomes with a greater diversity of data sources, opinions and ‘values’, thus represents an attempt to articulate a new hegemonic mode of governing capitalism. Section Three in particular uses documentary and interview evidence to show how Carney and others described their efforts in terms that resonate with this theory.

This argument chimes with the work of Neo-Gramscian and other globalisation scholars, who build on Gramsci’s approach to class formation, passive revolution and the internationalisation of production to advance theories of transnational capitalist development (Cox, 1987; Gill, 1998; Van Der Pijl, 1998). Capitalism as a potentially all-encompassing global system has required the development of transnational systems of rule and launched processes of transnational class formation (Cox, 1987; Sklair, 2002, 2016; Van Der Pijl, 1998). This required the development of legal orders and technical expertise that could be deployed outside of the democratic sphere (what Gill calls ‘new constitutionalism’) (Gill, 1998, 2017). Scepticism towards unbridled forms of marketisation and commodification on the part of the groups who manage these non-majoritarian governing and regulatory institutions may lead them to advocate new forms of international policy coordination and voice scepticism about unadulterated free markets (Ryner, 2023; Van Der Pijl, 1998). These contributions stress the ways in which principally domestic state institutions are partially transnationalized through increasing opportunities for multilateral cooperation and communication (Panitch & Gindin, 2012; cf. Babić, 2023). At the same time, principally supranational institutions enter into closer cooperation with domestic regulatory and non-majoritarian institutions. Networks of public and official sector governance—which mediate both the state and supranational institutions—thus emerge through processes of capitalist development.

I argue, then, that this Neo-Gramscian lens can help to account for what is missing from the wider literature on the politics of central banks. In the case studied here, some Bank officials did not attempt to narrowly defend either depoliticization or their own reputations. Rather, they exposed themselves to political attack in a context of a dysfunctional political system in order to offer what they—in their own words—saw as a form of social leadership. What appears to have facilitated the adoption of this more prominent and broader role are two sets of factors. On the one hand, the GFC opened up the possibility for new forms of inter-institutional cooperation and communication between independent central banks and multilateral institutions (as described by the Neo-Gramscians). The response to the crisis expanded existing forms of central bank cooperation (Bordo et al., 2014) and initiated new ones under the executive oversight of the G20 and coordinated through the Financial Stability Board (FSB) (Pagliari, 2013). These processes of cooperation implicated not only central banks, but government departments, regulators, official international institutions and—to a lesser extent—private market actors in the deliberative production of normative guidelines for market activity (Carney, 2021). Such networks have been seen by many scholars as playing a vital role in the production of contemporary economics expertise and the management of the global economy (Henriksen & Seabrooke, 2021; Seabrooke & Tsingou, 2021; Tsingou, 2010). It was in this setting that the language of inclusive capitalism was popularised. On the other hand, the UK has witnessed particularly notable public discontent with the prevailing political settlement of globalisation, growing popular disaffection with economic expertise and a breakdown in domestic political consensus. This has led to what Davies (2021) terms the ‘collapse of liberal value systems’ in the UK. The destabilisation of the democratic political system has accentuated the role of the Bank’s organic intellectuals. Anecdotally, this more pronounced role was visible in the aftermath of the UK’s vote for Brexit (when, in the absence of political leadership, it was left to Carney alone to calm markets). In the case examined here, this prominence is evidenced by the Bank’s new strategic communications—particularly its efforts to institute and promote a more socially deliberative style of governance. A number of Bank officials thus contrasted ‘soft’ law, ‘social’ governance, ‘inclusion’, ‘informal’ deliberation, consensual ‘norms’ and community ‘engagement’ to the ‘hard’ law of the state and the lawlessness of the market. As such, their own efforts are viewed as contributing to the creation of a new sphere of inclusive social governance opposed to both the markets and the state. These claims are substantiated in the following two sections.

The language of inclusive capitalism in the postcrisis Bank of England

This section uses text analysis of Bank officials’ public speeches and their career backgrounds to show how the potentially hegemonic ideology of inclusive capitalism was increasingly adopted by postcrisis Bank officials with experience in the public and international official sectors—i.e. those identified by Gramsci as possessing increasing autonomy within the sprawling ‘democratic-bureaucratic’ apparatuses of (global) capitalist rule. Having indicated this empirical association, the section goes on to show when and where the language was used. It therefore uses quantitative evidence of language change as a proxy for the adoption of new ideological sentiment. The growing use of this language in both postcrisis multilateral and local, domestic settings supports the claim that Bank officials translated forms of multilateral deliberation for domestic audiences. The analysis also suggests that the growth in inter-institutional multilateral communication in the postcrisis era facilitated the adoption of this potentially politicizing and reputation-risking language. These claims are further supported by the qualitative analysis in the next section.

Data collection consisted of two stages. First, I collected biographical and career data up to and including Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) tenure for all 46 of the officials who sat on the Bank’s MPC between its creation in 1997 and the end of the third quarter of 2022 (using CVs and other publicly available biographical data). I focus on the MPC as it is the central body for making policy decisions within the Bank, and its members should broadly embody the highest levels of public economics expertise in the UK. There are nine members of the MPC, consisting of the Governor, the three Deputy Governors, the Chief Economist (the five ‘internals’) and four Treasury-appointed ‘externals’. The externals are appointed for three years via a standard application process, which requires that they demonstrate leadership in the field and expert knowledge of the UK economy (HMT, 2022). There was only one member (Christopher Allsopp) for whom I could not reconstruct a comprehensive career path with start and end dates for each principal job role they performed. Occasionally, members combine two principal roles at once. These are both counted separately. Secondary roles (visiting professorships, non-executive board memberships, charitable engagements) are not counted. I also do not count roles taken after MPC tenure because publicly available CVs usually only exist up to the date of MPC appointment and there are gaps in subsequent data. It has already been established that central bank officials’ backgrounds have historically mattered for their conduct of monetary policy (with government career bureaucrats favouring looser and financial sector economists preferring tighter policy) (Adolph, 2013). Covering a more relevant period for this study (1990–2010), Farvaque et al. (2014) find notable variation in committee membership across central banks. The ECB was dominated by public sector economists, while half of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s committee consisted of private sector economists. Owing to the appointment by the Treasury of external members, the composition of the MPC has since 1997 been relatively diverse (see Figures 1 and 2). However, almost all MPC members have an advanced economics degree (41 of 46). What has not yet been asked of this kind of career data is whether different types of career experience are associated with the articulation of particular ideological concerns (in this case, inclusive capitalism). I turn to public speech data to address this question.

Figure 1. Career categories of MPC members by external and internal appointees. Note: Career categories were produced using hierarchical clustering of the career data (see Supplementary Material).

Figure 2. Average time spent in each sector as percentage.

Second, I gathered every speech given by members of the MPC between 1997 and the end of the third quarter of 2022. I focus on speeches because these are carefully designed, collaboratively written public interventions that combine the Bank’s institutional view with that of the speaker (cf. Moschella & Pinto, 2019). Anecdotally, external appointees seem to deliver speeches that justify their voting behaviour with reference to their view of the economic prospects of the UK. Internal appointees address a broader range of issues relating to their specific post and to other topical debates. According to one interviewee with experience of assisting the writing process, Governor speeches are designed to leave a mark on the wider profession or contribute to debates across economic policy fields (Interview D). Unlike a conventional politician’s speech, the audience is intentionally limited. Often, speeches are tailored to specific audiences in the domestic private sector, in local communities or in international organisations. A small number of speeches could not be added to the corpus because a full transcript did not exist on the Bank’s website. Another small group of speeches that solely addressed financial stability issues were also excluded as these could affect the results (see below). This resulted in a corpus of 778 texts, which I processed using the ‘quanteda’ programme in R (removing all non-textual features and stop words) (Benoit et al., 2018). Each text was coded with metadata, including the speaker, the date and the type of venue. In total, the corpus contains speeches for 44 of the MPC’s 46 members (two had no speeches in the archive). However, a small number of members had only a few speeches on record. These members’ speeches were excluded from subsequent member-level analysis because their small numbers of total words could lead to exaggerated results. This left 39 members with adequate amounts of text for individual-level analysis (see Supplementary Data). As with all single case studies, the corpus should be representative of the views of the specific speakers, but it would be hazardous to assume it is somehow representative of the views of central bankers more generally. While the method is easily reproducible and could be applied to other institutions (particularly rich economy central banks), the corpus itself should be seen as data for a small, historically specific population rather than a representative sample.

Having built these two data sets, I wanted to know who—if anyone—uses the postcrisis inclusive capitalism language identified above. Use of this language should indicate the adoption of discursive efforts to re-build the legitimacy of capitalism and secure its long-term future by making it more inclusive. In order to do this, I built a dictionary of value-laden terms that appear in the most frequently used words in Carney’s speeches. I checked that each of these terms was used as expected by conducting ‘key words in context’ (KWIC) searches in R. For completeness, I compared these terms with Carney’s book Values (2021) and further incorporated some terms from the aforementioned speech by Lagarde (2014). In order to check for validity, I then compared this dictionary with the CIC’s ‘guiding principles’ (Committee for Inclusive Capitalism, n.d) and terms in the ‘fairness’ and ‘participation’ legitimation frames identified by Rauh and Zürn (2020). The resulting inclusive capitalism dictionary is designed to capture sentiments that sit outside of the technical language associated with central bankers, regulators and economists (see Supplementary Material). It combines ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ words associated with the three issue areas of politics, society and the environment (e.g. ‘democracy’, ‘equality’, ‘sustainable’, ‘populist’, ‘unequal’, ‘carbon’) as well as language related to the issue of inclusion (‘inclusive’, ‘social’, ‘societal’, ‘community’). In order to avoid overlaps with common topics, some cognates are excluded (e.g. ‘systemic’, but not ‘system’). The exclusion of speeches that solely focus on financial stability regulation should avoid the risk that the dictionary scores will simply reflect ‘systemic’ stability concerns. However, a note of caution is still warranted. The dictionary combines language that diagnoses problems and offers solutions to them. At times, particularly around the GFC, some speeches may only mention relevant problems and not propose ‘inclusive capitalist’ solutions to them. I compensate for this weakness through the qualitative approach in the next section. In previous studies of this kind, researchers have found that different forms of moral language are employed by speakers of different political persuasions, but that word density is generally quite low (usually less than one percent) (e.g. Graham et al., 2009). As such, variation in word usage should reflect small, but real variation in the expression of ideological sentiment. While Carney’s speeches (as well as those of other Governors and Chief Economists) should exhibit this language more frequently, there may be periods and settings when others similarly adopt this language. Reflecting their narrow remit, most external appointees are unlikely to make wide use of the terms in the dictionary. Following the Neo-Gramscian organic intellectual theory outlined above, organic intellectuals should be those with the formal and substantive scope to articulate new ideas for governing capitalism into a relatively coherent, potentially hegemonic ideology. Those with a history of work in sectors oriented around ‘public service’—including both the domestic and international sectors—are more likely to discuss these wider themes, rather than putting forth a narrow defence of their own policy decisions.

The graph in Figure 3 demonstrates the extent to which individual appointees used the inclusive capitalism language. It plots percentage dictionary word coverage for each member (total inclusive capitalism words/total words*100) against a scale of net public sector experience (including the Bank, UK government, UK regulators, international official institutions, global governments and global central banks) for all MPC members (Carney and another extreme outlier—Andrew Sentance—are removed from the data). The scale ranges from −1 to 1 and is calculated for each member by subtracting all non-public from public sector years and then dividing by total years. The measure is closely correlated with internal status, but takes different sources of career experience into account. While Carney (excluded from the data) is a notable outlier (1.11%), other recent internal appointees with a range of domestic public (Cunliffe) and international official (Shafik) sector experience score highly. As expected, most of the externals (often academic and private sector economists) score relatively low, while many internal appointees with more private and academic experience (Pill, King, Broadbent, Fisher) appear around the middle. Several pre-GFC career Bank professionals (George, Gieve, Tucker) stand at relatively low levels. Post-GFC Bank career professionals score highly, for example, current Governor Andrew Bailey (2020-) and former Chief Economist Andrew Haldane (2014–2021). If this analysis is reliable, then, it would appear that the novel ideological framing of inclusive capitalism crept into the public speech of the Bank’s organic intellectuals after the crisis. This provides some indication of who used the language, but equally important are the questions of where and when.

Figure 3. Inclusive capitalism word coverage and total domestic public and international official sector experience – all MPC members (no Carney).

The graph in Figure 4 shows how use of the language in the inclusive capitalism dictionary varied across settings over three periods. Once Carney is excluded, this leaves a corpus of 640 speeches delivered in three periods between 24^th June 1997 and 28^th February 2020 (excluding the pandemic, when many speeches were delivered in the Bank’s own webinars). Dividing the corpus into three in this way has the advantage of creating roughly equal bodies of text (each of between 900,000 and 980,000 words). Across most venues, use of the language peaks in the 2008–2013 period. This is no doubt because the dictionary captures some of the crisis talk prevalent at the time. However, speeches delivered at international universities and in international official and non-UK public sector settings remained at high levels during the recovery period after 2013. Speeches delivered to UK private sector audiences (including financial and non-financial firms, professional associations and domestic NGOs) also maintained higher levels of inclusive capitalism language use after the crisis. Although small, there is a continued increase in use of this language in domestic non-government settings even in the post-2013 recovery period. Even when Carney is excluded, then, there is evidence to suggest that Bank officials sought to press upon domestic private sector audiences both the set of social concerns and possible solutions associated with the ideology of inclusive capitalism. In this way, multilateral concerns with making capitalism more inclusive after the crisis were translated for particular domestic audiences.

Figure 4. Use of language in the inclusive capitalism dictionary in different venues across three periods. Note: time1 = 24/06/1997-15/07/2008; time2 = 16/07/2008-14/11/2013; time3 = 15/11/2013-28/02/2020 (No Carney).

Taking all speeches delivered by Carney (2013–2020; 75 speeches; 316,677 words) and Haldane (2014–2021; 44 speeches; 250,315 words) during their respective MPC tenures makes this last point clearer (Figure 5). I choose to focus on these two MPC members because their tenures were roughly contemporaneous, they both have large bodies of text and both score highly in overall use of the inclusive capitalism language. However, Carney and Haldane fundamentally differ in terms of career path. Carney combines a long period of employment in the international financial private sector as well as long periods of non-UK public and official sector employment. Haldane, on the other hand, worked solely at the Bank from the beginning of his career until his departure in 2021. They do, however, have one thing in common: Experience as high-level officials in the postcrisis public/official sectors (fitting the broad definition of organic intellectual above). As Governor, Carney gave far more speeches in international official and global public sector venues than Haldane. This category of venue is also where Carney deployed inclusive capitalism language most frequently. By contrast, Haldane used this language more often when addressing domestic audiences (with the exception of a small number of speeches delivered at non-UK academic institutions). Both Carney and Haldane used this language relatively frequently in both UK public and private sector venues. What is also notable is the relatively low use of this language on the single occasions when Carney and Haldane respectively addressed a trade union venue (both at the annual conference of the Trade Union Congress). Workers, it seems, were not prioritised when advocating inclusive capitalism. One feasible interpretation of these trends is that Carney and Haldane conducted a form of ‘boundary walking’ as they deployed the inclusive capitalism language across different sectors. In effect, the high-level language of inclusive capitalism was being translated and applied to local contexts.

Figure 5. Carney and Haldane speeches.

This section has suggested, then, that postcrisis Bank officials with a background in Gramsci’s ‘democratic-bureaucratic’ apparatuses of (global) capitalist governance used the language of inclusive capitalism, and that this language was used at notably higher levels in both international (official and academic) and domestic private (profit and non-profit) sector settings. This suggests that these Bank officials mediated between the domestic and international spheres when advocating inclusive capitalist solutions to capitalism’s crises (a form of boundary walking). Overall, then, there is good preliminary evidence to suggest that what I have called the potentially hegemonic ideology of inclusive capitalism became a more prominent feature of some Bank officials’ speeches after the crisis. However, showing that this was the case—and that the language was actually used in the way so far inferred—requires a more qualitative approach. I turn to that in the next section.

Bringing society back in: social deliberation at the postcrisis Bank of England

This section draws on document analysis and interview data to show how the postcrisis language of inclusive capitalism was put to use by the key officials identified above. They put this language into effect in communicative initiatives that sought to embed non-market and non-state forms of social deliberation into policy formulation. In doing so, various concepts of the social were invoked in contrast to both the state and the market. I show here the relevance of the Gramscian concept of ‘intellectual labour’: Concepts of the ‘social’ and of ‘inclusion’—rooted in the drive to rebuild global capitalism’s legitimacy– were translated for domestic audiences. Using strategy documents, public statements and interviews with key players, this section shows that the increase in global capitalism language identified in the previous section was no accident. Inclusive capitalism was to be built through new forms of consensual social governance in what I have termed a new, potentially hegemonic ideology.

The first set of conditions that paved the way for the adoption of the language of inclusive capitalism was the increase in opportunities for collaboration between the Bank and a network of multilateral governing institutions. In the sphere of global governance and regulatory institutions, Carney felt that the GFC had ended the era of ‘light touch, laisse-faire thinking’ (Carney, 2021, p. 161). What would need to take its place was a new multilateral regime ‘without a hegemon’, which would need to be undergirded by social values through which trust and legitimacy could be built (ibid.). The FSB provides the model for the development of this kind of ‘soft infrastructure’: Continual negotiation between ‘central banks, finance ministries, standard setters and regulators’, legitimated by accountability to the G20 (ibid., p. 165). Carney takes this model of consensus built through informed deliberation and applies it as a general social alternative to pure market forms of valuation. Cost-benefit analyses are unreliable ways to calculate the value of the long-term health of society, since human nature tends to dramatically discount the future (p. 204). Markets facilitated the creation of economic ‘value’, but often at the cost of social ‘values’ (p. 182). For Carney, the deliberative production of norms—both as rules of conduct, but also as a culture of responsibility—could alter social actors’ focus on short-term profit. By reforming corporate pay schemes, professional ‘horizons’ could be extended beyond the short term, while new ‘codes’ of conduct could ‘re-establish finance’ on the basis of ‘social obligations’ (Carney, 2014a, p. 10; Dictionary score = 1.9%). As such, market actors and public officials alike would be imbued with a ‘sense of the systemic’ consequences of their actions. The move from narrow to broad ‘horizons’ became a key metaphor of Carney’s, which he invoked to explain the failure of social institutions to act on climate change. The ‘tragedy’ of contemporary life was that long-term social and environmental risks did not form part of the short-term calculative models of both market and public sector actors (Carney, 2015; Dictionary score = 2.1%). Because systemic risk was hard to price, the creation and maintenance of social value had to some degree to be consciously governed. To this end he advocated both ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ deliberation to forge a ‘broad social consensus’ about how capitalism should be governed (2021, p. 276). As Carney says, his experience of multilateral negotiations at the FSB helped to shape his view that ‘inclusive processes’ of deliberation and consensus building needed to be adopted ‘across society’ (2021, p. 317). Such exercises in deliberation were ‘messy’, but could help ‘rebuild trust in experts’ (2021, p. 317). In this way, then, Carney did not seek to maintain the Bank’s reputation, but instead sought to play a broader social leadership role. In line with the ideology of inclusive capitalism, deliberation between different social groups could build a new social consensus—a clear indication of a hegemonic project.

Evidence for this heightened multilateralism emerges across the interview data. One former Bank economist with experience of working at the FSB noted the close collaboration that took place between central bankers, regulators and finance ministries in negotiations over future financial regulations (Interview E). A former senior BIS economist also noted the important contribution made by the Bank to these discussions (Interview L). The development of a new research department in the 2010s was intended to increase the Bank’s impact within broader international theoretical and policy debates (Interview F). The extent of inter-institutional cooperation and communication is also partly captured in the speech data. Even when Carney is excluded, the number of speeches delivered in international official venues rose from 15 in 1997–2008 to 21 in 2008–2013 and 20 in 2013–2020. Carney alone delivered 17 speeches in this setting. Reflecting this inter-institutional dialogue, Minouche Shafik (formerly of the IMF) was appointed Deputy Governor for Markets and Banking under Carney in 2014. In a 2016 speech at the New York Fed, Shafik—echoing many of Carney’s concerns—suggested that global finance could receive an ‘ethical lift’ by active ‘official’ and private sector cooperation in the development of ‘soft law’—that is, culturally embedded norms that guide practice (Shafik, 2016, p. 4; Dictionary score = 1.7%). Another high scorer, Jon Cunliffe also invoked new forms of ‘global governance’, conducted through ‘standards, norms and conventions, international organisations and agreements that fall short of hard law’ (Cunliffe, 2020, p. 1; Dictionary score = 2.4%). This suggests, then, that concerns about inclusive capitalism and the attempt to institute new social governance techniques—deliberation, the formulation of norms, consensus—were developed in collaboration with multilateral institutions.

The second set of conditions that drove the adoption of the inclusive capitalism language was related to domestic political crisis, the heightened domestic prominence of the Bank and the Bank’s internal response to greater public and political pressure. In an apparent effort to strengthen the international reputation of the City and to increase the resilience of the UK financial system (Interview E; Evemy, 2019), the Financial Services Act (2012) returned responsibility for the supervision of individual financial institutions to the Bank and expanded the Bank’s role in ensuring system-wide stability. Carney appears to have been appointed as a global ‘superstar central banker’ who could further bolster these efforts (Clarke & Roberts, 2016; Interview E). Post-GFC and post-Brexit, the Bank appeared to be under closer political and public scrutiny (Interviews B & K). Given the Bank’s new legal powers, new mechanisms for external accountability and reviewing internal processes inevitably followed. In 2014, Carney announced the One Bank strategic plan, which would help to co-ordinate the delivery of the Bank’s new powers. This plan would also build on the Bank’s ‘international engagement’ and ‘international relationships’ to push forward the G20’s plan to re-regulate global finance (Carney, 2014b, p. 11; Dictionary score = 1%). At the same time, Carney committed to deepening and extending the Bank’s commitment to communicative transparency with the public (p. 13). To that end, the Bank’s October 2016 Future Forum gathered businesses, community leaders, educators and members of the public to help inform the next step in their ‘new organisational strategy’, Vision 2020 (Bank of England, 2017, p. 23). The latter built on One Bank as well as a series of internal and external consultations to identify two key areas for reform: ‘How we communicate’ and ‘how we work’. Of particular relevance for this article is the Bank’s new-found focus on ‘outreach and education’, which stemmed from these strategic reviews (Interview G). Officials at the Bank recognised that the public had lost a lot of trust, not only in the Bank, but in the major institutions that govern the economy (Interview G). Reflecting organic intellectuals’ concern with systemic legitimacy rather than the defensive posture of a ‘conservative’ central banker, these officials set about advocating and enacting a more ‘inclusive’ style of governance (Interview G; Interview K).

They attempted to model inclusion by incorporating ideas of social governance in their communicative initiatives. What Will Davies calls the new ‘social governance’ (2015) breaks with the neo-classical view that qualitative social values are incommensurable, while prices alone reveal in quantitative form the wishes of the public. In Carney’s words, market processes of valuation had to be ‘rebalanced’ by wider ‘social values’ (2021, p. 128). In place of market value, social governance techniques stress real-time psychological and biological data collection through which a broad range of social sentiments are measured and acted upon (Davies, 2015, pp. 13–14). The pursuit of social wellbeing and happiness replaces the pursuit of individual utility (Carney, 2021, p. 113). As this data allows for ever more detailed maps of the social body, ever more localised forms of economic management become possible (Haldane, 2019; Dictionary score = 0.6%). At the same time, qualitative data collection in the form of local community deliberation—forms of ‘deep hanging out’—also construct a ‘micro-to-macro’ approach that links governing institutions to society (ibid., pp. 45–46). The myopia of the market requires that social values which, by definition, cannot be reduced to quantified measures become part of the deliberative process of policy formulation. As such, non-market norms should help to re-embed markets in social values (cf. Konings, 2015). Drawing on the work of former Bank of India Governor, IMF economist and academic, Raghuram Rajan, Haldane argued that ‘community’ should be seen as the ‘third pillar’ of society, alongside the market and the state. Central banks and other economic policymakers had a ‘pivotal role to play in resurrecting that Third Pillar’ (ibid., p. 2). This could not be achieved by markets alone, but rather required consensus building in deliberative initiatives like Citizens Assemblies (a view recently echoed by Carney—see Carney & MacPherson, 2023).

With the launch of Vision 2020, outreach and education gave institutional expression to this organic intellectual impetus for deliberative social governance and inclusion. In the process, Carney’s interest in imbuing market outcomes with social values and Haldane’s interest in public participation in policy formulation were seen as coming together (Interview G). Social governance became the means of making capitalism more inclusive. As we have seen, Haldane’s speeches were more domestically oriented than Carney’s. Yet his starting point was the same: A widespread deterioration in public trust in leading social institutions since the GFC (Haldane, 2017, pp. 7–8; Dictionary score = 0.9%). In a number of speeches, Haldane addressed the damaging effects of inequality on society and highlighted the need to change myopic business incentives (Haldane, 2014; Dictionary score = 1.7%; Haldane, 2016, p. 2; Dictionary score = 1.9%). As such, local communities were seen as the privileged sites for generating knowledge about complex economic systems, developing policy to combat inequality and reconnecting citizens to governing institutions (Haldane, 2019; Dictionary score = 0.6%). In relation to this, Haldane described an emerging agenda among central banks to strengthen their community ties. In Davies’s terms, Haldane recognised that threats to the authority of public institutions in the age of big data, social media and pervasive politicization required that the Bank adapt the data it collected as well as the processes by which it made policy decisions (Davies, 2015; Haldane, 2019). High-level multilateral and local community deliberation—forms of boundary walking—were thus the means by which to create the ‘inclusive capitalism’ imagined by these organic intellectuals.

Concrete communicative initiatives soon followed. The Bank began ‘layering’ its communications in earnest from 2017 by issuing its quarterly Monetary Policy (formerly Inflation) Reports in a variety of graded online formats (Haldane & McMahon, 2018). Further innovations include short textual and video explainers on the ‘Knowledge Bank’ section of the Bank’s website that target a wide audience. More significantly for the purposes of this article, the Bank began running regular Citizens Panels in which major policy questions and economic issues are debated. Other events within the Citizens Panels initiative—the Future Forums (on the future of money) and Community Forums (targeted at low-income groups)—function as social spaces in which to debate inequality, indebtedness and economic wellbeing (Bank of England, 2021, 2023). Visits to state schools with high levels of economic deprivation were launched in 2018, with an emphasis on making students more aware of their own role in the economy (Interview G). In addition to the five hundred members of Bank staff who conduct state school visits (Interview G), the Bank has also distributed copies of its popular economics book—the first to be published with the Bank’s imprimatur—to every secondary school in the UK (Patel & Meaning, 2022). In an interview for this article, the authors explained that the book was based on conversations with the public and aimed to reach as wide an audience as possible—preferably amongst the young (Interviews H & I). As part of this effort, the Bank has also developed educational resources for both primary and secondary school pupils. In collaboration with the Times Educational Supplement (TES) and the Beano magazine, the Bank’s Money and Me series aims to teach primary school students about concepts like money and banking. Teaching materials for early secondary school pupils, released under the banner of the Bank’s EconoME education programme, centre the individual as a consumer who must make decisions about how to spend and save. Such initiatives reflect the growing influence of ideas of inclusion in the Bank’s public communication.

When asked what motivated these initiatives, Haldane confirmed that he had wanted to play a role in rebuilding the legitimacy of the ‘stewards and safeguards’ of the global economy (Interview K). Moreover, Haldane suggested, it was hard to disentangle a motive for self-preservation (i.e. defence of the Bank’s reputation and credibility) from more normative concerns (i.e. the desire for a better functioning public sphere built on strengthened ‘social capital’). Although Haldane felt that the period saw few political threats to the Bank’s independence, the events surrounding the Brexit vote had probably accelerated the speed with which the Bank adopted and scaled up his proposals (Interview K). He situated these initiatives in the context of the Bank’s own history of business engagement, but also in recent experiments by research institutes, local governments and global governments in participatory democracy (Interview K). This broadening scope of communications is, then, more than an exercise in reputation defence, but rather constitutes an effort to maximise the ‘public good’ (Interviews G & K). By advocating and modelling inclusion, Haldane was attempting to offer social leadership and to demonstrate how capitalist governance could be re-legitimised.

Neither exclusively of the state nor of the market, these intellectuals drew on a worldview that advocates logics of social inclusion as alternatives to both divisive politics and myopic markets. They thus translated high-level multilateral ideas about ‘inclusive capitalism’ for local audiences. In doing so, they sought to shape new boundaries around the ‘social’, which could help to create a new legitimacy for the governance of global capitalism. The crises of global capitalism and domestic politics created the opportunity for these initiatives, while strengthened inter-institutional cooperation and communication determined their forms. In other words, these efforts were ideological in the Gramscian sense: They sought through a new hegemonic vision to build a new consensus in support of global capitalism, despite the politicizing risks that rising prominence brought with it.

Conclusion

This article has shown how a postcrisis concern with social inequality, the long-term sustainability of capitalism and the legitimacy of prevailing institutional arrangements led a subset of Bank of England officials to advocate a more ‘inclusive’ form of capitalist governance that would facilitate consensus through local, community-based forms of deliberation. As an explanation for this phenomenon, I have argued that experience of work in postcrisis public and international official institutions shaped these officials’ worldview. This potentially hegemonic worldview reflects their role as organic intellectual boundary walkers who work in an increasingly powerful sphere constituted in the interstices between states and markets and between the international and the domestic spheres. The Neo-Gramscian lens adopted here shifts scholarly attention from these central bankers’ defence of their reputations to their broader ideological motivations, which are formed through multilateral governance networks.

However, there is a glaring absence from the apparently participatory processes initiated by the Bank. While multilateral negotiations result in tangible changes to global regulations, the Bank’s community engagement can hardly be said to affect the policy regime. How effective can a Citizens Panel be if the citizens cannot resolve to amend how the Bank targets inflation? These deliberative models leave little space for the explicitly partisan formulation of alternatives. Freed from the strictures of office, Carney has increasingly stressed the need for ‘bottom up’ pressure for change, but his model of consensus forming social deliberation reproduces at a smaller scale the depoliticization of prevailing multilateral governance arrangements. In Values he suggests that governments could delegate the setting of ‘carbon calibration’ instruments to expert Carbon Councils (Carney, 2021, p. 297). Consensual deliberation—whether among experts or the wider citizenry—replaces the perils of partisan democracy. There is, then, something of a tension in these deliberative exercises. Greater engagement with a broad range of social issues and actors could politicize the Bank itself, while the very form of deliberation unintentionally reproduces the displacement of conventional, oppositional politics.

In an inversion of the Polanyian dynamic, global politics today is increasingly divided between right-wing forces who seek to ‘dis-embed’ states from global governance systems and technocratic forces that seek to ‘re-embed’ markets in non-market social values (cf. Fraser, 2013; Konings, 2015). Inevitably, these forces are coming into conflict. Future research might look at the way that, for example, the Truss government in the UK was unceremoniously ejected from office once Bank Governor Andrew Bailey—whilst in attendance at the IMF’s annual conference in Washington—announced the abrupt termination of the Bank’s support for government debt markets in 2022. The weaknesses of the right-wing project are plain enough in the downfall of Truss. The role of the Bank—and of the leading lights of global capitalism—in the saga is much more ambiguous. In that brief interlude, concerns about greater ‘inclusion’ were notably absent. The same goes for the recent, unprecedented wave of interest rate hikes by global central banks. While Haldane openly suggested that the Bank may have raised rates too high (Haldane, 2023), others suggested that only a continued show of force would quell concerns about the Bank’s ‘credibility’ (Wolf, 2023). ‘Inclusive capitalism’ took a backseat while inflation was tamed.

The widespread credibility concerns that drove the recent wave of policy tightening may have made the Bank’s exercises in community engagement and deliberation seem like a luxury. The Citizens Panels continue at the time of writing, though without Haldane as a public advocate. The Bank’s outreach and education initiatives—including the Citizens Panels, school visits, popular publishing and lesson materials—all continue to be very active (Interviews G, I and J). Bailey also scores higher than earlier governors in his use of inclusive capitalism language, which implies there has not been a total reversion to the pre-Carney norm. The institutional and contextual conditions which facilitated a more ‘social’ governance approach have not entirely disappeared. Carney, meanwhile, has become a globe-trotting ‘progressive’, appearing at conventions alongside the likes of Justin Trudeau and Tony Blair as well as at the UK Labour Party’s recent conference (delivering a peculiar ‘endorsement’ of Shadow Chancellor and former Bank economist, Rachel Reeves). The language of ‘inclusive capitalism’ may find a new home in the more obviously political venues of global progressivism.

If deliberative forms of inclusion are to make a meaningful contribution to governance, what may be needed is not more consensus, but less. Although not exactly depoliticization in the old sense, social governance continues to elide the substance of democracy: The power to articulate and possibly implement alternatives. Haldane did suggest that the practice of regular public review of the monetary policy regime—already in place in Carney’s homeland, Canada—could help to foster that debate (Interview K). Whatever its weaknesses, the use of concepts of social deliberation and inclusion discussed here does raise the prospect of more meaningful policy democratisation in future (Eich, 2022; Macquarie, 2022). In terms of the academic debate, the article suggests that we need to look more closely at the ways in which a relatively autonomous public and official sector worldview may exist in tension with more conventionally political approaches of left and right. In their boundary walking efforts, these organic intellectuals have affected how political and social issues are conceived and addressed.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Magnus Ryner, Christopher Holmes, Christel Koop, James Wood and John Evemy for comments on previous drafts. The manuscript was also improved through discussions with audiences at the King’s College London 2022 IPE Research Group Seminar Series, the BISA-IPEG 2023 Annual Workshop at King’s College London and the CPERN 2023 Mid-Term Workshop at University L’Orientale Naples. Thanks also to the three anonymous reviewers and the RIPE editorial board, whose advice vastly strengthened the contribution. The research for this article has benefitted from an ESRC PhD Studentship (ES/P000703/1).

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Adam Blanden

Adam Blanden is a PhD student at King’s College London. His work focuses on the political conflicts that contest and shape contemporary monetary order in the United Kingdom.