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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shirts' Spectators daily politics podcast.

I'm Katie Bulls and I'm joined by Jane Sive and Kate Andrews, our economics editor.

So as folks just go to the polls in the local election,

let's be news today when it comes to the cost of living crisis.

Kate, can you just talk us through the announcement from the Bank of England?

Yeah, so the Monetary Policy Committee has met again and decided not surprisingly to raise

interest rates from 0.75% up to 1%. It's another incremental rise, the fourth consecutive rise,

which is the first time that's happened in about a quarter of a century.

And interestingly this time round, the minority opinion, it was voted 63 to raise rates to 1%.

The three people who voted against weren't doing so to hold interest rates, they wanted to go

further. They wanted a 0.5% increase. This is completely different territory from where we were

say six, seven months ago when most central bankers were just pulling blankets over their faces,

not willing at all to look around and see that inflation was clearly going up and that they

needed to act much sooner than they did. We can come back to interest rates and the impact that's

going to have on mortgages and borrowing costs, but I think the really big piece of information

out of the Monetary Policy Report isn't this high interest rates because it was expected.

It's the Bank's new economic forecast. They are extremely grim. They're devastating.

They don't predict a full-blown recession. I know there's a lot of headlines today saying

Bank of England predicts recession. They haven't done that. They do show several contractions,

...