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There should be public outrage: the APF's winners are private banks, whose pre-tax profits in the first nine months of 2023 reached £41bn, roughly the amount received from the APF and nearly double on the previous year, at a time when Britain endures the longest hit to living standards since records began. In turn, Bailey has refused to change the APF mechanics, holding up the totem of central bank independence that terrifies politicians. But this is not a matter of independence. The Treasury pays the Bank by choice and institutional design, with no solid theoretical justification. The Bank could simply follow the established practice at other large central banks who bear the costs of paying interest on reserves. That the Bank chooses otherwise points to the bigger stakes here: Britain is going through an extreme version of what the political theorist Wendy Brown called "undoing the demos", where unelected technocrats in control over monetary-fiscal dynamics are chstructing future governments