Has the Bank of England given up on its duty?

Has the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee quietly excused itself from its duty of keeping inflation down: namely, keeping the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) close to a 2 per cent target? I ask because the minutes of its September meeting, released today, show little inclination to raise rates from their historic low of 0.1 percent, even though it predicts that inflation will rise above 4 per cent and stay there at least into the second quarter of 2022. 

You can argue that inflation isn’t everything, that growth matters more and that monetary policy should not obsess about short-term targets. But surely the whole purpose of the MPC, as set up by Gordon Brown in 1997, was to stick to this narrow objective of being inflation within a narrow band – all else was politics and therefore the job of the Chancellor, not an unelected body of bankers and economists.