BoE's Breeden says are looking to whether the energy shock is gone or just delayed; the loosening of the labour market hopefully means that there will not be wage price pressure like in 2022

Remarks framed around whether a shock has passed or merely been delayed sit squarely in the tradition of central banks managing energy-driven inflation episodes, where the institution has historically distinguished between the direct first-round impulse and the second-round risk that matters for policy. The operative phrase is the explicit reference to wage-price pressure of the kind seen in the previous energy shock: invoking that comparison signals the Bank is treating the earlier episode as the template to avoid, and is using labour-market slack as the argument that this time the transmission into settlements and services inflation will be weaker. That distinction, first-round versus second-round, is the channel: if wages stay contained, the shock remains a level effect on headline inflation rather than a shift in the path, which is the difference between the MPC looking through it and feeling compelled to lean against it. Breeden's prior form has placed her on the more hawkish side of the committee's spectrum on persistence, so conditional language of this sort from her carries a little more weight than the same words from the dovish end. The tells are whether the wage data and services inflation prints corroborate the loosening-labour-market thesis, and whether colleagues adopt the same framing in subsequent appearances, since the MPC's reaction function in energy episodes has historically been set by the median voter rather than by individual commentary.