Today's interest rate verdict was much a tougher call for the Bank of England than the recent grim headlines and hyperbolic clamour for action might suggest.

It is certainly true that the case for an urgent cut in interest rates has become compelling as the forces threatening to tip the economy into a severe downturn next year - rather than the necessary slowdown that the Bank always intended - have intensified.

Yet the nine men and women of the MPC confronted a genuine dilemma.

Whatever the pressures from politicians, business and the public for it to act, the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) members are rightly conscious that it is not their job to court popularity, but rather to keep inflation under control.

They cannot simply take the easy course and, with little thought, just deliver lower rates at a time when soaring oil prices could ignite inflation and when there are still worrying signs of other lurking price pressures.

As Mervyn King, the Bank's Governor, spelled out last week, the near-term outlook is for slowing growth combined with rising inflation. It is a mix that the Governor labelled, with a central banker's typical understatement, "uncomfortable".

It is therefore easy to see why today’s verdict must have been tough to reach. So it is all the more reassuring that, against this tricky backdrop, the right conclusion was reached.

For some MPC members wrestling with the quandary of these conflicting pressures, it might have been tempting just to sit on the fence and talk of uncertainty.

Instead, the committee has faced up to its responsibilities, weighed the risks and made a tough choice.

With the dangers to economic prospects next year now growing rapidly, for the MPC this month was the right moment to act. Yesterday’s bleak news from both the housing market and, crucially, the services sector were almost certainly the factors that tipped the scales.

The MPC's worries over inflation are quite proper and wholly understandable. Fretting over price pressures is its job.

Yet it is now reasonable to expect that these worries will evaporate like spring snow after the turn of the year if the economy does slow as sharply next year as still seems likely even after today’s modest loosening of policy.

The accumulating pressures weighing on growth are now such that, after all the usual timelags, the MPC's biggest worry may still be not that inflation ends up too high, but rather that it risks falling consistently short of the Bank's 2 per cent target.

Sure, growth was strong in the third quarter, even after a modest downward revision to 0.7 per cent last month. But that is history.

The economy now seems bound to be in the grip of a downturn next year driven by the housing market and by crumbling high street demand - the twin engines that have kept the economy steaming along for the past few years.

There is scant question now that the housing market has stalled, and will come close to stagnating next year, at best.

That will have knock-on consequences for consumer demand, at a time when households are already feeling the pinch from surging fuel bills, weak income growth, rising taxes, and the dearer mortgage costs thanks to the Bank's past rate increases.

As for other motors for growth, government spending is slated to slow sharply from next year onwards; business investment is disappointing expectations; company profits are under pressure; and overseas trade was already knocking 0.5 percentage points off third quarter growth even before the full impact of a looming slowdown in the US and Europe is felt.

Add to this the resurgence of stress in credit markets, and its implications for the financial sector, and for lending conditions across the wider economy, and it seems certain that further cuts in borrowing costs will follow.

For the Bank, badly battered by recent events, and MPC members surely feeling the weight of their responsibilities, the good news is that the first cut is the hardest. We should applaud them for making it.

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