The issue of what images to put on new banknotes, and specifically of whom, has become one of the great battlegrounds of the culture wars in this country in recent years. Whenever the subject is broached there always arises the cry that the new note ought to feature a woman or an ethnic minority figure – someone who has been ‘written out of history’ – and that dead, white males have for too long hogged the limelight. This inevitably provokes the response that such special pleading merely amounts to ahistorical tokenism, a kind of retrospective, posthumous form of DEI hiring.
The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has chosen the route that will cause it the least grief
The Bank of England thinks it has devised a way to obviate such a fractious debate: by not having representations of any human beings at all. As reported this week, it has announced a shortlist of 18 animal species it proposes to place on its next notes, with the public being able to vote on which creatures will replace the likes of Winston Churchill, William Shakespeare and Jane Austen. In the running are pine martins, hedgehogs, basking sharks and other native British species.
So problem solved then. Well, not quite. When the Bank first made public this proposal in March, it faced a barrage of criticism from voices on the right.
‘The Bank of England is proposing replacing Winston Churchill with a picture of a beaver on our banknotes. This is the definition of woke,’ said Nigel Farage. Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat accused it of ‘the weakness of not being able to make tough choices and instead going for bland neutrality’.
While Farage’s reaction was somewhat amiss – having a beaver on an English banknote really isn’t ‘the definition of woke’ – Tugendhat’s was closer to the truth. The Bank’s latest direction may hearten wildlife enthusiasts, but it is still a cynical move all the same. In an age in which causing offence has become one of the greatest transgressions, The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has chosen the route that will cause it the least grief.
It’s depressing that it’s come to this. But this is the price we pay for living in a multicultural society beset by competitive identity politics, one in which some have no shame in re-writing history in order to make it accord with their politics. That much became clear in 2018 when a group of more than 200 actors, writers, campaigners and MPs – among them David Lammy, Stella Creasy and Baroness Warsi – wrote a letter to the Sunday Times asking that Britain’s ethnic diversity should be reflected on the next new Bank of England issue.
That campaign was conceived by Zehra Zaidi and Professor Patrick Vernon, who previously called for Noor Inayat Khan – the British-Indian SOE agent who served in France in the Second World War – or for (the inevitable) Mary Seacole, to feature on the next £50 note. The economist Susie Symes, chairperson of the Museum of Immigration, argued then that ‘Britain has been shaped over centuries by inward and outward migration, so its time our central Bank, the world’s oldest, reflects our diversity of heritage and culture’.
All of which is only very slightly true, when faced with the reality that between 1066 and 1945 Britain was an almost entirely white, not very diverse country and not one forged by immigrants beyond these islands, not even by that mixed-race and popular caterer to the troops in the Crimean War, Mary Seacole.
Yet those who peddle the myth of Britain being a ‘nation of immigrants’ are equally unhappy at the Bank of England’s new direction. In March, the same Professor Vernon called it ‘deeply disappointing…that the institution would rather feature a fox or a flower than confront Britain’s diverse human story’.
The whole episode reminds us of the sometimes intractable problems faced by states which are highly multiracial and ideologically multicultural, and those which seek to bind together different peoples with different languages and different histories.
That much was made obvious when the Euro banknotes were launched in 2002, none of which featured the great figures from European history. Instead of Beethoven, Descartes or Leonardo da Vinci, or even depictions of the Reichstag, the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum, they bore imaginary representations of classical arches, doorways and monuments that owed more to Plato’s theory of ideal forms than having any foundation in reality.
That expedient was taken because those behind the currency foresaw the potential arguments that would ensue about which person to choose from which country, and who would feature on the higher and more prestigious denominations. Complaints would also follow from member states whose eminent dead while males would have been necessarily excluded altogether.
Whenever a state is troubled by division, its institutions often ignore the problem, change the subject or opt to not have a conversation at all. That doesn’t make the problem go away.
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