Famously, you can’t please everyone – something the Bank of England is ironically discovering, in their quest to do just that. After 50 years of featuring historical figures, the announcement that our next set of bank notes will feature UK-native animals instead has been met with scoffs and cries of wokery – but if you ask me, the move is a stroke of genius. I’ll take a badger over Winston Churchill any day.
While not everyone will agree with me, they’ll nonetheless have their own version of that equation – and therein lies the bank’s trouble. No figure can represent everyone.
The current cast of characters – Jane Austen, Winston Churchill, JMW Turner, Alan Turing – might be among the country’s most celebrated, but that only makes them more objectionable. All are white, for starters, not to mention varying degrees of posh. Surely, if we want the faces on our money to represent the (multicultural, with the majority defining themselves as working class) nation, we’ve already failed at the first hurdle.
There exists no figure in history who can represent, let alone please, everyone – to do that, we’d need as many notes as citizens. Luckily, there’s no law saying that we need people on our money anyway – and in opting out of the tortured process of finding just the right ones, the bank is saving us all endless grief.
Even traditionalists can’t be too cross – while monarchs have been stamped on currency for thousands of years, no one’s suggesting ousting Charles (more’s the pity, but that’s another column). Just, having him share the limelight with animals rather than history’s Greatest Hits.
If you’re still hesitant, just know that Jacob Rees-Mogg hates the idea – “notes use symbolism to express power and value, twee little furry things do neither,” apparently – and that it’s best practice to love anything he loathes on principle. Certainly, if what’s printed on our money is what we hold in reverence, we could do worse than popping the natural world on that pedestal.
In representing no one, animals represent us all. While the bank’s move otter-wards has drawn its own wave of criticism, that only serves to prove the point at hand.
As a nation, we are too various to be represented by a handful of dead people stamped on notes – and that’s something to be celebrated rather than bemoaned.
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