When money talks, it says wrong things

Obviously, no official can make such decisions on his own. We are, after all, a democracy, meaning that nothing is ever decided without a show of hands. Unless, of course, the survival of ‘our planet’ is at stake, in which case only Ed Miliband can be trusted.

So first things first. And the very first thing had to be hiring an expensive market research consultancy, in this case one called Savanta.

Savanta was given a carte blanche and did what market researchers do: put together focus groups. Savanta’s included 119 respondents deemed sufficient for the task. I’m not familiar with the criteria for their selection, but, judging by the outcome, the overarching principle is clear enough.

Savanta’s report summarised the results by stating that the participants found that banknotes featuring historical figures, such as Winston Churchill, Alan Turing and Jane Austen, were “potentially divisive, elitist and disconnected from their own experiences”. Such figures were “contentious and not representative of the UK’s cultural and natural diversity.”

Moreover, “Many participants – especially younger ones – questioned the relevance of current figures, suggesting the theme feels outdated. There was a clear desire for banknote imagery to evolve and better reflect modern Britain by being more inclusive.”

The current banknotes reflect “a backward-looking vision of the UK that carries too great a risk of division and controversy.” And the Bank of England wasn’t prepared to take such lethal risks.

Now, what’s so divisive and controversial about Jane Austen? Fair enough, some people think she is a great novelist, while others see her as a precursor of Girl Lit. But such diversion of tastes poses little threat to social cohesion.

One has to conclude that the most offensive aspect of Jane Austen is that she lived more than 200 years ago. Putting her image on a tenner is thus undeniably “backward-looking”, which is a wrong way to look.

As far as today’s lot is concerned, history is reset to zero in every generation. Everything that happened in the past is at best irrelevant and at worst pernicious. In Britain’s case it’s mostly the latter. British history is nothing but an exercise in racism, colonialism, misogyny, transphobia and religious persecution.

But hold on a moment. What’s wrong with Churchill and Turing? Old Winston did lead the country during the war, while Turing’s Enigma exploits helped the country emerge victorious. Isn’t that so?

It is. That’s precisely the problem. As one respondent explained, “It does kind of still feel a little bit imperialistic… like ‘we’re the ones who won the Second World War and saved the world’ feeling’.”

Also, both Churchill and Turing were unquestionably elitist. The former was the worst kind, an aristocrat, a duke’s grandson. But Turing, even though his sexuality was commendable, was too clever by half. Churchill was no idiot either, so any way you cut it they were both elitist.

‘Elitist’, you must understand, now means belonging to an elite, not what it used to mean, someone who looks down on his perceived inferiors. Thus anyone whose achievements make his face known to the public is ipso facto elitist.

And elitism is every bit as bad as racism, colonialism, misogyny, transphobia and religious persecution. You understand the problem now? Any familiar face appearing on a banknote will be controversial to most and offensive to some. And all famous people lived in the past, which makes any depiction of them backward-looking.

Have we reached a dead end? Not at all. Savanta respondents weren’t just naysayers. They offered a non-controversial solution to the problem: banknotes should feature not people but wildlife and natural sites, such as the White Cliffs of Dover…

Hold on a moment. That image won’t do either “due to its association with the UK border”. As one respondent explained, the cliffs “could be seen by some people to be a political statement, particularly at the moment around immigration and small boats”.

Actually, the same goes for any place in Britain. Its very provenance makes it exclusive rather than inclusive. Those famous Cliffs, for example, aren’t just White but Whites Only. Anyone can see that.

And showing a foreign location may raise a question of relevance – or worse. Anything African or Indian, for example, may be construed as glorifying the British Empire and its colonial past.

No, forget about both people and places. Back to the drawing board it was, and the Bank went to the public at large with a multiple choice questionnaire. Some 44,000 responses came back, and 60 per cent voted for nature as their preferred imagery, to be on the safe side.

Since we’ve already vetoed inanimate nature, animals emerge as the clear winner. According to the Bank’s spokesman, new imagery would “demonstrate the rich variety of wildlife we have to celebrate in the UK.”

One of the creatures to be celebrated is the common frog, and that’s where we realise how divisive and controversial even animals can be. Wouldn’t that be an underhanded Francophobe dig at our cross-Channel neighbours?

A British comedian once quipped, “It’s not racist if it’s against the French”, but I disagree. No ethnic stereotyping belongs on our banknotes, and even the French are off limits.

Do you ever get the feeling we live in an asylum run by the lunatics? I do, all the time. And everything about modernity is progressive, including its madness.

Yesterday, I wrote about brown-eggians and white-eggians, today I’m writing about the xenophobic, anti-immigrant implications of the White Cliffs of Dover. What will tomorrow bring?

Well, I don’t know about tomorrow, but I can confidently predict a violent reaction in the near future. Britons still clinging on to their sanity will rebel against this woke lunacy and, as rebels usually do, run to the opposite extreme.

Enoch Powell’s classicist and therefore elitist prophecy may well come true, and the consequences are too awful to contemplate. Our woke powers that be better watch out: history, something they wish to expunge, shows what happens when the people have had enough.