De-Based Currency: Scrubbing White Faces Off British Banknotes

1,995 words

As a child, I was fascinated by the collection of old English coins my grandfather kept in a box to remind him of better monetary times once the nation had turned to decimal coinage in 1971, as a preparatory measure for joining what was later to become the EU. The old £sd tokens were all much nicer-looking, better designed, and more pleasingly chunky and substantial than their decimal successors, but the way their system actually fitted together was utterly incomprehensible to me. Compared to the simple fact there were now 100 pennies to a pound, just like there were now 100 centimeters to a meter, the way there were once 12 pence to a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound, meaning £1 equaled 240 pence, appeared completely random, obscure, and practically unworkable. Why did anyone ever design the damned things to work like this?

It was only once I read the late conservative philosopher Roger Scruton’s 2000 book England: An Elegy that I discovered the answer. Apparently, the £sd system went back to the days of Alfred the Great, being designed to be divisible by two in as many ways as possible; making the King’s coinage easily sharable amongst his lords, and then easily sharable by them amongst their own underlings, was supposed to ensure a fairer and more cohesive society. Replacing £sd with the more rational continental decimal-based system—an invention of those original Left-wing Jacobins, the French Revolutionaries—stood for something far greater and more sinister than merely enabling the mathematically retarded like me to go shopping. In Scruton’s opinion:

Weights and measures [and currencies] mediate our day-to-day transactions; hence they are imprinted with our sense of membership [of a wider national community]. They are symbols of the social order and distillations of our daily habits … But, the French Revolutionaries believed, they were symbols of a hierarchical, backward-looking society, a society that paid more respect to custom and precedent than to progress and the future. They were muddled, improvised and full of compromises, in just the way that human life is full of compromises when insufficiently controlled … Muddled though the imperial measures may appear to those obsessed by mathematics, they are – unlike the metric system – self-evidently the product of life … The French Revolutionaries believed that by changing weights and measures, calendars and festivals, street names and landmarks, they could more effectively undermine the old and local attachments of the French people, so as to conscript them behind their international purpose. The survival of old weights and measures in England [until the 1970s] testified to the underlying principle of English society – the principal that society should be governed not from above but from within, by custom, tradition and compromise, and by a habit of reasonableness of which the single most important enemy is Reason. The English measures [and currency] were designed for the promotion of comfortable deals and just shares, and not for the convenience of the state accountant. [1]

Nor, indeed, for the petty convenience of someone like me standing around confused in a supermarket and trying to work out how much change from a farthing I’m due.

As Bent As a Nine-Bob Note

Scruton’s book was called England: An Elegy, meaning he clearly thought the nation he grew up in was now effectively dead, having been stealthily replaced by its hideous inverted Kali Yuga twin, the “Yookay”. Yookayification has inevitably affected our national coinage, too, as much as everything else. Here are the kinds of thing you used to get on nice old £sd coins:

Now here’s the design of a 50 pence coin minted in 2020, one of which I found in my own change only the other day (you can vomit at the horrible government propaganda write-up of it here):

Appropriately enough, I received this coin from my nearest local Paki shop. Below, meanwhile, is another decimal diversity disaster, issued by the Royal Mint in 2022, to celebrate 50 years of Great British Bumming:

“PRIDE” it says, in great big capital letters. Paradoxically, you would feel ashamed to have one.

Defacing the Currency

Within such an absurd context, you wouldn’t be surprised to see anything appearing on official UK currency nowadays, from a dead lion to Britannia in a burka. In fact, the only things you would be surprised to see on a British banknote in the near future are representations of the human face. This follows news earlier this month that the Bank of England (BoE)—the nation’s official counterfeiters by Royal Appointment—will shortly be giving all UK banknotes a facelift by the literal-minded means of lifting all the faces off them.

Only the semi-human image of Thing Charles III on the notes’ reverse-side will remain, but the current frontage portraits of notable Great Britons from the past will all be consigned to the Orwellian Memory-Hole in favor of engravings of native British wildlife, to be decided on by a public vote: current popular suggestions include badgers, owls, hedgehogs, puffins, and ringworm. The BoE’s stated rationale is that, somehow, substituting fauna for humans will render the notes more difficult to copy, forgers being notably bad at drawing ferrets and fieldmice.

This explanation doesn’t quite make sense, though, as the decision for what to put on the new notes was itself legally tendered out to the public, with one of the options available continuing to be “more historical figures” just like the last lot, an option voted for by 38% of the 44,000 respondents. By comparison, 60% voted for animals, making this the clear winner. If anti-forgery considerations were really the main issue here, and human faces were just far easier to forge than fish faces, then why give the public the continued option to go on having them?

The vote does appear to have been a free and fair one, it wasn’t just conducted amongst UK zookeepers or anything, but you do get the distinct feeling the BoE were relieved the public chose the least controversial option. Other voting possibilities were architecture and landmarks at 56%, arts, culture, and sport at 30%, innovation at 23%, and noteworthy milestones at 19%. Now that, as the BoE’s 2020-minted coin tells us, “DIVERSITY BUILT BRITAIN,” a category like the final one there, which would once have been the sole province of milestones like “1815, Battle of Waterloo,” or “1066, Norman Conquest,” could instead have become the domain of rival ethnic ones like “1948, Arrival of the SS Empire Windrush” or “9/11, 2001: Fiery Conquest of the Great Satan.”

Notes On a Scandal

Examining the criteria considered by the BoE when choosing which specific images to place on their notes, we find the Central Bankers had to ensure that firstly they had “a direct link to the UK,” but also that the chosen image:

• Is not divisive: The theme should not involve imagery that would reasonably be offensive to, or exclude, any groups. 
• Is consistent with our legal obligations: In considering what theme to feature, we will have due regard to the public sector equality duty and other relevant laws, including considering the impact on individuals who share the protected characteristics set out in the Equality Act 2010.

No “ENOCH WAS RIGHT” 50 pence coin, then. In contemporary Balkanized Britain, just about anyone, or anything, with a human connection to it could now be considered offensive by some obscure special-interest group or other if it appeared stamped on a banknote. Shakespeare? He wrote a racist play about a murdering Moor. Stonehenge? It was really built by black people, and the fact then covered up. And so on, ad infinitum.

We can see that many people who heard about the BoE’s measure immediately thought similar things, as every single item of mainstream media coverage I saw misrepresented the story specifically as being that Winston Churchill had been thrown off the £5 note for reasons of political correctness, Winston nowadays being thought of by Lefties and imports as an insane imperialist warmonger. However, the fact is that everyone’s faces are being removed from British banknotes soon, from Jane Austen on the £10 to JMW Turner on the £20.

As Mark Gullick correctly observed on this site last week:

Removing these national figureheads simply would not occur to politicians who love their country. It is only the self-haters in Western governments who would do such a thing. Replacing images of great Britons with wildlife in a country which doesn’t have many species of particular interest or beauty is deliberately perverse.

Although doubtless many of their staff really do privately consider Winnie a big fat racist, the BoE were of course not stupid enough to express any open relief about Great Replacing him with a water-vole. Wanting as quiet a life as possible before they draw their pensions, many BoE managers were probably just relieved they wouldn’t have to mediate endless identitarian debates like the one expressed below in a letter to The Times of 12 March by some silly white woman from one of the smarter London postcodes:

Being a 99.9% white country until about yesterday, England has no genuinely “major historical British figures of color” to grace its banknotes with, though. The Walter Tull mentioned there, for example, was the incredibly epoch-making figure of the first black man to be picked to play an outfield position for a top-flight English soccer team. . . for all of ten games. From noted figures to noted niggas: Scruton would have been appalled. Why don’t we just rechristen them Pounds Raheem Sterling and be done with it?

No Common Currency

National personages only began appearing on UK banknotes in 1970, and Churchill not until 2016, but one key theory of explanation for their sudden looming removal kept popping up online: that it had been done to appease Islam.

Muslims have a tradition called “aniconism” where depictions of the human form are proclaimed haram, this being deemed the rightful demesne of Allah alone. As such, there is some debate about whether it is legitimate for the faithful to carry around banknotes with human portraits on them whatsoever, as discussed in online “ask an imam” videos like the one (ironically) pictured below.

Is it really plausible the BoE debased Britain’s entire currency just to appease Islam? In fact, most religious guidance tells Muslims they are allowed to use money with humans on it, simply because not doing so is practically impossible; to avoid going to Hell, all they need do is treat such graven images with contempt as they utilize them. Anyhow, Islamic aniconism also extends towards prohibiting the depiction of animals, as Allah made them, too—so, the BoE’s posited dhimmitude here is non-tenable.

As a result, some supercilious souls have mocked the online conspiracy theorists, columnist and former BoE trainee Oliver Kamm writing in The Times that this was “the silliest public controversy I can recall.” But are suspicious Brits really morons for believing such a plot could take place? Also during March, as I mentioned on Counter-Currents recently, UK schools had been instructed not to allow students to draw pictures of the human form during Ramadan, as a sign of “respect” and “consideration” for their diverse new colonizers. If British schools can act like that, why not the Bank of England too? It’s hardly a massive leap.

Back in the good old pre-decimal days, said Roger Scruton, British coins of the realm were “imprinted with our sense of membership [of a wider community],” being “symbols of the social order and distillations of our daily habits.” But there is no wider cohesive community to exchange coins with anymore, and “our daily habits” are now so badly removed from one another that we even see fields of conflict breaking out upon previously innocent and uncontroversial items like banknotes.

“DIVERSITY BUILT BRITAIN” says the Yookay’s current 50 pence piece. Yes, it certainly did; a divided, incoherent, mistrustful, never-ending war of human, cockerel, snake, and ape in a disintegrating civilizational sack. If the BoE really wants to prove above all suspicion it didn’t remove Churchill from our banknotes just to soothe the Muslims, the animal they choose to replace him with should be a giant pig.

Notes

[1] Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2006, pp.162-163