The Bank of England plans to replace historical figures on British banknotes with wildlife. Shakespeare, Churchill, Austen and Turing all face being replaced by Mr Badger and Squirrel Nutkin.
The decision may appear trivial. Yet it reflects something deeper about Britain’s governing culture and our understanding of power in today’s world.
In The Collapse of British Power (1972), the late historian Correlli Barnett argued that Britain underwent a profound philosophical and “moral revolution” during the 19th century. Romanticism, he wrote, became the dominant intellectual influence among the country’s governing classes. It “valued feeling above calculation or judgement” and “exalted sentiment — soon crudened into sentimentality — over sense.”
One expression of this impulse was nature worship. The British imagination increasingly preferred pastoral imagery and emotional attachment to landscape over the harder language of power, industry and statecraft. Today’s green movement draws heavily from this tradition.
Earlier generations had thought differently. The 18th century outlook understood the foundations of power in unsentimental economic and material terms: markets, natural resources, naval bases, industry and profits. Barnett argued that the triumph of romanticism over strategic realism among Britain’s governing classes contributed to the country’s decline in the 20th century.
Winston Churchill belonged to the older, realist tradition, particularly when it came to energy.
One of the most consequential examples came during his tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1912. At that time the Royal Navy relied on coal. Churchill supported the transition to oil as the primary fuel for Britain’s battleships. He saw very early on that oil, like it still does today, offers decisive advantages for modern warfare.
As the historian Andrew Roberts records in Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018), Churchill pushed ahead with the construction of the new Queen Elizabeth-class battleships equipped with 15-inch guns, the largest calibre then afloat. Far more energy-dense than coal, oil made these “super-dreadnoughts” lighter, faster and capable of remaining at sea far longer. The decision gave the Royal Navy a major strategic advantage while Germany came late to the transition.
But the shift forced Britain to confront a new strategic reality: oil, unlike coal, was not produced in significant quantities at home. Churchill responded by securing supply. He oversaw the government’s purchase of a controlling stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and negotiated naval arrangements with France that left the Mediterranean to the French fleet, allowing Britain to concentrate its strength in the North Sea.
That same energy realism appeared again during the Second World War. By 1942 Britain faced a serious fuel shortage due to German U-boats and aerial attacks by the Luftwaffe on British ports.
Churchill’s government responded by developing every available source of supply. One example was the onshore oilfield discovered on the edge of Sherwood Forest. American drilling crews were brought in to install modern rigs and rapidly expand production. By the end of the war, these fields supplied more than 3.5 million barrels of high-grade oil.
The quantities were small by global standards. But in a moment of crisis every barrel mattered.
That way of thinking contrasts sharply with much of today’s debate about Britain’s energy resources, including the future of the North Sea.
Which brings us back to the present debate over Churchill’s removal from the £5 note. One of the defenders of Churchill is Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats. Davey argues that Britain should honour his wartime leadership that helped defeat Nazi Germany and draws parallels with our own period today vis-à-vis Putin’s war in Ukraine. On this, I agree with Davey.
Yet Davey’s own record as Energy Secretary between 2012 and 2015 sits rather uneasily with the strategic instincts Churchill displayed throughout his career.
Davey’s electricity market reforms turbocharged the expansion of wind and solar.
This is disarmament — not of our armed forces, but of the nation’s energetic and industrial foundations
The result was a shift toward energy sources physically inferior to the denser and more reliable fuels they displaced. Their diffuse and intermittent nature has raised system costs and pushed Britain’s industrial electricity prices to among the highest in the developed world, driving the loss of strategic industries such as primary steelmaking and ammonia production — essential for fertiliser and explosives. It has also put new sectors like data centres and AI at a competitive disadvantage.
This is disarmament — not of our armed forces, but of the nation’s energetic and industrial foundations. Yet Churchill spent much of the 1930s warning that disarmament would embolden dictators like Hitler and Mussolini.
Another catastrophic decision taken by Davey was the regulatory regime that killed Britain’s shale gas industry before it had even begun. The seismic limits he imposed on fracking made commercial extraction impossible. Davey himself later admitted the effect, saying in 2019 that the rule meant the industry “has not developed in this country at all”. Even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed Britain’s energy vulnerability, he said in 2022 that he remained “proud” of the outcome.
None of this is to suggest that Churchill himself was infallible.
During his time at the Treasury in the 1920s he supported policies that weakened Britain, including the “ten-year rule” that assumed the country would not face a major war for at least a decade. Some held him partially responsible for delays of the development of Britain’s naval base at Singapore.
Yet history remembers him not for his earlier errors, but for his capacity to recognise reality when it mattered most and to act decisively once the danger became clear.
If Britain can forgive Churchill his mistakes and still regard him as “the greatest Englishman who ever lived”, then we can surely extend the same grace to our leaders today.
But that forgiveness comes with a condition. Like Churchill, they must be willing to confront uncomfortable truths, abandon comforting illusions and take the decisions necessary to secure the country’s future. That starts with rejecting the idealistic Net Zero doctrine and embracing hard-headed energy realism.
