Putting badgers on the banknotes may avoid controversy, but it also avoids saying anything meaningful about Britain at all
Trigger warning.
British wildlife is dull. I may be forever damning a future political career here, but it has to be said.
Now that you’ve sat back down to continue reading after projectile splurting the remnants of your hot drink over yourself and and your surroundings, hopefully you’ve also regained enough intellectual composure to allow you to move past the surge of bleary-eyed patriotism that consumed you as you pictured a robin fluttering among the trees, and a red squirrel scampering across the forest floor. And accept that there is truth in what I say.
In fact the point of British wildlife, and the reason why you love it, is because it’s dull. What makes the English countryside so charming, so captivating, from the landscapes to the flora and fauna, is that it has been so completely tamed. Walk in any direction and you will be treated to gentle hills, criss-crossed with neat, tidy paths punctuated by occasional stiles. Rare will it be that there won’t be a steeple-marked village somewhere on the horizon, or multiple. Even in the most isolated parts of Northumberland you will be within a few miles walk of the nearest pub. The likelihood of extreme weather is minimal. The likelihood of encountering an animal which could do you harm, is zero.
Compare that to the United States of America, where to venture outdoors is to potentially place your life in mortal danger. Even in Dorothy’s gentle, harmless Kansas, summer temperatures routinely hit the 40s, and winter temperatures routinely plummet to -10 or below. Tornadoes are common. Head further west though and you venture into some of the most forbidding, most inhospitable landscapes anywhere in the world. Vast mountain ranges teeming with grizzly bears, sun-drenched deserts with not a drop of water in sight. Thousands upon thousands of square miles with not a living soul to be found. Vast canyons.
There could not be a more unsuitable country to place its wildlife on its currency than the United Kingdom. The Americans could choose the bald eagle, the Indians the leopard, the Botswanans the Elephant, the Australians the kangaroo and the Chinese the panda. What will we choose? The beaver? The badger? Really?
What will we choose? The beaver? The badger? Really?
Yet that’s exactly what the Bank of England proposes. Depressingly, this was not just out of fear of controversy that choosing historical figures, or architecture and landmarks (two of the other options) might entail. Although by “controversy” what we really mean is a few braindead organisations shouting very loudly and very incoherently. It was also partly because nature was chosen by the most respondents to a consultation. Now that may have been swung by the awesome ability of the wildlife lobby to organise, helped by their mind-bogglingly large income (the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds alone has an annual income of £150-200 million). But either way, it says a depressing amount about the pusillanimity of the new, diverse British psyche that so many seemed squeamish about celebrating the great men and women of British history on our banknotes.
I’d imagine some readers of this publication may have actually breathed a sigh of relief that wildlife was chosen. No doubt that if they continued with people it would end up being Paddington Bear, Captain Sir Tom Moore and Diane Abbott. If they picked buildings and architecture whose to say it wouldn’t be the Regent’s Park Mosque on the £10, maybe the Barbican on the £20 (although there is a certain editor of The Critic who would likely support that).
But that’s to concede defeat. What makes this country remarkable is the wealth of talent that it has gifted to the world over the many centuries, in art, science, literature, architecture, its many extraordinary political and military leaders. Human contributions unparalleled in history.
Think how many have never appeared. Nelson, Brunel, Wollstonecraft, Shackleton, Tolkien, Wilberforce, Gladstone. If we have to appease the hippies and the vegans, then even John Lennon would be better than a wren. 2028 will be the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of penicillin. Does Alexander Fleming not deserve an appearance, or is it only Wetherspoons which will do that giant of history the honour of commemorating his legacy?
Having fought so hard and for so long to keep Britain out of the European single currency, a fight that ultimately culminated in our independence from the whole European project, how damning would it be if our currency shows fewer markings of national pride than that of the Euro. At least the Euro shows off stylised motifs of European architectural styles. We don’t even have the guts to put St Paul’s on our own.
At least we’ll have the song of the blackbird to distract us from the decline of our once great civilisation.
