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One day soon we may finally have an answer to a question that has stumped philosophers through the ages: which is worth more, a beaver or a robin? We might be able to place actual monetary values on barn owls or stags, too. Any one of them could even be considered worth more than Winston Churchill.
That’s because the Bank of England has announced that the next update of British banknotes will end the half-century tradition of designs featuring historic notables. (Charles III, whose historic notability we won’t be clear on for some time, will remain.) In their place will come representations of patriotic British wildlife, shortlisted by a panel of experts, then chosen by public vote. In a transparent attempt to avoid national humiliation of a “Goaty McGoatface” variety, the Bank’s governor will get the final say.
All this is happening, though you wouldn’t know it from the coverage, with the support and encouragement of the British public. A consultation last July found that 60% of the 44,000 responses backed the idea of taking nature as the theme, just in front of “architecture and landmarks” on 56%, and way ahead of “historic figures” at a measly 38%. Whether the public would have been quite so keen if they’d known upfront that “household pets” would be explicitly excluded from possible designs, I’m not so sure.
Nor is this some mad, previously unthinkable idea. In 2024, the International Bank Note Society’s prestigious banknote of the year award went to the Bermuda $5 note, which as well as King Charles (it’s a British Overseas Territory), featured blue marlin, dolphins, butterflies and rather a lot else. Even in the UK itself, you can find legal tender featuring mackerel, otters and red squirrels, in the form of Royal Bank of Scotland banknotes (though good luck spending them down south).
And yet, the idea has caused uproar among Britain’s noisy army of self-appointed patriots. Nigel Farage posted a video on X about his fury, with the immortal line: “The Bank of England is proposing replacing Winston Churchill with a picture of a beaver on our banknotes. This is the definition of woke.” Meanwhile, Tom Tugendhat, who is a very serious person (he was in the army, you know), took to the pages of the Telegraph to accuse the Bank of “the weakness of not being able to make tough choices and instead going for bland neutrality”; while the financial commentator Matthew Lynn used a column in the Spectator to describe the end of “the proud tradition of honouring our greatest Brits” as a “travesty” – even if that proud tradition is only about as old as Andy Burnham.
It would be churlish, however, to suggest it is only the right who have concerns. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said that Churchill “deserves better than being replaced by a badger” – tell me you don’t want to see that war movie – while even the BBC’s write-up noted that: “Bosses at the Bank may feel they are less likely to face a backlash with choices of wildlife”.
It’s true that the Bank’s own guidelines say it should avoid anything “divisive” (“The theme should not involve imagery that would reasonably be offensive to, or exclude, any groups”) And would you blame officials if – after a long decade that has brought everything from the Rhodes Must Fall campaign to the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, and in which even innocuous subjects can become fodder for the never-ending culture wars – they found themselves tempted to duck the risk of controversy altogether.
Such rows, after all, are not just exhausting but can also get in the way of actually getting things done. Across the Atlantic, the US treasury’s long-stated ambition to replace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill – a man who committed ethnic cleansing, if not full-blown genocide – with the African-American abolitionist campaigner Harriet Tubman have been delayed, at least partly for all the reasons you can immediately guess. Of the seven white men currently pictured on US paper currency, five of them owned slaves.
Perhaps none of this really matters. Cash use has declined markedly this past decade: it’s now the preferred payment method for about 15% of users, a number that seems likely to go only one way. And perhaps, this being 2026, we’re anticipating culture-war fallout where there was never intended to be one. “Not being divisive”, after all, was just one of a whole raft of criteria set out by the Bank: to select images that resonate with the public, that won’t go swiftly out of date, and so forth. One of them, ignored by much of the commentary, is the need to make notes hard to counterfeit. Who among us cannot, at this stage, do a passable Churchill?
But even if the move wasn’t a conscious attempt to avoid a culture war, skirting it by accident might still be a mistake. Someone else who criticised the bank’s plans was the social justice campaigner Prof Patrick Vernon, who noted that the decision would be “deeply disappointing” to thousands who’ve campaigned to see Mary Seacole – or, frankly, any minority Briton – on a banknote. It sent a “troubling message”, Vernon added, “that the institution would rather feature a fox or a flower than confront Britain’s diverse human story”. The reason we fight so furiously about these symbols is because they matter.
The monarch, incidentally, has only been featured on banknotes since 1960, when Elizabeth II first appeared on one, a mere decade before other historic figures began to join her. You think this fight is bad? Just wait until they try to change that.
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Jonn Elledge is former assistant editor of the New Statesman and the author of books including A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps
