Churchill on a Fiver and Other Culture Wars

I have been watching the latest banknote row with mild amusement. Apparently Britain is now facing a constitutional crisis because Winston Churchill might one day disappear from the back of a fiver.

A few details tend to get lost in the shouting. For a start, there is no “pound note”. That vanished in 1988 when the £1 coin arrived. Churchill sits on the £5 note, and he has only been there since 2016. If the Bank of England had simply carried on rotating historical figures, he would probably have been replaced by someone else in the next redesign anyway. That is what normally happens. Dickens disappeared. Darwin disappeared. Adam Smith disappeared. No one marched in the streets.

The new wrinkle is that the Bank is considering wildlife instead of historical figures. Cue outrage. Suddenly this is presented as some sort of national amnesia. Churchill, we are told, is being erased from British history by bureaucrats armed with puffins.

The thing that makes me smile is the spectacle of politicians rushing forward to defend the presence of a politician on a banknote. One almost expects a whip to be issued. “All members must attend the division to ensure the continued polymer representation of Members of Parliament.”

Of course the real reason the story has taken off is identity signalling. It is a neat little stage on which people can perform their views about Britain. The banknotes themselves are merely the stage props. On one side are those who see defending Churchill as proof of patriotic virtue. On the other are those who think wildlife might be a pleasant and politically neutral alternative.

But the loudest outrage is really nothing more than tribal signalling by those who worship at the altar of populism. It is a simple story that can be shouted from the ramparts. “They are taking Churchill off our money.” No nuance required. No history needed. Just a reliable way of telling your followers which tribe you belong to.

There is also a certain historical irony here. The tradition of putting historical figures on Bank of England notes only began in 1970. Before that it was Britannia and the monarch. So the furious defence of this supposedly ancient custom is in fact a defence of something barely half a century old.

And if the principle were really about defending national heroes on banknotes, we would have seen this drama before. The Duke of Wellington appeared on the £5 note from 1971 until 1991. This was the man who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo and ended one of the great wars of European history. Yet when Wellington disappeared from the note and was replaced by George Stephenson, the father of the railways, there was no national meltdown. No headlines about erasing British history. The country quietly carried on.

Churchill himself is an interesting case. His reputation rests almost entirely on one extraordinary moment in 1940 when Britain faced defeat in the Second World War and he gave the country the language and determination to keep going. He was brilliant at that. But the idea that only Churchill could have done it is doubtful. Britain still had a functioning state, armed forces, and a coalition of politicians committed to continuing the war. Someone else would almost certainly have fought on.

He was also, like many politicians of his era, a bundle of contradictions. The same man who later became the embodiment of national defiance had earlier voted against extending the vote to women. That tends to get skipped over when people treat him as a kind of secular saint carved in granite.

Which brings me to another Churchill entirely. The first Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill. Now there was a leader whose achievements really did depend on his own ability. His campaigns in the War of the Spanish Succession, particularly Blenheim, required strategic imagination and operational skill of the highest order. Remove Marlborough and those campaigns might have turned out very differently.

So it is slightly amusing that the modern Churchill has become a kind of national mascot on a piece of polymer while the earlier Churchill, arguably the more exceptional leader in pure military terms, barely features in these discussions at all.

Meanwhile the Bank of England is simply trying to design the next series of anti-counterfeiting banknotes, while somewhere in Britain a badger, an otter or possibly a puffin is wondering how on earth it ended up in the middle of the culture wars.

Which does make one wonder how all this will end. Perhaps after the Great Culture War is finally won, Nigel Farage will appear on a future fiver, gazing heroically into the middle distance, having saved the nation from the terrible menace of decorative wildlife. Until then, the badger and the puffin will have to remain on standby.