@MalSamuel228622 @JChimirie66677 @Robbietheranger You mean Andrew Bailey? He was appointed in 2020, when Boris Johnson was PM.
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Tim
3.2K posts
Tim
@Mooseic
Vinyl obsessive - Tea drinker - Existential DJ - Music maker
Manchester Katılım Ocak 2009
834 Takip Edilen453 Takipçiler
@JChimirie66677 @Robbietheranger Well, when Labour are out, and the head of the Bank of England has been fired, Britain can reinstate whoever they want on the banknotes.
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Replacing Churchill With a Puffin: The Quiet Erasure of Britain
The Bank of England has made its decision. Churchill goes. Turner goes. Jane Austen goes. Alan Turing goes. In their place, wildlife. A stoat, perhaps. A puffin. A hedgehog. The consultation found it popular. The anti-counterfeiting argument was sound. And so, without a parliamentary debate, without a public vote, without anyone in authority pausing to ask what it means to remove the faces of the people who built and saved this country from its own currency, it was quietly done. This is how erasure works. With a consultation and a press release.
Churchill's face on the five pound note is not decoration. It's a daily reminder that Britain has a history worth being proud of. That the people who shaped and defended this nation deserve to be remembered. And that national identity is something real. Hand over a fiver for a coffee and catch a glimpse of the man who stood between Western civilisation and Nazi conquest. The man who refused to negotiate when every pressure was on him to do so. The man who defined British resolve at its finest hour. Replace him with a puffin and you have made a statement about what Britain now thinks of itself. You have made it to every man, woman and child in the country. Without a debate. Without a vote. Without asking anyone.
That is the pattern. It's always quiet. It's always administrative. It's always defended on its own terms, as common sense, as progress, as a neutral technical decision. Statues fall to angry mobs and the establishment calls it a moment of reckoning. Street names are changed by council committees and it's called sensitivity. The curriculum is rewritten by academics and it's called balance. And now the currency is stripped of the faces that connect a people to their past, and it's called anti-counterfeiting policy.
Individually each decision is defensible. Cumulatively they form a pattern that is not accidental. The institutions entrusted with stewarding British identity have been captured by people who regard that identity as a problem to be managed rather than an inheritance to be protected. The long march through the institutions that began in the universities and the civil service fifty years ago has reached the point where it makes decisions about whose face appears on your money, and nobody with the power to stop it seems minded to try.
The consequences are not abstract. A population severed from its history, its symbols and its heroes loses the connective tissue of national identity. It cannot defend what it no longer recognises. It cannot demand loyalty to values it has been taught to be ashamed of. Lebanon's Christians believed their country was too civilised, too plural, too decent to fall. They were right about the decency. They were wrong about what decency alone can protect. Britain is making the same error by different means. You do not need armed factions to hollow out a nation. You need a Bank of England consultation, a university diversity committee, and fifty years of patience.
Churchill understood what was at stake when identity and resolve were under pressure. He said so, repeatedly, in language that would today be considered inflammatory by the very institutions that once celebrated him. The irony of removing his face from the currency of a country he saved, in an era when the threats he warned against have taken new forms, is apparently lost on the people who made that decision.
A stoat will never evoke what Churchill evoked. That is not sentiment. That is the point. The replacement of meaning with the merely decorative is not a neutral act. It's a statement about what a nation values, made quietly, by people who were not elected to make it, and cannot be held to account for having done so.
If we cannot defend the face on a banknote, we will not defend what that face represented. And the people dismantling it, piece by piece, consultation by consultation, know that perfectly well.
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@jessgill03 No, it's the fact that you won't even try other food. You're like a racist version of the character from Green Eggs and Ham.
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@DonnaLouise1212 @TRobinsonNewEra This isn't the full story though is it? Why does the video keep skipping when the police are trying to explain why they are there? Be more honest and more people will trust you.
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@swfc @MrVegas_Casino I like this shirt...BUT....The badge is too high. It should be placed over the heart not under to the collarbone.
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@thetrainline @AvantiWestCoast I'm trying to book a train from London to Manchester but there don't seem to be direct trains scheduled for ANY Sunday from 16 February onwards. Is this correct?
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@BloodRecs Hi. 48 hours after you dispatched my copy, Royal Mail is still sayung it's not been received. Can you help?
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The Cure release day! Otherwise known as goth Christmas.
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Obviously @AvantiWestCoast joking aside, I'd like someone to contact me about this. 40+ minutes added to my 10 minutes journey, with the added stress of a tight turnaround to get my connecting train.
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Guess where this train from Stockport is going @AvantiWestCoast . Clue! It's not Manchester Piccadilly.
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The Carlton Club, where @StrongUtopia recorded their wonderful Gyre album, is under threat after 111 years. Please sign.
chng.it/vv9KFZ7GyZ
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