I have found an issue on which Ed Davey is right.
Now I have no intention of going further than that. I have no plans to be fired out of a cannon or to wakeboard down the Thames or to copy whichever ridiculous stunt the Lib Dem leader chooses to try to distract us from his lack of effective, evidence-based policies.
However, on this specific, solitary issue, Ed Davey is indeed correct. It would be a massive mistake for the Bank of England to proceed with its plan to remove Winston Churchill and other great British historical figures from our banknotes and replace them with animals.
Our banknotes have featured historical figures since the introduction of decimalisation in 1971, whilst it seems reasonable to change the specific figures every decade to deter forgery, there really is no good reason to dispense with a system which has worked well for 55 years.
Just as we should be comfortable changing things which do not work, we should avoid trying to fix something which isn’t broken.
The Bank of England has pointed to a consultation which 44,000 people answered last year, showing strong support for switching from historical figures to nature.
Forty-four thousand is no small number for a consultation, but my guess is that millions of us were completely unaware that there was any threat to the current system and that if the Bank were to rerun that consultation tomorrow, now that so many people are aware of the threatened change, the numbers would be overwhelmingly in favour of retaining the status quo.
Can someone check my vitals? Ed Davey is right about plans to remove Churchill from banknotes - Susan Hall
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There is plenty of room to debate which historical figures ought to be on our £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes to replace Sir Churchill, Jane Austen, JMW Turner and Alan Turing respectively.
Since their introduction, notes have included Sir Isaac Newton, the Duke of Wellington, Florence Nightingale, William Shakespeare, Sir Christopher Wren, Elizabeth Fry, Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Edward Elgar and Adam Smith.
Fortunately, assuming we do not want to revisit any of those who have already been on a banknote, there are so many great Britons that we are in no danger of running out of options any time soon.
The only rule is that whoever is chosen must be deceased. The King (or whoever is the current monarch) is the only living person on our banknotes.
However, even assuming we do not want to revisit any of those who have already had a turn, the public could choose from Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Ernest Shackleton, Millicent Fawcett, William Wilberforce, Ada Lovelace, David Bowie, Freddie Mercury, Charles Babbage, JRR Tolkien, George Elliot or Margaret Thatcher to name eleven. All of those figures undoubtedly made a great and lasting contribution to our country.
Despite all our problems – and the damage that Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Ed Miliband, David Lammy, Bridget Phillipson and, in all honesty, pretty much the whole of the Cabinet is doing on a daily basis – we remain a great country and celebrating some of our great historical figures on our banknotes remains the right thing to do.
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