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Here’s a story that did not receive the attention it deserved this week — but it really matters. The Bank of England is removing historical figures such as Winston Churchill from banknotes and replacing them with images of wildlife or landscapes.
If the decision goes ahead then Churchill — the wartime prime minister who led Britain through its darkest hour — will soon disappear from one of the most recognisable symbols of our national life.
To some people, this may appear like a minor design change.
A trivial story.
But it isn’t. And it matters far more than many people realise.
Because what we are witnessing today is not a debate about the design of banknotes. It’s part of something much deeper and more insidious: a slow but relentless erosion of our national culture, identity, and sense of collective memory.
As I wrote nearly two years ago, across the West we are now living through what Professor Frank Furedi has called the ‘War Against the Past’.
Increasingly, a loose alliance of bureaucrats in thrall to the ‘Diversity, Inclusion, and Equality’ agenda, radical left activists, and compliant public institutions are pursuing a cultural project that seeks to delegitimise our history and heritage, and strip away the symbols that once anchored our sense of collective identity and memory.
The pattern is now familiar.
Statues are toppled. Historical figures are reframed as morally suspect or “divisive”. Public institutions rename their buildings, spaces, even London Tube lines.
School and university reading lists are “decolonised”. Netflix and other media revise or reinvent our historical dramas and disrupt our sense of continuity with the past.
In this way, our past is rewritten to emphasise only its sins while ignoring its achievements, while our sense of history is reframed so it becomes less about who “we” are as a distinctive people and much more about the celebration of others through a relentless obsession with “diversity”.
Even the quiet symbolism of everyday life — the images on our currency, the names of our streets, the monuments in our squares — is steadily edited and sanitised.
What replaces these symbols is ….