The United Kingdom’s central bank, the Bank of England, announced this week that Winston Churchill will be removed from the 5-pound ($6.60 value) note. The next series of banknotes will replace all historical figures on the reverse side with images of British wildlife, ending a tradition that has endured for more than half a century. Otters, badgers, and puffins will take the place of the man whose wartime leadership held together a country and a continent. King Charles III will remain on the front. The back, however, will belong to fauna.
The Bank cites a 2025 public consultation in which about 60% of 44,000 respondents chose nature as their preferred theme, ahead of historical figures at 38%. Victoria Cleland, the Bank’s chief cashier, frames the redesign as an anti-counterfeiting measure, arguing that wildlife imagery suits the complex visual patterns required by modern security features. That technical rationale is not a good excuse.
Churchill’s face on the 5-pound note was a reminder of the most consequential chapter in modern British history. The current note carries his famous 1941 portrait alongside his pledge of blood, toil, tears, and sweat from his first speech as prime minister. Every transaction involving that note was a small recognition that the freedoms enjoyed today were purchased at the expense of historic heroism. The choice of national figures on banknotes was, from the beginning, meant to promote the shared values and history that bind a society together.
To swap all of that for a red squirrel is a retreat, if not a crime of great proportion.
The backlash has been fierce. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch accused the Bank of “erasing our history.” Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said Churchill “helped save our country and the whole of Europe from fascism,” and had earned a permanent place on the currency. Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat argued that replacing famous Britons with animals reveals a country too hesitant to celebrate its own story.
Supporters of the change point out that the tradition of featuring historical figures dates only to 1970. They add that every selection invites controversy, and that the roster has always skewed heavily toward white men. The solution, they suggest, is to bypass the question of human achievement altogether. Better, the argument goes, to sidestep the problem: animals, by representing everyone through abstraction, become the great equalizer.
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But refusing to acknowledge history will produce neither a better Britain nor a more united one. There is something uncomfortably Orwellian about a country that decides, by unelected committee and consultation, to replace its greatest statesmen with farmyard creatures. That a nation of Shakespeare, Newton, Darwin, Nightingale, and Turing finds itself too timid to decide which of its citizens deserves a place on its currency says something very dispiriting.
There is an old warning that a nation that forgets its past has already surrendered its future. Churchill understood this. The badger may be charming. But it will remind future generations of little that matters.