Symbolic: Britannia was created by the Romans 2,000 years ago, and she first appeared on British coins in 1672
Posted on 01/26/2008 1:25:22 PM PST by Stoat
Gordon Brown's campaign to promote British values was exposed as a sham last night after it was revealed he personally approved a decision to remove Britannia from the 50p coin.
The patriotic symbol - based on a Roman goddess - will no longer be on any British coin for the first time in more than 300 years, as part of a redesign by the Royal Mint.
An overhaul of all coinage in April, being billed as the most significant change to the currency since decimalisation, will see it replaced with a representation of modern Britain.
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Symbolic: Britannia was created by the Romans 2,000 years ago, and she first appeared on British coins in 1672
The disclosure makes a nonsense of Mr Brown's repeated declarations of his patriotism in the run-up to taking over from Tony Blair.
When The Mail on Sunday first contacted the Government yesterday to confirm the reform, surprised officials doubted it could have been approved at the top levels of the Treasury.
But after extensive behind-the-scenes consultations, they confirmed that it had indeed been sanctioned - by Gordon Brown as Chancellor, shortly before he entered Downing Street last June.
The Queen then rubber-stamped the idea later in the year. But Buckingham Palace would not comment last night on the Monarch's personal opinion of the change.
The move is a personal embarrassment to Mr Brown, because at the time he made the decision, he was emphasising his sense of Britishness as part of efforts to appear a fitting occupant of Downing Street.
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He praised the British values of responsibility, liberty and fairness and even threw his weight behind the campaign to stop BBC Radio 4 from dropping its UK Theme, which included a rousing performance of Rule Britannia.
Soon after he took power, Mr Brown appointed Michael Wills, one of his most trusted allies, as Minister for Patriotism, with orders to promote Britishness across the country.
Last night, the Treasury attempted to gloss over the reform by insisting the Britannia symbol would return for future Mint runs.
But critics said it was depressing that it would not be the default design on the tails side of a British circulation coin for the first time since 1672.
The revamp is the culmination of a process that started in 2005, when the Royal Mint launched a competition to find designs for the UK's coins.
It is keeping the winning entries under wraps, but the artists - who each claimed £5,000 if they were successful - were told to consider themes to represent Britain, such as flora or fauna, geographic features, social, political or cultural achievements or British institutions, or to interpret heraldry in an imaginative and creative way.
More than 4,000 designs, submitted by 526 artists, have been whittled down to seven by the Royal Mint's Advisory Committee on Coin Design.
It means that the traditional heraldic designs on a total of seven coins, including the crowned lion and chained portcullis, will all vanish.
Advisory Committee member John Porteous, who sat on the committee in 1969 with poet John Betjeman and art historian Lord Clark when Britannia was moved from the penny to the 50p coin, refused to comment on the new designs.
But he said: "My thought was that it was a great idea to keep Britannia at that particular point in time.
"However, I dont think anyone cares for her much longer.
"Britannia was a Bank of England badge and she really belongs to them."
But Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague said: "Britannia has been an enduring symbol of British pride and history.
"It is all too typical of a Government with an inadequate sense of British pride and an ignorance of history to want to do away with such a symbol."
Historian Andrew Roberts, author of Eminent Churchillians and A History Of The English-Speaking People Since 1900, called for an urgent rethink.
"We constantly see Gordon Brown wrapping himself up in the Union Jack, yet here we find a blatant attempt to erase our history, to allow important symbols to be abolished after 300 years," he said.
"Britannia is a classic symbol of modern Britain and people care very much about whats on their coins.
"People fight for symbols, for flags, because they represent in a small way the big things that matter to us.
"What does this rather sinister term 'modernisation' mean? Does it mean sticking that awful Jade Goody on the 50p instead?"
Richard Bishop, chief numismatist at London coin-dealer Spink and Son, said: "Poor old Britannia - even she has a sell-by date.
"One day, people will probably wonder, 'Who's this old woman holding a fork?' But if they've decided she should go, what about other things, like the British lion? Is that for the scrapheap?"
The current standard designs for 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p and 50p pieces were rolled out in the run-up to decimalisation in 1971 and were joined by the 20p piece in 1982 and the £1 in 1983. They have been minted in batches every year since then.
The £2 coin will be unaffected by the changes and limited-edition non-circulation coins are still expected to carry Britannia.
A Royal Mint spokeswoman last night refused to discuss the abolition of Britannia.
She would only say: "We will be launching some new coins in the spring.
"It's a really important project for us and its very important that people understand what's changing and why it's happening."
A Treasury spokesman said: "As people will see when the new Mint run is issued, the chosen designs represent the best traditions of British coinage and are totally in line with the Government's desire to celebrate our British heritage, including our historic national and heraldic emblems.
"The traditional Britannia design and other traditional designs will return in future mint runs.
The figure of Britannia first appeared almost 2,000 years ago when the Romans created her as a personification of the British Isles, which they called Britanniae.
She made her first appearance on a Roman coin during the rule of Emperor Hadrian.
Her first appearance on a British coin came during the reign of Charles II, on the copper farthing in 1672 and the copper halfpenny in 1673.
She was conjured up as a symbol of Britain's political and naval might during the time of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and by the Victorian era she had grown to become a more forceful, trident-holding representation of the British Empire.
Between 1797 and 1970, she was on the penny coin and now features on an estimated 769million 50p pieces in circulation.
But critics said it was depressing that it would not be the default design on the tails side of a British circulation coin for the first time since 1672.
Placing Britannia in a Burkha for awhile is more important than maintaining an unbroken tradition, I suppose......
Death of the West watch...
He really, underneath it all, hates his country, doesn’t he? An entire class of people have somehow gotten into office who hate Britain and all she stood for. I’m not conspiracy-minded, but I could be convinced.
The pathological impulse of “progressives” is to run around fixing things that aren’t broken.
FReeper ccmay has some insightful perspectives on the demographic makeup of the current British Government. Perhaps he can be cajoled into dropping by and lending his opinion? :-)
I’d love to read it.
Doing it so Muslim man will be able to use the coins?
He hates his own country?
Wait til you see a Dumocrat president...
Depressing? It's a damn shame.
There was a time when I had hope for PM Brown, mainly due to his strongly supportive statements about the war on terror, his enthusiastic support for President Bush and his very congenial tone toward the USA, but just like Blair, he's letting his own country down.....
Brown hails Bush's war (Great Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer delivers glowing endorsement)
Gordon Brown I love the USA (wants to make ties even stronger)
Well I don’t doubt that. We’ll get what we deserve for letting one be elected, just as Britain got what they elected. But I’d like to see even a ‘rat President try to remove “In God We Trust” from the money.
And we still have our guns :D
ROFL - I love that coin with the spy-on-your-citizenry camera on it. :-)
Gordon Brown is making Tony Blair look like Margaret Thatcher.
And Americans to remain Americans.
>Well I don’t doubt that. We’ll get what we deserve for letting one be elected, just as Britain got what they elected. But I’d like to see even a ‘rat President try to remove “In God We Trust” from the money.
And we still have our guns :D<
True. Makes you wish for the 2nd Civil War to show up, huh?
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