Britain will at long last leave the European Union on Friday, bringing with it lingering questions about its trade relationships, deep divisions among its voting public—and a brand-new commemorative coin.
The 50 pence coin—10 million of which will go into circulation across the U.K. from Jan. 31 onwards—has had several false starts; stoked deep divisions among who will—and who won’t—accept the 50 pence coin as change; and even kicked off a politically fraught—but detail oriented—debate about proper grammar.
In other words, swap “grammar” for “legal minutiae and Parliamentary procedure” and what we have is a coin that is truly doing duty: as both legal tender, and embattled Brexit metaphor. What more could a chunk of metal ask for?
Peace, prosperity, friendship
Though the so-called “Brexit” coin will only make its first public appearance on Friday, it has been in the works since at least spring 2018, when a group of Conservative party MPs requested a celebratory coin to mark the results of the June 2016 referendum, according to The Times of London.
Then, in October 2018, news broke in the British press that the Royal Mint had been asked to draw up designs for it, bearing the date when Britain was due to leave the EU: March 29, 2019.
The March deadline came and went, as the Conservative government struggled to reach an agreement on the country’s exit and get the plan backed by Parliament.
Months later, another blown deadline—Oct. 31, 2019—prompted about a million coins already stamped with the date to be rendered useless and melted down, according to The Times. Weeks after that missed deadline, the coin at last became a reality when a successful election result for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives ensured Parliamentary backing for the Jan. 31 exit.
But if the coin—bearing the words: “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations”—was meant as an attempt to unify a deeply-divided nation behind Brexit, it didn’t get off to a flying start.
Philip Pullman, the author of the Golden Compass and other children’s books, kicked off a national reckoning over the lack of an Oxford comma, declaring it “should be boycotted by all literate people.” (Others disagreed, calling the punctuation not just optional, but American English.)
On Twitter, so-called “remainers” compared the photo of the MP Sajid Javid holding the coin to “Gollum” from the Lord of the Rings, and declared that they would not accept the coin as change.
Meanwhile, conservative tabloids cheered the coin’s arrival and lambasted coin critics, and a special series of tours at the Royal Mint in South Wales, where visitors could “press” their own Brexit commemorative coin, were quickly booked out.
The Royal Mint, for its part, pointed out that the U.K. has already marked the nation’s relationship with the EU three previous times—in 1973, 1992, and in 1998, to mark the country’s 25th anniversary as a member of the bloc. Why should Brexit be any different?
“It felt fitting, that following the decision on 23rd June 2016 for the U.K. to leave the European Union, for The Royal Mint to produce a new 50p coin to commemorate this historic moment,” Clare Maclennan, Director of Commemorative Coin at The Royal Mint, said in a statement.
But there seems to be agreement that this coin, at least, is intended to convey a clear political message, says Tae-Yeoun Keum, a professor of politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford, who is currently researching political myths and the construction of political narratives.
“What’s striking about [the coin is] that it’s another reminder of the continued and committed effort, on the part of [Boris] Johnson’s campaign, to imbue Brexit with a sense of world-historical greatness, to package the renegotiation of what’s really a complicated—and frankly rather dull—set of economic and legal agreements into this singular event in a grand national epic,” she says.
“And what’s awkward about the situation is this disconnect between that effort and the reception.”
The power of a coin
Coins and bills have a long history as objects of political myth-building: think of a former colony striking a Monarch off its bills, or the debate about over new public figure being added to a coin.
Keum is skeptical that a coin, on its own, can make a real symbolic mark. But she points out it’s just one item—the discussion around whether Big Ben should chime to mark Brexit is another—in a “broad, big-volume symbolic campaign to graft the event of Brexit onto larger narratives that already mean something to us.”
“It’s often the accumulation of all these little things that sit on our subconscious and begin to affect our world views,” she says.
Although she argues there was nothing “predetermined or necessary” about the way Brexit has come to encapsulate a battleground of clashing visions, those stories have been pervasive: even before the Referendum vote, campaigners and posters created a stand-off between a pro-Brexit image harkening back to nostalgia for simpler times; while the pro-Remain view made the case for Cosmopolitanism—unsuccessfully, given the result of the vote.
But in the years since, the question has moved past the ultimate outcome of Brexit (still an unknown), to the question of which story will eventually define this period when we look back in years to come. Was it a triumph, or a disaster?
“Brexit, I think, will be remembered as a reminder of the power of narratives, and their grip on our imaginations, to shift the course of real events with real consequences,” Keum says.
The lesson there, she notes, is that we have to take these stories seriously—rather than wring our hands over their lack of rationality.
And when it comes to shaping a narrative in the years to come—one Brexit story to rule them all, if you will—we might be entering a new age.
In that new world, maybe we accept that those two stories might continue to co-exist, and where we accept, commemorative coin or not, that there might not be a narrative that can unite Brexiteers and Remainers after all.
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