New Alan Turing £50 note design is revealed
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The first list I found of her meeting US presidents: https://time.com/5333083/queen-elizabeth-trump-visit-preside...
She didn't have to be elected..
By the time Turing was convicted that power is in effect in control of the Lord Chancellor, part of the British Government. Today although the title is the same, a Lord Chancellor would likely be an MP (ie elected, albeit not to do that specific job) but at the time Turing was convicted I assume it was a Peer (so, not elected) but chosen by the Prime Minister of the day (who is elected).
The most recent notable exercise of this power by the British government was to reduce the sentence for a murderer who (during day release) tackled some terrorist lunatic and thereby likely saved some people's lives.
I look to Switzerland with envy, where as far as I can tell you can stroll into the supermarket and drop a 1000-franc note without issue.
There's also a high cash demand from tourists, and a high nighttime demand (when machines won't be refilled).
> smuggled out of China
That's unfair: completely honest tourists often have £50 notes, regardless of where they come from. The currency exchange office prefers high-ish denominations of most currencies. They take up less space, which matters when everything has to fit in a safe, and are generally in better condition.
Anyway, the relevance to our conversation: since value density is highest with £50 notes, that's what they tend to bring.
- I don’t really think the problem is forgery. I think it’s that it is annoying for a lot of shops to make change for £50.
- I don’t think the government is particularly interested in making cash more convenient for people (card transactions are easier to track) and wealthy people mostly aren’t interested in carrying around high-value notes as credit cards exist.
edit: to add to that, it used to be that £1 coins were the most forged in sterling cash. I can't say if that's still the case, but at one point it felt like 1 in 3 pound coins were a fake.
Minor, and probably specific to busy bars, but it did come up: there's also the practical issue of where you put a £50 note as there's no space for it in a register. So you kinda shove them at the bottom of another stack, but there's the danger that when you're very busy and handing change back you'd grab it without looking. So always had to tell another staff member there was a £50 in the register, and ideally that register got emptied asap.
> During later years of the round pound's use, Royal Mint surveys estimated the proportion of counterfeit £1 coins in circulation. This was estimated at 3.04% in 2013, a rise from 2.74%.[9][10] The figure previously announced in 2012 was 2.86%, following the prolonged rise from 0.92% in 2002–2003 to 0.98% in 2004, 1.26% in 2005, 1.69% in 2006, 2.06% in 2007, 2.58% in 2008, 2.65% in 2009, 3.07% in 2010 and 3.09% in 2011.[40][41] Figures were generally reported in the following year; in 2008 (as reported in 2009), the highest levels of counterfeits were in Northern Ireland (3.6%) and the South East and London (2.97%), with the lowest being in Northwest England.[42][43][44] Coin testing companies estimated in 2009 that the actual figure was about twice the Mint's estimate, suggesting that the Mint was underplaying the figures so as not to undermine confidence in the coin.
IIRC that is/was only in number though, not total value.
The £50 notes were perceived as "most likely forged" because - in addition to being temptingly large denominations - they're so rare the average person has never used one and doesn't really know what they look like. There's a vicious circle of course: ATMs don't dispense them and banks are unlikely to unless requested because they're not widely accepted. The £20 note doesn't have that problem.
We have the a similar issue in Germany, but it's mostly with 200€ notes (and 100€ notes for a small shop, maybe). I've never had anyone even as much as look annoyed to being handed 50€.
That was what we were told back when I worked in a small shop in a theme park in the late 90s. That combined with the fact that because we rarely saw them people tended to be worse at picking out fakes than they were with smaller denomination notes.
We were to ask people to go to the cash office at the front of the site to have large notes swapped for smaller currency, £10 and lower. The reason we gave the customer (which as you mention had the benefit of also being true, even though I was very much given the impression it wasn't management's primary concern) was that it would take all the change from out tills. We would accept £20s, though the sign up front suggested they be changed first too.
> solution surely isn’t to get rid of the notes as that just shifts the forgery to the next note down
The recognisability helps with lower denomination notes though. And taking a forged £50 is more of a hit than taking a forged £10 amongst others.
> Surely instead the solution would be higher valued notes being created.
The solution we are heading towards, more rapidly now due to C19's effects, is cashless. I still have a few coins in my running pouch in case I need to use a non-free public convenience and a few of notes in my wallet just in case the cards fail, but I don't think I've actually used cash at all in the last 12 months and that may remain the case once This is all over (there is a local corner shop that won't take contactless or other card payments for less than £10 - I simply don't go to that shop any more as that is inconvenient for me for single small items so I do without for now or walk further, and for needs >£10 I'll walk further to a larger store with more options anyway).
£20 in 1994 was £10 in 1981 - 13 years before.
£20 in 1981 was £10 in 1975
Before that 1969 and 1950
So that’s doubling in 19,6,6,13,26
So inflation is at long time record lows despite the last period including the 08 crash and covid
CPIH figure includes houses, under that £20 today was £10 in 1990, so even lower.
I take a unscientific approach in that I had a bar menu from 1971 (my birth year) showing the prices in old and new money. A pint of Skol was 5 new pennies in 1971, and today you can find an equivalent pint of lager at about 5 pounds.
So that's 100 fold increase in my lifetime.
A lot of that came out of the 70's and early 80s but current inflation does, anecdotally, seem higher than 1-2% a year.
Ale prices themselves have increased 73% since 2000, lager 85%, according to beerandpub.com
Annecdoatally in 2002 I was paying £1.60 in a student bar in the south west. Earlier this year I paid over £5.50 in a sam smiths in london, you might think it’s increased, but those were two very different pubs though. London prices are far higher than the majority of the country, and the range is even higher now. Perhaps CPI should be measured on a regional basis, as rents in london increased due to high demand and high paying jobs, prices of goods and services had to also.
Since 2008 according to the British beer and pub association, annual beer inflation has been 2.8%. The most expensive beer since 2008 has increased on average 5% a year.
Beer will be higher inflation than other measures like Big Macs as the tax has increased on it - both duty and vat. Pre tax beer prices were 1.43 in 2002, 1.91 in 2008 and 2.42 in 2019.
That’s an 08-19 increase of 2.2%
I’m sure (as far as bars go) contactless payment will be preferred more in future. COVID has sped up the process of that. It’s unlikely to see many £50 notes around. There were already a lot of “card only” bars in London and that was pre-COVID.
Also inflation is low and will be low for quite some time so that won’t be a factor.
In many countries, accepting cash is legally required. Unless a foreign national can pay with their credit card reliably, such a rule should be the required fallback payment method.
Some constituent countries of the UK have legal tender laws but a legal tender law only applies to debts and you have not incurred a debt when you offer to buy something.
In pubs that are card-only, pay-first, you might have an argument - but this may become a discrimination lawsuit the moment my card gets denied when the sticker says it should be accepted.
Very difficult to get contactless working in the midst of the Cheviots.
I have heard this since I was a kid, in reality, it isn't true, at least not in London. I have never been refused when presenting a £50, not that I have carried them more than a dozen times. Most places that have issues taking them are small merchants who give away too many notes breaking them, so will often ask for a smaller note. When I was in New York once, I went into a CVS and bought $60 of sweets to bring home, the cashier shouted 'bill check' when i presented a $100 bill, so I guess I look more dodgey in the US.
It's just dumb. UK government should definitely drive a larger adoption of the £50 notes, it's so bizzaire to me that the British population treats their own banknotes like something from the moon.
How so? And if this is an actual, real problem...then stop printing them? What's the point of making currency that normal citizens have issues using?
I just don't undestand it on some fundamental level. Where I'm from(Poland)_200PLN(about £40) notes are very common in circulation, and if you were to pay for a 5PLN loaf of bread with a 200PLN banknote I can guarantee literally no one would bat an eyelid. It's a common and completely normal banknote to use.
Yet in UK, where people make more money on average and also buy more expensive things, the £50 is some alien piece of paper that most Brits have never even seen. The only other place which treats its own currency with such disdain is Germany where I saw signs on petrol stations sayng they don't accept 500 Euro notes. Well if you don't, then why even have them? What's the point? The government should be going after all retailers who don't accept any official currency, because that seems like the very basis of working currency system.
https://www.ft.com/content/afe8ed5a-cd10-11e5-986a-62c79fcbc...
I think you're conflating twoo things as well. Retailers don't like high denomination notes because they're more likely to be forgeries (getting change from a low value purchase with a high denomination note is a simple way to launder forged notes)
Governments don't like them because of tax evasion (though they'll call it "anti money laundering because not all upstanding citizens are entirely averse to a spot of cash-in-hand money laundering).
I presume there's just enough demand from business (where using high denomination notes for high value B2B transactions has very low transaction costs) that they still print them, but I would be surprised if they're still around in a decade.
However, if you're making a jewelry purchase with multiple 50 quid notes, denying them would seem unreasonable.
I have seen places checking $5 bills in some parts of town.
Legal tender is only a thing for the settlement of pre-existing debts.
Hop over to Switzerland, and you can buy a coffee with a 1000 franc (GBP780) note without any issues.
(Serious price comparison: I walked over the St Bernard's pass from Switzerland to Italy. In Switzerland, we paid €6.50 for mediocre commercial ice cream. Over the border in Italy, €2 for the most incredible gelato. Although it may be that walking down a mountain to get it improves your perception of an ice-cream.)
I guess everyone is so used to Digital Payment and do not want to deal with the hassle of cash.
Personally I love cash.
It did dumb down in some horrible areas however. There was a overdone conflict between him and his superiors and peers - until they too realised he was right in Hollywood fashion. The actual code breaking was ... "my god what if they put Heil Hitler at the end of each message. We could use the new computer you have built to break the message and then put the play on right here."
But to be fair I don't think even I would have sat through ten minutes of Cumberbatch explaining cipher theory to get a proper grip on that.
Overall, its a good way to introduce the kids to the origin of computers, the need to stick to your principles, and prejudice is bad.
They have him say "boy" but they never clarify that the "boy" was 19 years old. I have little doubt that some people left the movie thinking that Turing was a pedophile.
Christopher was the name he gave to the first Bombe I think.
I don't think any part of the film implied pedophilia - not at all.
NB - all above is from memory.
I'm also speaking from memory, but I remember being pretty upset that they weren't more explicit about his crime being strictly homosexuality and not about the partner's age.
I found the clip on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RQBPs5Dkzg
The only actual description of his crime, if I recall, was that single sentence: "[...] accused of intriguing a young man to touch my penis [...]" at about 50 seconds into that clip.
I don't know. Maybe not everyone would interpret that description badly, but it doesn't even sound consensual to me. It sounds like he's describing himself as being accused of manipulating a child.
And the pain that Turing had later in the film/in his life - I felt that too. Cumberbatch's weird self, and the overbearing lone/nerd vibe they gave Turing aside, they tried to convey the pain and sadness and I think it was portrayed enough for the audience to feel it and sympathize.
Could be argued that the film contributed to this path that he's now going to be on the banknote perhaps?
I'm not showing off, and I don't mean to say my opinion is correct, but let's just say I have at least some claim to know what was going on.
I watched the Imitation Game with my wife who knew little to nothing about Bletchley park and Turing. I have to say, that given 90 minutes I couldn't have done a better job in giving them a good feel for the situation and the pressures, the ideas and personalities involved.
I can say with confidence that pretty much everything said or shown in every scene is significantly inaccurate, but taken as a whole, and with an understanding of the restrictions, it's a very good job.
If you can't live without knowing the specific truth, read Hodges. If you can, just watch the film then get on with something else.
Sincerely, I do defer to you for your opinion of Turing's personality - but when I saw the film it was so very disappointing that Turing was written as a lone-genius type - while it didn't drive the plot, I understand it really wasn't what he was like as a person. Come to think about it, I can't think of any mainstream cinema production that portrayed a leading academic as a _normal person_ - they invariably fall into stock character tropes, and The Imitation Game was no exception. That's what disappointed me the most.
Additionally, like many other historical biographies, the film condenses multiple people - or in this case, entire teams of people into single characters. I can understand that for budgetary and storytelling reasons, but the film's decision to substitute Turing's circle of literally a handful of characters for what would have been hundreds of cryptographers and researchers (out of a Bletchley Park workforce of almost 10,000 people concurrently in early 1945!) was enough to break the film for me - and even if that fudging wouldn't have made me take issue with the film the scenes where Turing-and-Chums single-handedly make moral decisions about the handling of high-level intelligence certainly did. Those scenes added nothing of historical value and would have added emotional tension only to viewers entirely ignorant about how military intelligence gathering and analysis works - which, unfortunately, seems to include the film critics.
Police officers end their phone conversations abruptly, academics are lone genius, managers consider their employees as slaves, chefs dedicate their life to their art...
Cinema has its codes, good or not, so you shouldn't really expect them to not be there I think !
In 1939 the Poles basically dumped an absolutely massive amount of information they had worked out about enigma on the British and the French. The Poles had a working system to decrypt enigma from (I think) 1932 up to 1939 when the Germans added more rotors to the machines increasing the complexity significantly. The Polish techniques still worked with the new rotors but the additional complexity slowed them down a lot.
I maybe remembering this incorrectly but I think the Poles managed to construct machines logically identical to enigma machines (i.e. the same output for every input) based just on messages they'd intercepted (without ever seeing an actual enigma machine). They gave one of these machines to the French and one to the British.
The "Bombe" built in Bletchly park was directly inspired by the Polish "Bomba" machines.
I've never watched the movie, having also spent a bunch of time working with the Turing Archive's collection of his other work (he was really interested in morphogenesis, a corner of biology) as a side job when I was at postgraduate student I expect I'd just find the portrayal annoying.
As for scarcely different - Churchill is an idol to the current government, and their regressive policies, their proposal to reintroduce the death penalty, their isolationist nationalism - all of these are things I’m sure he would support.
Like a corporation, that government definitely feels bound by the obligations made by its predecessors, and, likewise, feels entitled to receive any obligations owed to it.
To argue otherwise would be to argue that debts, treaties, as well as all prior legislative and executive decisions all disappear every time you hold an election.
Governments are composed of people: people inherit money and associated debt but they don't inherit guilt.
The UK's recent actions towards Turing were very much not an apology, however.
Nearly all repression was the law of the land at the time it was carried out. If the German or Russian, or American government 'forgave' the ethnic groups it's predecessor mistreated, there would be an incredibly justified uproar about it (Because as the transgressor, the government should be the one asking for forgiveness, not giving it. And for two of them, it would not even a direct successor of the government responsible!)
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/12/12/boris-johnson-tank-top...
It seems to me that it would have been more appropriate for it to have officially asked for his forgiveness, instead.
Nope. He didn't. Just the way pop culture likes their nerds to act.
I'm no collector, I just think it's cool that Turing is on a bank note, and I want one.
As for a (web) service, I'm not aware of any.
International airports and many major banks have currency exchanges. The exchanges take a healthy cut, where your personal bank most likely will not.
The caveat is because places with lots of tourists will have their "pocket change" (old notes)
After that sure, they're just money, if you want to be certain to obtain one of these, particularly in mint condition you may end up paying a bit more than it's "worth" but you seemingly don't intend to spend it so that shouldn't matter.
I'm not sure if they're a thing in the US, but in many countries there are places which sell stamps, coins and notes to collectors, and here I'd expect to find at least one in a large town or city, people like that would understand what you want here, although their prices would likely be significantly higher than just going to an international airport and asking to buy a £50 note from them once they have the new kind.
A brief aside about why people won't have the old ones for long. Unlike the US, the UK actually replaces notes. Pre-Turing notes given to banks will gradually be destroyed and then in not so long the government will declare that they are no longer to be used. They don't become worthless, but shops won't take them, and then high street banks won't take them, until eventually the only place that will is the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street, they will always honour the old note, since it says it is worth Fifty Pounds and they issued it, but of course all you get is a newer Fifty Pound note that still works, a fun ritual to do once maybe if you don't live too far away.
This means ordinary British people needn't have the expertise to authenticate genuine 100 year old money, none of it is valid any more - while if you find some down the back of your couch, it isn't worthless, it's just maybe not very convenient to go to Threadneedle Street if you found an archaic banknote that's now worth less than it'd cost to get there.
Also of course eventually (many years from now) the old notes will be worth more than £50 to collectors because they become rare, even though at Threadneedle Street you can only ever get £50 for them.
Most countries will go with politicians, buildings and warlords.
I have to say that it saddens me to see Darwin go. Considering that the evolution theory is still considered controversial in many places(even in advanced countries like the US) I think it was a very bold move to have him on the note.
If you want an engraved portrait of Gauss, Cliff Stoll will sell you a nice one: https://www.kleinbottle.com/gauss.htm
> Founded in 1932 as “The Evolution Protest Movement” by a small group of Christians concerned by the propaganda that was promoting the theory of evolution as if scientifically proven
There's a lot of wacky people with wacky ideas in the UK... but I think almost literally nobody disbelieves evolution here. It's just not a thing on anyone's radar and the small component we have of evangelical christianity is strangely quite an urban middle-class thing. I don't think it was bold at all.
The £50 note feels like lipservice if anything.
I find that amusing because I suspect that in practice not many shops accept them. It's hard for me to know because despite having lived in the UK for about half a century I've never had a £50 note.
Perhaps they have a plan to bring the new £50 notes into use. If today's cash machines only have the hardware to dispense two kinds of note they could replace the 20s with 50s. But inflation is low and cash is generally on the way out, so probably not, I would guess.
Scottish and other non-English sterling is another matter. Despite being legal tender in England, smaller shops don't see it frequently enough to want to take the risk handling them.
So retailers can reject them for the same reason as when you see something labelled with the wrong price. The shop keeper is under no obligation to sell it to you for that price.
What you actually see is a reference for you, the customer, to initiate an offer to buy something at that price.
If the shop keeper doesn't like the look or you money or the price your offering he can reject the deal.
As far as legal tender goes that only applies to the settling of debts and a retailer could reject an offer to sell they don't like even if you do offer legal tender.
Even Bank of England copper coins are only legal tender up to something like the value of 20p. So you can't take a truck load of copper coins to your landlord to pay for rent in arrears.
The point about Scottish notes not being legal tender is a surprise. Thanks for the correction there.
I remember seeing George Galloway on a morning TV show passionately saying why Margaret Thatcher shouldn't be on any notes. At the end of the interview he was asked who was on the £5, £10, £20 notes. He had no clue. I'm sure most of us in the UK don't either.
Cash protects both buyers and sellers more from crazy people.
Rich coming from someone under whose leadership, money laundering was going on:
> Also during his time at the bank, Sands was harshly criticized after Standard Chartered paid New York State $340 million in 2012 to settle claims it laundered money for Iran[0]
The volume is massive: with the most used notes lasting 3-5 years it won't be long until you have a billion plastic notes in circulation.
Introduction of these notes will probably not even be visible in microplastics assays.
The filter could be big and designed to last the life of the machine. It's far better to dispose of a single chunk of solid plastic waste than the billions of particulates that would have gone into waterways...
Not sure if that breaks at laws, IMNAL..
Not sure of the TAM/ SAM/ SOM