Petition to put Alan Turing on the next £10 note | Hacker News Reader

Petition to put Alan Turing on the next £10 note

epetitions.direct.gov.uk

151 pointsdave1010uk28 comments

I think I speak for everyone here when I say that Turing's bill should be a power of two. I think Turing should get a £5.12 bill.

Maybe it's £10 in binary.

There are 2p and £2 coins[1], but sadly all currency must have the monarch's head on the obverse; a second head on the reverse would probably be unwelcome.

[1] They're quite beautiful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_pounds_(British_coin)

"Turing's homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952, when homosexual acts were still illegal in the United Kingdom. He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He died in 1954, just over two weeks before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined it was suicide"

"On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war."

Putting him on the money would further the apology.

I don't want Turing put on a note as "an apology". There are thousands (millions?) of people who have been mistreated by unjust laws in British history, of which Turing's case is sadly not the worst example. Turing's accomplishments in Computer Science and the help he gave the Allies in WWII are cause enough.

Amazing contributions towards defeating the Axis. Response? "Yeah... but, at the time, being gay was illegal, so, ya know."

That was not the response. The actual response

It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd-particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the-northerner/2012/feb/07/alan...

Gordon Brown may have made an apology, but UK government recently refused to posthumously pardon Turing.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2012/02/07/uk-de...

The argument for not pardoning is mostly reasonable, I think. It was a crime at the time, and you can't go around posthumously pardoning everyone retroactively whenever the law catches up to society a generation or two later. (Edit: I still think what they did to Turing was wrong, of course.)

Not a brit, so my opinion is officially meaningless. But, why can't you just go around issuing posthumous pardons for unjust old laws? I mean, it's posthumous! It's not like there's a fundamental fairness issue at stake here. Other unjustly-convicted dead people aren't suddenly going to file suits demanding redress.

Just do the right thing. Why bother with the technicalities?

Two things because the person is already dead pardoning them isn't going to do a lot of good for them is it? Furthermore the governments opinion that convicting them was wrong is already apparent due to the fact that they changed the law. Next, England is one the oldest governments on Earth being roughly 1000 years old (give or take a century), individually pardoning every dead person who committed a crime that is no longer a crime would be a major burden on the parliament taking time away from addressing the needs of living people. As a result it makes a lot of sense to have a blanket (and longstanding) rule; no pardons for dead people.

Your opinion is not meaningless although like 99.9999% may be ultimately ignored.

But the problem with pardoning people posthumously for something is that there may be people who were convicted of the same crime who aren't yet dead. A government admitting that it did wrong is just asking to be sued. Sorry quite cynical I know.

Personally I'd like Babbage on a note.

The Bank of England already has him on their list of candidates.

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/Documents/about/ban...

That's a list of names suggested by the public, not candidates that the Bank of England is considering. Surely it's unsurprising that he is among the 154 suggested names.

"Inclusion on the list does not imply any endorsement by the Bank."

The petition still has value.

I'm not sure what the point in this petition is: surely responsibility for the design and circulation of currency lies solely with the Bank of England and not HM Treasury?

"We therefore call upon the Treasury to request the Bank of England to consider depicting Alan Turing when Series F £10 banknotes are designed."

But we shouldn't want the Treasury to have a say in this!? Allowing the Treasury to have a political say in what the Bank can put on their banknotes opens up a whole can of worms that it would be infinitely preferable to be left unopened.

They still wouldn't "have a say"; it's simply a request. I admit ignorance of English political delicacies, however.

what's wrong with Darwin?

I don't know that anyone was claiming there was something wrong with him, but a new £10 note will be issued in the near future as part of series F that will feature someone else.

I'd argue that Darwin is even more important, we should petition to keep him on there.

Alan Turing is a huge personal hero and agree that it'd be great to have him on a note, but just wish it was another one.

I would prefer if Darwin remained on the £10 note and Turing was put on the £5 note instead.

Why is this a petition?

Because in the UK if you get 100,000 signatures on a petition you can get it debated by The House Of Commons.

Whereas in the US, if you get 25,000 signatures on a petition, you get... a polite response summarizing the talking points you already knew, and explaining why nothing will change.

That is, if you're lucky - I believe we're still waiting on the promised response to this one: https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#%21/petition/actually-...

It doesn't have to be seriously debated - it just has to be officially mentioned, it's still just democracy window dressing.

It doesn't have to be debated at all - if a petition reaches the threshold then the committee just 'consider' it for a debate.

There was a petition to abandon the recent NHS reforms that reached the threshold and wasn't put forward for debate.

Okay, so it's not really any better than the US system.

Incidentally, in the 24 hours after I posted that, they did in fact finally release a response to that petition. It was long after the deadline that they promise for petitions that reach the threshold, and it wasn't much more than a justification of what they already do, but at this point I doubt anybody was expecting anything more.

I think this comes with particular weight after this... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17405016

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