Pound Note Nationalism

I've always found the Pound Note Nationalism a fascinating aspect of UK debate. I think it must be because I have real difficulty having an attachment to these little coins, and notes, with the face of the monarch stamped upon them.

The Tories famously tried to save the pound from that crafty lot in Brussels and people shrugged their shoulders. UKIP use the Pound sign as part of their acronym. Neither of the campaigns particularly caught the imagination of anyone other than those who miss those 'pink bits' on the map. George Foulkes waved a Scottish Note during FMQ's to waves of laughter and pointing, as he tried to accuse Salmond of being the de'il behind moves to scrap the Scottish notes by aspiring to join the Euro. So who is it who wants to save the Pound and why?

Nairn wrote that the UK has never really cohered logically, but relied on other types of glue to bind the polity: a superiority complex forged from memories of Empire, and a concomitant, strong elite culture. There is a strange self-referential authority that many from Westminster claim in their debates about the future of the UK polity, falling into the trap that the state is somehow neutral, failing to understand the point of view that this may be the very worst way to organise things. Part of this is due to a self-interest, but it's also to do with the same idea held by those that wave around the Pound, that this is not merely a currency but an important symbol of something of Britishness. And the fear of its loss has as much to do with the end of claims to this self-referential authority, as it has to do with the symbolism, thereby revealing how important such symbols are to the British polity, and how fragile, and ultimately empty, the worth of these symbols.