Unhelpful

I listen to the BBC World Service regularly. Generally, it’s a good news source, but on certain European matters, it displays some of its English bias more obviously than when it’s covering matters further afoot.

One of the biggest stories of the last few months that isn’t in any way related to international terrorism or the attacks in Afghanistan is, not surprisingly, the upcoming introduction of Euro bills and coins into the European Union states which ratified the switch to a common currency.

If your only source of news about this matter was the BBC World Service, you’d be absolutely sure that the so-called Euro Zone is utterly doomed, and will suffer depravations of mass-counterfeiting, bank theft, consumer confusion, financial industry collapse, public rioting, failure of computer systems needing conversion, and attacks by 100-meter-tall marine lizards.

It exhibits a certain national hubris on the part of the United Kingdom. One part of the national character of the United Kingdom is its separation from Europe. This surprises many Americans. It surprised me when I was there. You’re reminded of it by the great joy that English politicians and media staffers use when saying the word “Continental”, by which of course they mean Europe outside the British Isles and Ireland…

…but back to the Euro. Doomed, they say. It’s just too much for a union, a country, a people to endure. This is easily debunked by the fact that the Euro, while an ambitious project, is not the first remonetization. In fact, there’s an extremely successful model for the Euro remonetization to follow:

the United Kingdom’s.

In 1971, the United Kingdom’s remonetization program officially took effect. Before 1971, prices in the country were listed in pounds, shillings, and pence - 20 shillings to a pound, 12 pence to a shilling, and in previous centuries even four farthings to a pence. 240 pennies to the pound. And there were many denominations of middling value in use over the years, such as the two-shilling florin whose denomination was helpfully listed as “florin” rather than “two shillings”, the five-shilling crown, the absurd 21 shilling guinea, and the irritating half crown - worth two shillings and six pence, which is to say, 30 pence.

It was a mess. It was hell on foreign residents and tourists. It was English, and by god, they loved it. If you think that the English have some sort of monopoly on the love of obtuse valuation, you should take care to remember an example closer to home if you live in the United States. Our system of measurement is equally obtuse and has been estimated to cost our economy $50 billion annually in conversion costs. Presumably, this includes the price of a spacecraft smashing into Mars from time to time. The only defense of such a system - be it the old English system of currency or the US system of measure - is habit. We’re used to it. If you tell us something is seven feet six inches long, that has immediate meaning to us. If you tell us something is 260 centimeters long, we look at you and wait for the punchline. We might fare slightly better if you call it 2.6 meters, if only because we vaguely remember the fact the yardstick in our school memories which was printed in feet/inches on one side was actually printed in metric on the other side back in those heady days when conversion to the metric system was “just around the corner”. The fact that we could divide the metric measure by ten without any effort but would have to think a while before dividing the traditional measure by ten - with a calculator - doesn’t even get discussed in polite company.

To whip this back to the point, Euro remonetization. The United Kingdom’s proposed currency decimalization was criticized in many circles by the problems it would cause: mass-counterfeiting, bank theft, consumer confusion, financial industry collapse, public rioting, failure of accounting systems needing conversion, and attacks by 312-foot-nine-inch-tall marine lizards.

The result was much closer to the terrible events which followed the much-anticipated rollover to the year 2000: a collective yawn. While there were issues in decimalization, a typical case went more like that of Cambridge and District Trustee Savings Bank’s: after conversion, the bank took a stunning loss. The bank, which had converted over 94,000 accounts of over £16 million, was left destitute and in shambles after coming up with a deficit of 1 pound, 11 shillings, and 2 pence. That’s about $4.66 USD in 1971 currencies.

If one takes the dire predictions by the BBC to heart, this would seem to indicate that the only country that can successfully remonetize is the United Kingdom. Every other country is doomed, a union of 13 countries even more so. Clearly this is not the case, so why put such an emotional investment into this flawed notion?

Because spectacular failure would then justify the United Kingdom’s decision not to join the European common currency. They’re praying for it. Besides, this:

Is so much easier to deal with than this:

Meanwhile, I’ll go buy my gas in groats per pint.