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They won’t buy you much, but two anti-Brexit fake banknotes claiming to be from the “Bank of Brexit lies” and declaring themselves to be “for the privileged few” have been deemed of such historical value they have been added to the collection of the British Museum.
The banknotes, produced by a pro-EU group in Bath, have been doctored to carry the faces of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. The Johnson design, based on a £10 note, carries the slogan: “I promise not to pay the NHS the sum of £350m pounds”, while the “£50 guinea” Rees-Mogg version declares: “I promise to pay myself more than you”, and carries the fake motto: “Arrogantus Toffo Posterium”.
Tom Hockenhull, the museum’s curator of modern money, said the notes belonged in its collection because “we capture history. We collect things because they represent economic, social and political history, and so we want these in the collection.
“There’s a long tradition of making parody bank notes for the purposes of spreading a political message or advertising a particular viewpoint, and these fit into that genre.”
The notes were produced by Bath for Europe, which campaigns to stop Britain leaving the EU, and have already been distributed in their thousands at anti-Brexit rallies, said Dick Daniel, a founding member who designed the notes.
His original idea, he said, was to “play on the promises they made, the distortions and lies of the Brexit campaign, and to make something very visual”.
He had initially printed off a few hundred copies of the Johnson note, his first design, but after the notes proved popular, the group kept printing more. Daniel believes that up to 5,000 have now been handed out. The images are available without charge to download and use from the group’s website.
The British Museum’s move follows its acquisition earlier this year of a Banksy artwork depicting an equally fake banknote designed in 2004 and displaying an image of Princess Diana.
Those notes had to be withdrawn by the artist after he noticed people trying to spend them. The Johnson and Rees-Mogg notes, by contrast, resemble banknotes only on one side.
Hockenhull said the museum would gladly collect examples of pro-Brexit banknotes but he was not aware of any that had been produced. “I wonder if that is because the £350m figure is something they would rather forget rather than stick it on a banknote.
“This is the material culture of the politics of the last five years and the evidence suggests that this will have ramifications far beyond that, so I think these will be an important record of our time.”
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