London: Campaigners in the UK on Tuesday sought to clarify confusion arising out of recent reports of Mahatma Gandhi being featured on a future commemorative coin being mistakenly associated with a separate drive for ethnic minority representation on British legal tender.
The UK's Treasury department confirmed that the commemorative coin for Gandhi has been in the works since October 2019, when former Chancellor Sajid Javid proposed it to mark the 150th birth anniversary year of the Father of the Indian nation. However, this is unrelated to a separate campaign for wider ethnic minority representation on Britain's legal tender coinage.
Legal tender is supposed to honor people who contributed to British society, culture or economy, never a universal figure. So, to give an example, when we had Churchill for the GBP 5, you did not also have suggestions for global leaders such as JFK or Mandela. We have waited 400 years for ethnic minority representation on legal tender, said Zehra Zaidi, who leads the We Too Built Britain campaign, which received the backing of UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak over the weekend.
I know Zehra Zaidi, Patrick Vernon and many others have been campaigning for years for the BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) people who built Britain to be recognised on legal tender, said Sunak, as he revealed that he had written to the Royal Mint to consider how to celebrate ethnic minority contributions on UK coinage.
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Zaidi points out that while a coin commemorating Gandhi remains under consideration by the Royal Mint, Sunak's letter related specifically to their campaign for a Service to the Nation set of coins to honour British historical figures. And, their campaign is now firmly gaining ground around honouring a female military conflict-related heroine, with Indian-origin British spy Noor Inayat Khan and British Jamaican Crimean War heroine Mary Seacole among the frontrunners since Sunak's formal intervention last week.