Moral Maze · BBC Radio 4

Is it time to ditch historical figures as heroes?

July 10, 2025·57 min·4 clips

Cambridge Classics professor argues the defining feature of a hero is transgression, not virtue.

The Bank of England opens the row. Its proposal could take historical figures off banknotes and look instead at symbols like Stonehenge, wind farms, the Angel of the North, and fish and chips. That sounds harmless until the panel starts pulling at it. Can a country name shared heroes without sanding down the conflict that made those lives complicated? One witness thinks something real would be lost. Without shared figures, he says, public life loses direction, purpose, aspiration, and a sense that people are arguing inside the same moral world. Another voice is not having it. Admiration, she suggests, does not need statues, banknotes, or public authorities handing out approved heroes. Bruce Springsteen becomes the dry little test case: private reverence can get along fine without a place in the national furniture. Then Simon Goldhill changes the terms. As a classics professor, he pushes the word hero away from mere goodness. The ancient hero goes too far. That excess is the point, not a blemish to be politely ignored. Tim Stanley presses the next question. Was the classical hero great, while the Christian hero had to be good? And if greatness and goodness pull apart, then swapping Churchill or Austen for tidier symbols does not dodge moral judgment. Symbols judge too. A banknote without a face still asks what kind of story the public wants to carry. The programme ends without settling it. Heroes change with each generation. The uneasy question is whether that keeps a shared moral language alive, or slowly drains it.

As heard by us

A banknote row opens into a pointed argument about flawed heroes, public memory, and what nations choose to honor.

Moral Maze uses the Bank of England's proposal to move away from figures such as Winston Churchill and Jane Austen on banknotes as a route into a larger argument about public heroes.

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Why you'd press play

When banknotes become a debate about which public figures or symbols still belong there.

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