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Digital Pound: Have your say on CBDCs in the UK

This month marks the close of the UK government’s “consultation” on the planned digital pound. This is your chance to have your say on plans to introduce a Central Bank Digital Currency to the UK.

According to the UK government’s website:

The way we use money is changing. This Consultation Paper sets out our assessment of the case for a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) – a so-called ‘digital pound’. It has been overseen by the joint Bank-HM Treasury CBDC Taskforce that was announced in April 2021.

At this stage, we judge it likely that the digital pound will be needed in the future. It is too early to decide whether to introduce the digital pound, but we are convinced preparatory work is justified.

We have covered the rise of CBDCs – and the concomitant dangers to personal freedom – in detail for a while now.

As a quick refresher, or for the uninitiated, CBDCs are a form digital money that would allow both surveillance of every transaction as well potentially Orwellian control through a function they call “programmability”.

Essentially, CBDC would hypothetically allow either the state or your employer to control where and how you spend your money.

If that sounds like a bad idea to you, well then good news – you get to make yourself heard.

Part of the UK’s consultation process leaves an opportunity for members of the public to submit their feedback on the proposal. The orginal deadline for this was June 7th, but just today it was pushed back to June 30th, apparently because they added a new question at the last minute.

To respond to the original form [click here].

Or to respond to the brand new question 9 [click here]

NOTE: For some reason you have to do both separately. Question 9 is not included on the main form.

They are also accepting written responses both by email:

[email protected]

…and post:

Digital Pound Consultation
CBDC Unit
Bank of England
Threadneedle Street
London
EC2R 8AH

If that’s you’re preferred option, Big Brother Watch have prepared a template you can use.

Honestly, we all know how the world works, and orders to implement CBDCs come from someone way above the UK government’s pay grade. Whatever the inclination of the bureaucrats or politicians in Westminster, the digital currency will almost certainly be pushed through. But apathy only greases the wheels of that machinary, while civil objections from an informed populace will hold up and stall and irritate the process.

They will probably ignore it, but we can still make it really really hard to ignore.

Let’s make sure the man behind the curtain knows we can see him.

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