End Of The Penny?

Well, Tony Blair moved out, Gordon Brown moves in...

Someone has to clean the mess up, but Brown certainly knows how to construct a large pile of stuff...

Guess that nobody seriously thinks of the UK joining Euroland. But it's so much fun to bring the subject up once in a while in order to get a Pavlov style conditional reflex from the British.

As for the 1p coin, well, in my opinion such a piece is a nuisance just like the US 1 cent coin, or our (€) 1 and 2 cent coins. Problem is, people in some countries seem to believe that doing away with low value coins leads to price increases. Heck, we had a 1 pfennig coin, worth half a cent or one third of a British penny, until Dec-2001 . And in Switzerland the government wanted to phase the 5 rp/ct coin out. No way, it will continue to be made even though it costs more than face to make them ...

Christian

Who knows. Unfortunately the EU has a few member states which for some unintelligible reason once insisted on getting in but so far have been unwilling to leave. So they just hang around trying to make the life of the rest of the Union as miserable as possible. Where all this will "end" ... no idea.

Christian

Ah, I forgot to vote. Done that a few minutes ago. Well, I already wrote that IMO the days of the penny are numbered. And I must admit that I was a little surprised when I read that the planned redesign would include the 1p and 2p coins: While the 5p, 10p and 50p pieces have all been resized at some point in the past couple of years, the two "copper" coins still have the sizes that were introduced with the decimalization. So I thought they might be about to be phased out. (The 2p coin I don't find particularly handy anyway.) Guess I was wrong ...

Also, in many countries that do not have such low value coins any more but where prices still count on them, so to say, rounding applies to cash payments only. In the Netherlands, for example, "0.99" or "2.98" price tags are still common in supermarkets. So the penny in the UK may actually be there to stay for many years ... just not as a coin.

Christian

I haven't heard any talk as of yet for us losing the British penny. I think many would see that as the first move of trying to introduce the Euro through the 'back door' as our currency & current popular feeling is that the Euro is something we do not want here. It's one of the clearest signs of our own independence from the continent & as much as I enjoy travelling to mainland Europe I don't want to be considered part of it.
However...I do have several collections of 'trial euros' that have been issued, some with an English theme, some Welsh & others Scottish. The British/English issues DO have the queens head on them. I at first found the Euro rather a boring coin but have since come to love collecting it. Mind you, collecting it & using it on a daily basis are two different things & I hope it forever stays a foreign currency to us Brits.

"Why did you use the term 'mainland Uurope' instead of the European Union? -aren't there still nations on the European mainland which aren't part of this funfair in a hall of mirrors?"

Because we are an island...not part of the mainland, as opposed to 'most' of the continent which is land locked to each other. Yes...to the best of my knowledge there are still countries on the continent not yet fully caught up in the EU but being as I don't reside in them I'm only qualified to talk about our country...from my point of view.