Birds on banknotes. You will note that the new euro notes will feature birds, not Europe’s leaders. In defiance of identity

The birds will win, I know. The ECB has launched a survey to decide on the designs for the next European banknotes, and Europeans, torn between culture and nature, will sentimentally choose nature. Two options are on offer: would you prefer the great figures of art and history to represent the Ancient Continent, or birds? Choosing culture means favouring the likenesses of Maria Callas, Beethoven, Marie Curie, Cervantes, Leonardo, Bertha von Suttner – and, alongside culture, the grandmotherly feminism that currently dominates a European Union that no longer has any mothers. Three women out of six – just to show how much influence women wield: the unknown and unelectable Baroness von something-or-other, a friend of Alfred Nobel and, as it happens, the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, towering from the top of the 200-euro note.

Choosing nature means favouring birds such as woodpeckers, bee-eaters, avocets, storks… Do you really think city-dwelling Europeans wouldn’t be moved by the sight of a stork? Even I – who, when I hear the word ‘birds’, mentally reach for my shotgun – was struck by the sight when I first came across a flock of storks this spring in Castiglione d’Adda, in southern Lombardy. No, I wouldn’t have shot them even if I’d been able to. With all the filthy pigeons about, why pick on such fairy-tale-like migratory birds?

I will not be voting in the ECB poll; I have too much respect for myself. The results of the consultation, which runs until 21 September (a bird for the summer), will not even be binding, in the finest tradition of Brussels’ sham democracy. The President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, assures us that the new banknotes, ‘by combining beauty and meaning, will strengthen our common identity’. They will reinforce the absence of identity, if the birds prevail – and they will prevail. Because none of the species in the running is uniquely European (almost all of them flit about in Asia and Africa too; gannets even in America). Had they cared about identity, the Eurocrats would have proposed Saint Benedict of Norcia as the patron saint of Europe. But they would have had to believe in something: in Christ.