If your local pub ever reopens, don’t be surprised if one thing is missing: the till. The anti-cash lobby is seeking to take advantage of the pandemic to rid us of our banknotes once and for all. When UK Finance — the trade body for the banking and payments industry — pushed the government two weeks ago to increase the limit on contactless card payments to £100 (it was raised from £30 to £45 at the beginning of the pandemic), it was a new offensive in a campaign for a cashless society which has been going on for years.
Small shops might fight back — the British Retail Consortium warns of high fees charged by card issuers and that some of its members are losing thousands from incomplete contactless payments — but there are far bigger forces at play. The ‘fintech’ (financial technology) industry has sniffed its big chance, and it is going to play dirty.
Just look at the stuff pumped out over the past year claiming that cash could be spreading Covid-19 — and more. My favourite was a study which claimed to have found, among a host of other nasties, traces of vaginal fluid on banknotes. Never mind coronavirus, you could pick up gonorrhoea from a £50 note. We’ve even been told that the World Health Organisation warned against using cash during the pandemic — when actually an official merely said that people should wash their hands after handling cash, just as they would after handling any other goods.
Claims that cash was spreading Covid-19 were put to bed in November, when the Bank of England published results of a study where banknotes were sprayed with Sars-CoV-2 in an amount equivalent to if an infected person had sneezed over them. After an hour, the virus on the notes started to significantly decline.
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