The GCW Tour, A Few Bits of the UK and Ireland: OK, What Sort of Half-Baked Empire Are They Running Over Here?

Today I ran out of cash. In the modern age of universal ATMs, that's not usually much of a problem. The only challenge is guessing how much cash you're going to need, since, in most cases, both the bank whose ATM you're using and the bank that issued your card are going to want to charge a service fee so you don't want to tap into the ATM too often, but nor do you want to be left with a bunch of money you can't use when you get home (as trading it back will, again, usually incur some skimming fees). 

However, today at my little Northern Ireland ATM, what came out of the ATM was not the British pound we all know and love...

But some crazed alternative version issued by Danske Bank out of Northern Ireland...

So I went back to my Black Cab Tour Guide (more on that later) who wanted to be paid in cash, and had thus prompted my trip to the ATM, to ask him about the handful of Monopoly money I'd been given. 

"Oh no," says he, "it's legitimate money -- well, sort of. We use it here, and they might take it in Scotland, but they probably won't take it in England. But the Marks & Spencer over there will have a cash exchange desk where you can swap what you got for proper English pounds"

So we go to the Marks & Spencer. There I'm told Scotland will definitely take the bills I have, and England definitely won't take the bills I have, but they can't swap the handful I've limited utility cash I've now got for proper English bills with the picture of the queen because they don't actually have any of those.

Oh, and it turns out Scotland has their own version of the pound as well, which I did not bother to find out if the Irish will accept...

What sort of half-baked empire puts everyone on the same unit of currency, but then allows different parts of the empire to print their own versions of that currency, and then further allows the different parts of the empire to decide which versions of the currency they will or won't accept?

That's not currency. That's chaos. 

This would be like, say, California deciding it was tired of seeing the founding fathers on its greenbacks and so printing alternative "California bills," with, say, celebrities on them, asserting those bills to be worth the equivalent the same as official US dollars, but conducting all its own business using California dollars and filling all its ATMs with California dollars, but having none of the other forty-nine states recognize California dollars as legitimate currency. 

Does the Admiral of the Exchequer, or whatever they call their equivalent to the Secretary of the Treasurer, not understand how money works? Has no one in the empire read Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle (which, among many other things, includes a number of interesting passages explaining how money works and how it came to be)? 

If you want to let everyone in the UK print their own currency, fine. Stupid and confusing, but fine. But if you're going to do that, you've got to also require everyone in the UK to accept all the various versions, or you don't actually have a shared currency. But if you don't like the idea of accepting some alternative bill, then don't allow it to be printed.

I won't live to see it, but I'm personally very ready to live in a cash free society...