 Who would look great on a Glasgow Pound?
It's lunchtime at Glasgow Chambers in late November, and Councillor George Redmond is getting worked up at the prospect a Glasgow Pound. "We would be Glasgow-centric about it," he says conspiratorially, as though there is any other way to be. Or Alex Ferguson, or Kenny Dalglish?" But they will only work if Britons are ready to accept that they have the power to invent their own currency. "At the moment, if the pound stops working for us, the whole economy grinds to a halt because there aren't alternatives," Duncan McCann, a researcher at the New Economics Foundation, tells those gathered in a gilded room at Glasgow Chambers to discuss the Glasgow Pound. It's an idea he no longer thinks will work, because the debate, since Brexit, has shifted from the currency issue back to ideas about Scottish independence. On an adjacent table, Tracy Duff, a community learning and development worker from Clackmannanshire Council, digs out some papers. Rutherford runs the People's Bank of Govanhill, a currency that changes value depending on the income of the user. Everyone has gathered to decide what a Glasgow Pound might look like at a time when many are asking if local currencies can work at all. Councillor Redmond says Glasgow has been closely watching existing alternative currencies like the Brixton Pound in London, which was introduced in 2011. The founders of the Brixton Pound wanted to do something to stop 80p of every £1 spent locally from leaking out of the area into the pockets of corporations, at the expense of small local traders. So they printed a currency that would have the same value as the pound, but could only be traded in independent Brixton shops, where the shopkeeper would also have to spend it locally. The Bank of England does not consider these forms of currency legal tender, but the notes hold value in the same way as a gift-card from a department store, with the same kind of restrictions about where they can be spent. Kingston, Birmingham and Liverpool have schemes underway. But the working group has some serious questions to answer first, not least: do complementary currencies actually work? Scott Cato says the fish-in-water problem – the idea that sterling is so ubiquitous, it is never questioned – is the biggest challenge for complementary currencies. She knows all about it as a founder of the Stroud Pound in 2010, a currency that has since gone out of circulation.
 Billy Connolly
 Karen Gillian  Billy Connolly  Gerard Butler  Sean Connery