Criminal to be British?

From the end of 1999 it is to be illegal to sell fruit, vegetables, etc., priced by the pound. It will be a criminal offence to use our own- weights and measures for trade in our own country. An ancient freedom will be lost.

Compulsory metrication is undemocratic

The edict already making metric units compulsory for pre-packaged goods, and those sold by length, was rubber-stamped by Parliament without proper consultation or debate, against the public's wishes.

Our weights and measures are preferred

Most people, in all age groups, prefer customary weights and measures - overall 74% of us prefer them. Only 7% want metric-only labelling.

Feet and inches, gallons and pints, pounds and ounces are better

They are more practical than metric units for easy division into useful fractions. They are also more convenient in size for everyday needs.

Part of our heritage

Our weights and measures have been used for centuries in our literature, from Shakespeare to Roald Dahl. Their loss would further weaken understanding and appreciation of this inheritance.

Our units are used internationally

Aircraft heights are in feet; computer printers all work in inches. German plumbers use inches. Few, if any, countries are wholly metric. The U.S.A., with the world's largest economy, uses our feet and inches, pounds and ounces, and intends to continue doing so. Why shouldn't we?

Ending compulsory metrication

Many trade associations and chambers of commerce back our call to end compulsory metrication. So do over 90 MPs of all parties. But it needs more active public support to get the Government to end compulsion.

Helping to defend freedom

You can help to restore freedom of choice and to save part of our heritage by joining the British Weights and Measures Association. Tell others about the campaign by distributing this leaflet (copies sent on request). Write to your MP and to your local newspaper. The time to speak up is now.

While politicians debate whether to keep one kind of pound, they have silently allowed the disappearance of another. After December 31 it will be a criminal offence to sell products by the pound and the ounce. The reason for this is that the DTI has not bothered to obtain the ten-year extension of our old imperial measures that was offered by the EC as a preliminary to forbidding them. No more blatant example could be imagined of random law-making in defiance of popular wishes. The law compelling us to use the metric system was never discussed or voted on by our elected represent- atives; and although opinion polls suggest that nine people out of ten are opposed to the change, their desires count for nothing. The Eurocrats have decreed that the metric system will be used, and another foundation-stone is to he removed from the already tottering edifice of our national culture.
        Do weights and measures matter? Those who introduced the metric system - the French Revolutionaries - answered with an emphatic "yes". Weights and measures mediate our day-to-day transactions; hence they are imprinted with our sense of membership. They are symbols of the social order and distillations of our daily habits. The old measures were redolent, the Revolutionaries believed, of an hierarchical, backward-looking society. They were muddled, improvised, and full of compromises. What was needed was a system expressive of the new social order, based on Reason, progress, discipline and the future. Since the decimal system is the basis of arithmetic, and since mathematics is the symbol of Reason and its cold imperatives, the decimal system must be imposed by force, in order to shake people free of their old attachments.
        The conflict of currencies therefore expressed a conflict both political and philosophical. The distinction between the imperial and the metric systems corresponds to the distinction between the reasonable and the rational, between solutions achieved through custom and compromise and those imposed by a plan. Muddled though the imperial measures may appear to those obsessed by mathematics, they are the produce of life. In ordinary transactions, measurement proceeds by dividing and multiplying, ihit by, adding. It makes sense to divide a gallon into half, a quart and a pint, or to have 16 ounces to the pound.
        The antiquity of these measures - like that of our old coinage, arbitrarily jettisoned in a.previous fit of rationalism - is testimony to their common sense. But the most important fact about them is that they are ours. They are commemorated in our national literature and in our proverbs; they have shaped our eating and drinking habits; they are the lingua franca of all our books of recipes, all our manuals of gardening and husbandry and handicraft, and the subject matter of a thousand schoolbooks.

THE idea that we should be committing a crime by using them, and just because some foreign bureaucrat has said so, is such an offence to the sense of law and justice that we are surely under a moral obligation to go on using them nevertheless. If ever there were a case for civil disobedience, this is it.
        There is another and deeper reason to resist these mad imperatives. The French Revolutionaries believed that by changing weights and measures, calendars and festivals,
street-names and landmarks, they could undermine the old and local attachments of the people, so as to conscript them behind their international purpose. The eventual result was Napoleon, who spread the metric system by force across the Continent. In a small way the same is being done to us. The effect of destroying our weights and measures will be not only to undermine the old local loyalties between shopkeeper and customer. It will be to destroy the small businesses that cannot afford the change. And we should ask who would really want such a result.
        The answer, it seems to me, is clear. The supermarkets are international players, who have a vested interest in the metric system, since it is applied in most of the countries from which they import their products. If the measures on which old and local businesses depend are criminalized, the supermarkets will score yet another advantage in their war on behalf of the global government that will do most for their profits. Is that what we want? Surely, it would have been nice of our dictators to ask us, before commanding us to change.

The Times, 9 December 1999