30th May 2022
Before Brexit, there were the Metric Martyrs.
The key legal case here was a set of appeals which were decided by the High Court in 2002, in a judgment now known as Thoburn.
The street-level appellants faced criminal sanctions and other legal impediments because they dealt their groceries and wares in imperial measures rather than metric measures.
Re-reading Thoburn some twenty years later – in the light of the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union and this weekend’s ‘news’ about the government wanting to revive imperial measures – is an interesting exercise.
*
The first striking thing about Thoburn is the complexity of the applicable law.
Few lawyers – if any – would find it easy to follow paragraphs 8 to 35 of the judgment, which sets out all the relevant legal provisions.
Even the judge who gave the decisions of the court found it a complicated mess, saying at paragraph 81:
“In the course of the hearing I made no secret of my dismay at the way in which the criminal offences relevant to the first three of these appeals had been created. It is a nightmare of a paper chase. I accept that there was no prejudice to these individual appellants, who knew well what the law was because they were concerned to campaign against it. But in principle, I regard it as lamentable that criminal offences should be created by such a maze of cross-references in subordinate legislation.”
(The judge was Sir John Laws – notable to non-lawyers for his name and for being the uncle of Dominic Cummings – and it would be great if commenters assume these two things do not always need to be stated in their comments below.)
This judicial observation has wider import.
It is the lot of regulatory law – especially that law that regulates commerce and retail – to be complicated.
And this in turn means the law – like the one regarding the shape of bananas – will not fare well against the urges of simplification and distortion.
On one hand, you had the accessible image of market traders pricing and weighing their goods in imperial measurements for walk-up customers in English towns.
And on the other hand, you have pages and pages of impenetrable legal-ese which sets out why doing such a thing is a criminal activity leading to criminal sanctions.
Few onlookers would side with the legal-ese.
*
A second thing about the Thoburn case is just how hopeless the legal arguments were that were put on behalf of the traders.
Wide ‘constitutional’ submissions were made about ‘implied repeal’ and entrenchment of statutes – which were met by an equally wide-ranging ‘constitutional’ judgment.
This is why the Thoburn case is now – despite not being a Court of Appeal of House of Lords case – a staple of constitutional law teaching and essay writing.
The legal arguments were hopeless.
And this, in turn, was (in my view) a problem.
Many people at the time (and since) thought there was something not right about these prosecutions.
It was one thing to have common rules for cross-border trade within the single market, but it was another to prosecute and seek to give criminal records to local greengrocers and stall traders selling to local customers.
It seemed – to use a European Union concept – disproportionate.
But the hopelessness of the arguments at appeal indicates that here was a grievance here without a remedy.
There appeared at the time to be no way of practically contesting the disproportionate criminalisation of the grocers and the traders.
Even if you are (as I was and am) a supporter of the single market – and thereby of cross-border commercial standardisation and harmonisation – something just did not seem right about these prosecutions, but there was nothing that could be done about it.
And I submit that this sense of impotence in the face of what was perceived to be the legal impositions of the European Union was a contributing factor to what later became Brexit.
*
Weights and measures – like currencies – are both instruments and ornaments.
As means of exchange, such measures necessarily have to have a shared understanding – and anything which has a shared understanding will also tend to have cultural significance.
As this informative and fascinating thread by an author of a forthcoming book on weights and measures describes, one should not underestimate how important measures are to people:
https://twitter.com/jjvincent/status/1530905866689445888
I happen to have been born in 1971 and so was educated with metrification – and I still habitually think in miles, yards and feet, in stones and pounds, and in pints.
And this is despite not being especially patriotic, and not being opposed to metrification in principle.
I suspect it is not an idiosyncratic trait; I suspect many of you tend to think in imperial measures too.
*
But.
The government’s latest proposals. of course, do not make any sense.
This is partly because – after the Metric Martyrs case – both the United Kingdom and the European Union pulled back from strict applications of unified standards.
Supplementary indications of measures were to be allowed indefinitely – imperial markings as well as metric markings
And, in any case, often the relevant laws were home-made and not from Brussels:
Hello, weights and measures inspector here. They were not taken away by 'foreign bureaucrats'. It was long standing UK policy to move to SI units. The legislation to remove imperial was a UK instrument amending a UK act of Parliament. It had nothing to do with the EU.
— Pippa Musgrave (@PippaMusgrave1) May 28, 2022
As a former Lord Chancellor avers, this ‘policy’ is also a political rallying call which is made again and again:
This announcement seems to come round earlier every year. https://t.co/y21HU9LG93
— David Gauke (@DavidGauke) May 28, 2022
*
The United Kingdom’s move towards universal measurements predates membership of the European Union and its predecessor communities.
And over time, no doubt, these more ‘rational’ and internationally acceptable measures will take hold.
(Few now can reckon in pounds and shillings – which also went in 1971.)
Yet it is one of those areas where law and policy cannot easily outpace lore and culture.
Units of measurement are the means by which people understand the world about them and indeed understand the dimensions of their own bodies.
They will not easily shift – and perhaps some may never disappear altogether.
The current government is in deep political trouble – and so it is not surprising that it seeks to get the benefit of nostalgia and sentiment.
Such a government should be treated with disdain.
But changing the everyday practices and conventions of a people is a slow process – and with metrification it still has not ended.
Not by a country mile.
**
Please support this independent law and policy blog so that it can continue – do not assume it can continue without your help.
For more posts like this – both for the benefit of you and for the benefit of others – please support through the Paypal box above, or become a Patreon subscriber.
You can also become an email subscriber.
***
Comments Policy
This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.
Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated and comments will not be published if irksome.
For more on this blog’s Comments Policy see this page.
I find the whole thing very confusing – coffee is generally packed as 225g. Would it be such a problem if it was 250g?
Ditto 500ml instead of a pint.
The big risk seems to before small companies who feel forced to sell in imperial measures in the UK but metric for the EU (assuming they still want to do business with us).
But whatever, I’ll cope. A return to half crowns and shillings, and I will be taking tother barricades.
I just don’t think anything will really change anyway. Most items are bought by the packet, so the units used to measure the weight of the packet aren’t really relevant. For stuff that is bought by weight, most scales have both sets of units, so again, nothing really changes there. Most people of working age will be familiar with metric units for measuring, so I can’t really see businesses going out of their way to exclude them either.
One area we need to be careful is that we need to be consistent in our approach.
For example, if you go to a supermarket and see two brands of (washing up liquid / flour / cat litter / whatever) and one brand is measured in metric and the other with imperial units and you are trying to work out which represents value for money, which are you going to buy?
Or how about the switch from gallons to litres for petrol and diesel? When the duty on petrol goes up by “a penny a litre” instead of “a penny a gallon”, how many realise that they are paying 4.54 times more duty?
In my limited experience, every switch between systems of measurement that impacts the retail sector is another opportunity for consumers to be ripped off.
Solve the problem by requiring every “measurable” sale to be priced in both metric and imperial units and be done with it.
The issue wasn’t the introduction of metric units, it was the prohibition of imperial. Thoughtless.
Have you noticed the quantities being used for numbers of pouches for washing liquids and dishwasher detergent? Packs of around 37 and 28 and 54 are not uncommon. This establishes that manufactures will seek to obscure unit prices if they can.
As a physicist, of course I use mks based units but most of the ones I use are not in every day use anyway.
Imperial units being based on numbers like 12 and 16 are much better for practical use where, for example, you are scaling recipes.
I can also add and subtract in the old LSD money system, also very useful compared to metric for practical use as the numbers involved factor so beautifully.
“Much better for practical use where, for example, you are scaling recipes” is an example that is brought up a lot by the fans of Imperial measures, but it’s realistically very selective.
There are 16 ounces in a pound (and I had to look that up, being only 42 years old); it’s easy to convert your 1lb quantity into half or a quarter of that, but it’s no more convenient to divide it by a third as it is with a 100g quantity… and in fact, the 100g quantity can be divided roughly more easily (33g) because there isn’t a readily-understood smaller quantity than an ounce, just various fractions which you have to guess roughly on your scales anyway.
And what of the other direction? If I have a 70g quantity in a recipe and I have to make one and a half times as much because today Grandma and Grandad are coming to dinner as well, I can just multiply that number by one and a half (105g) and be done. If I have a recipe with 13 ounces of something then one and a half is awkward because 13 + 6.5 = 19.5, but then I have to remember some arbitrary magnitude multiplier to know how many ticks past the 1lb mark on my scales to look.
If everything were divided in 12s this “more convenient for everyday use” argument would hold water as 12 does indeed divide relatively easily by 2, 3, and 4… but instead we have this weird mish-mash of different magnitudes – even for different scales for the same kind of measure!
“Imperial units being based on numbers like 12 and 16 are much better for practical use where, for example, you are scaling recipes.”
Only if you need to scale down from, say, pounds, and switch to ounces. If the recipe refers to 10 ounces, it’s no easier than with metric units.
Re adding up columns of figures in £ s d, my father was an accountant in the days when spreadsheets were made of paper and he could do the same, rapidly and accurately. I could only ever do one column at a time.
You are meant to read the article, you know? The imperial measures *were not illegal*. It was refusing to give the metric legal measures *as well*. And the scales weren’t legal anyway, which was another offence – you can’t just use any random measuring device for trade, that’s why the scales on the supermarket shelves say “Not legal for trade” – they have to have standards.
The trouble with counting packets, is packet contents can and do change. Think of the classic, now almost annual discussion about chocolate, especially at Christmas when people notice that festive containers hold less than previous years yet still cost as much, or of shorter chocolate bars, etc. The old rule applies, always read the label!
You won’t release this, because it adds nothing, but that is a fantastic post, thank you.
Didn’t appreciate that you are so young.
By the way, did you know that John Laws … [etc. ad inf.]
I’ve always thought that the main reason why greengrocers were so keen to sell things by the pound was that there are about 2 pounds to the kilo, so their fruit and veg looked to be half the price of that in the supermarket.
If there had been two kilos to the pound, they’d have been selling stuff in kilos before they had to.
I grew up metric, and when I came to the UK went climbing I had to rapidly (in 30 s!) convert from m (a climbing rope being 50 m) and start to use feet to state distance and length of rope required/remaining on a pitch. Happily, though not exact, multiplying by 3 sufficed in this instance.
It remains common in France to request in a shop or market stall ‘une livre’ aka 1 lb, when you require a little less than half a kg. The weight and price are of course costed on a kg basis.
Using different measures should not matter, as long as there is a common and agreed means to compare, for example pence/100g and pence/kg for larger items. This can be in the small print, while the large print can be in lb.
Simple and everyone is accommodated.
Yet such comparisons are not possible today, even in a fully metric environment. The same products in a single supermarket, say apples of different types, can have very different comparator units, pence/100g, pence per apple, pence per kg, pence per pack of 4 (or pence for 450 g), making it impossible for the shopper to compare easily.
So perhaps the resolution is to ensure adequate and simple comparator units in the small print for those who need/wish to compare the price and otherwise the headline unit can be whatever fits the culture.
“une livre” (aka 500 g) was a legal in France between 1812 and 1837 for the retail trade where it was also known as “une livre metrique” (as opposed to “une livre du roi” (aka 489 g or une livre du duc” (aka: depends who the local duke was) or “une livre de magazin” (Before 1789, every shopkeeper in France had their own system of weights and measures, sometime two, depending on whether they were buying or selling).
My favourite idiosyncrasy of how we do things in the UK: we measure road distances in miles, sell petrol by the litre, and universally see fuel-consumption figures given in … miles per gallon.
We are a very silly country.
Fortunately we will all soon be using kWh per mile which will be much simpler….oh wait.
Why not allow everyone to adjust the level of nostalgia to their favorite stage of industrialisation? Kilowatt-hours, gasoline gallon equivalent, British thermal units, horsepower-hours, or, for the purists, foot-pound force.
If you don’t mind dealing with very large numbers, you can also adjust the length unit for extra cuteness: horsepower-hours per barleycorn, or foot-pound force per hand.
But hang on… if we used foot-pound force per foot, would the two foot (feet?) cancel out? Yes, they would. Fuel consumption has the same unit dimension as mechanical force. Thus, the most English unit of transport efficiency surely must be Newton!
(Though for these purposes fewer Newton are considered better, and I don’t know how English that is.)
(Also, Newton is a metric unit.)
Hmm…
While you’re correct to say that the Newton is a “metric” unit (I think it might be more accurate to define it as an “SI Unit”) I’ve always considered it to be one of the weaker examples, mainly because it is derived and not one of the seven base units (time, length, mass, current, temperature, molecular count and luminosity).
But for me the whole SI thing broke down with the adoption of the second as the unit of time (originally defined as 1/86400 of the length of a day).
This is because the original definition of the base units had more structure to them. The metre was defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. The kilogram was defined as the weight of one thousand cubic centimetres [derivation of distance] of pure water at four degrees centigrade (OK, the 4 degrees elements was a bit of an odd one – it is the point at which pure water achieved maximum density).
But time – and hence the Newton, which is in part derived from it – strays away from that powers-of-ten purity. Arguably, there are some good reasons for this… If the same principle had been applied to time as was given to distance (i.e. divide an arbitrary value by something that is a power-of-ten) then we would have a day with either 10 hours (which feels like it would lack granularity) or 100 (in which case an hour would last just under 15 of our current minutes) and that is subjectively a bit short.
I brought us on this journey out into the weeds specifically to call out the example of time and the wisdom of adopting the second as the unit (and then conveniently “forgetting” that minutes are made of 60 seconds and not 10, hours of 60 minutes (ditto) and days of 24 hours (ditto).
Well, that and the fact that “the metric system”, developed by the French in the 18th century (1793 if memory serves), means “pertaining to the metre”. Perhaps the second remains a bit abstract in that sense given that measuring time in units of distance seems a little bit contrived.
Yes, yes, I’ll see myself out…
For what it’s worth: the SI gets around this perceived weakness by having the second as the unit of time, but not actually including hours or days or anything else at all. The proper SI units for increasingly large quantities of time are the kilosecond (ks), megasecond (Ms), gigasecond (Gs), etc. The SI second is conveniently the same period of time as a ‘normal’ second but loses the associated baggage.
From what I recall they did actually try and introduce “Decimal Time” during the French Revolution, but nobody used it so they gave up.
You don’t see kiloseconds in the wild very often, but for example X-ray astronomers will calculate their telescope exposures (“integrations”) in kiloseconds – one kilosecond is about 16 minutes; 100 kiloseconds is approaching 28 hours.
These days, the second is based very precisely on radiation emitted by a caesium atom, the meter on how far light travels in one second, and the kilogram by reference to Planck constant (which has units of “kilogram meters squared per second”). So they are all fixed by measurements of fundamental properties of matter, not the somewhat arbitrary standards that were originally used in France.
But we are straying far from the Metric Martyrs.
Or even measure by Chaucer’s “furlong wey or two”, the length of time needed to walk a furlong or two.
I am going to be pedandic – “newton” should start with a lower case “n” because it is a common noun (like “mile”) rather than a proper noun. The symbol “N” for “Newton” however starts with an upper-case “N” because it is named after a person.
When I was a child in the Netherlands I used to go with my mother and my grandmother to the butcher, where they would ask for a pound of this and so many ounces of that. But those pounds and ounces were worth 500 g. and 100 g. respectively, as they had been since somewhere in the 19th century.
Such things are becoming increasingly rare as people buy their food in the supermarket instead of at the butcher’s or the baker’s. But my cousin who has a stall in the market is still perfectly happy to sell you three ounces of peanuts, if that’s what it pleases you to ask for.
As I recall in the early 70s both knitting wools and needles went to metric measurements, and I for one have no trouble buying 50g of wool instead of a similar number of oz. I also prefer metric sized needles – I know how thick 4mm needles are. I happen to know that the old pre-metric size was an 8, but 8 what? As far as I recall dressmaking fabrics were still made on the same looms, so the yard measurements were just converted to the nearest metric equivalent. It really wasn’t/ isn’t a problem.
BTW I am twenty years older than you, and have no desire to go back to the old measurements, and would happily scrap miles and pints too.
“I find the whole thing very confusing – coffee is generally packed as 225g. Would it be such a problem if it was 250g?”
More likely now to be packaged as 200g but for the same price!
This is the kind of nuanced, dispassionate commentary that is sorely missing in most public discourse. On the one hand we have the ‘kipper types’ cleaving to symbols of an imagined purity of national identity. On the other we have the sneering professional/managerial class reflexively dismissing all such notions. In the middle there are intelligent observations like ‘Weights and measures – like currencies – are both instruments and ornaments’. Enjoyed this piece very much!
An interesting post, and I am pleased to learn that such a subject can generate complex law.
The minor foolishness of some of our politicians wastes time and is just intended to distract. Their pronouncements are indeed “lore and culture” and “nostalgia and sentiment” and just show how stupid they are. Has Mr Rees-Mogg who “likes” Imperial units though of the issues of prescribing for a baby in minims, or of designing a bridge using feet and pounds?
The major craziness is in some national cultures, notably the USA. I cannot fathom (sorry – 1.828 m.) why that culture needs to persist with temperature in degrees Fahrenheit, and horsepower in foot-pounds per second. It is all very well if they use these just at home, but when my American friends send me a document on USA sized paper, my printer just feels sick. For international interaction, please use international standards!
Rees-Mogg would pay for his bridge in groats (or possibly goats).
I think for weights at the grocer’s stall there may also gave been an element of handiness. Probably the wrong word, my meaning is how easily something could be held in or by the hand until it was too big or too uncomfortable. Most food shopping is done by women, who have smaller hands than men and they need to buy items in a manageable size and/or weight. Some metric measures just look or feel too big to easily pick up and carry. Litre glasses are also larger and heavier than pint glasses, which makes having a drink at the pub physically uncomfortable. Peter Hitchens wrote an article pointing out the historic correlation between ‘Imperial’ weights and measures and the human body, which was really interesting. In conclusion, some of the prejudice against metric weights and measures may be related to unexpressed/poorly understood ergonomic discomfort.
It’s not often that you see Peter Hitchens and interesting in the same sentence.
I know people who insist on quoting temperatures in Fahrenheit.
It is a well known fact that everyone on the Continent has been unable to feed themselves because they use metric measures, and therefore have been unable to choose fruit at the market. Not sure even Rees Mogg or the ubiquitous Hitchens can really believe that imperial measure are intrinsically better than metric.
Hitchens never asked himself if the rest of the world was suffering some strange metric dysmorphia, and of course they don’t.
Cans aren’t made only in one-litre sizes. Beer comes in half or quarter litres, and the glasses are just as graspable as a pint. Nobody has to buy a kg bag of potatoes, or rice, or Brussels sprouts, if it’s too big, or not big enough.
Tl;dr Hitchens, again, is not even wrong.
Having both drunk beer and also witnessed butchers’ counters in metric Italy, the simple answer is that these activities are done in the shocking measures of “half litres” – a handful of millilitres less than a pint, therefore equally if not more graspable; and “hectograms” – 100g gradations that are apparently a little short of quarter of a pound.
So if anybody’s concern was that their “smaller female hands” were going to have trouble with metric units, then they were completely the opposite of in the right.
(And in fact, a large proportion of the ‘pint glasses’ you can buy in supermarkets and homewares shops in the UK are actually imported from abroad and therefore half-litre glasses, and barely anybody notices.)
Goodness, I have been going to Italy, on and off, for nearly 40 years, and have now discovered why you order things in etti or units of 100g (or a handful to Mr Hitchens). An etto is a word derived from a hectogramme. Who knew – apart from everyone bar me.
My day is made.
The temptation to see this as nothing more than a distraction by the current administration (stoke up a bit of nationalism for the party faithful) is definitely there, but at the same time it is worth acknowledging that everything we count and measure has a significant impact on our lives.
The way we measure time in fractions of a day (hours) dictates how many hours each week that many of us are required to work. The way that we count days in the week determines how many days we have to work and how many we are allowed to rest.
OK, so looking at a bag of carrots on a market stall and making the conceptual connection to the working week might be a bit of a stretch, but it is all down to measurement.
Which, when you are a government minister, translates to another opportunity for sleight-of-hand.
Litre glasses? Yes, I’ve seen them at German beer festivals.But the normal measures for beer in continental Europe are 33 or at most 50 cl. Nobody is stopping you buying 500 g or “une livre” of potatoes either.
Regulating weights and measures has been a core function of government since civilisation began. And the laws don’t have to be obscure. See, for example, Leviticus 19:35-6.
*have not gave. Can we have an edit function?
Seconded!
Thirded etc., ad ∞
As an engineer I regularly make use of SI units based on MKS (cgs). The system is rationalised against known physical constants. At most beyond multiplying or dividing by 10 or a power thereof I might have to make use of a PI or 2, or 4. If I had to use Imperial/American units I would have to fill my head with with another set of irrational factors and buy three more sets of spanners. Thanks but no thanks.
It is all utter tosh. Designed to appeal to the less bright, appear to be “taking back control” and to take attention from other things.
As someone else has said already, if you are in France, you quite often order stuff in “livres”. Je voudrais un livre et demi de cote de veau, svp. And you will get about 750g of veal. I dare say if draft beer was sold in half litres, we would still order a pint of it. And no grocer in the UK, ever since his or her scales were calibrated in kilos, has refused to sell anyone two pounds of onions.
Anyway, that is my 2 cwt of comment. (Has anyone else noticed Judge Laws hilarious name, etc, etc, etc. )
It is a great shame that no government of ours in the last fifty years at least has had the strength to bite the bullet and finish off the job of metrication. Instead, we’ve gone (more than) halfway, and are left with an utter mess.
The process of decimalization of our monetary system was a textbook example of excellent project management. Who would now reverse it? If a similar programme were now applied to the remaining imperial weights and measures in use, in a decade we would be free!
At a recent family gathering my sons (in their late twenties) took extreme pleasure (to the point of teary hilarity) in having me explain pounds, shillings and pence to them. Mentioning the LSD acronym was the icing….
I thought you were older, the good news for you is that you are not!
Thank you very much for highlighting my thread and book David! Really great to have you explain some of the legal context surrounding the Metric Martyrs case. It’s something I wish I’d dug into more for Beyond Measure itself, but given the span of the book is, nominally, the entire history of measurement as a civilizational practice, some cuts had to be made, even for very important bunches of bananas. For any readers interested in finding out more, I hope you don’t mind me dropping in a quick plug on where to buy the thing: https://linktr.ee/BeyondMeasureBook
A ‘return’ to Imperial or customary units is, of course, merely a piece of political fluff designed to distract from partygate, rewriting the ministerial code etc and appealing to a section of the public that will believe this about taking back control.
In practical terms it either means nothing or actually causes problems. Anyone recall the failed Mars mission due to metric/imperial conversion of dynamic thrust units for its positioning rockets?
All part and parcel of this Government’s tendency to float silly ideas with no real basis. A post-truth Government in fact.
You appear to have neglected the opportunity to mention Magna Carta.
Which, after Brexit, should presumably be rebranded Great Charter. (But not ‘the’ Great Charter.)
It surely shouldn’t be necessary here of all places to point out that in Latin, as in Russian, the definite or indefinite article is a deep grammar concept which is not expressed verbally.
The brouhaha about “reviving” imperial measurements is (a) a non issue and (b) a ridiculous distraction. Perhaps that is the point. Dead cat, much? I suspect we are going to get rather more dog whistles of this nature while this government stumbles on, looking for a purpose.
Is this topic mentioned at all in places like Australia, that went the full distance on metrication decades ago? The UK has been messing about with permissive metrication since 1864, and yet, some 50 years after the UK tried to metricate and decimalise, we still measure long distances in miles (1.6 km), or buy a pint of beer or milk (about 14% larger than a litre), and if we want a pound of potatoes or apples, that is about 10% smaller than half a kilo. I can multiply inches by 2.5 to get cm and miles by 1.6 to get km. I know a pound is 454g (a kilo is 2.2 pounds), and a pint is 568ml (two pints is 1.1 litres).
As a similar vintage to David, I’m pretty bimodal, although only learned metric at school. I don’t care much what units are used, as long as the price is marked in a manner that is consistent, to allow easy comparison. I’d rather not have to bother with the conversions, or be forced to do multiplication or division in base 12 (inches to feet) or 14 (pounds to stone) or 16 (ounces to pounds, as long as they are avoirdupois not troy).
If we are not allowed to mention Laws LJ, how about some of the other dramatis personae: the long-serving district judge Bruce Morgan. The other judge in the Divisional Court, Sir Peter Crane; like Laws, and the lead appellant Steven Thoburn, also now sadly deceased. The advocate for Sunderland council, Eleanor Sharpston, was later a Advocate General at the ECJ for 14 years up until Brexit. And the advocate for the appellants was Michael Shrimpton. Oh.
Many revolts were based on small changes to everyday measurements or standards. It must be as you say a core human emotion to dislike changing what seems to be natural order by a gated authority – whether it was the king or the government. Money decimalisation has been highly successful. I like others weigh myself in stones and my cakes in grams. Johnson’s appeal is again the European technocrat against the salt of the earth Englishman.
As long as they don’t outlaw metric politicians like Ed Miliband I’m fine with it.
Or metric music from the Glen Milliband, or indeed Steve Milliband.
I saw what you did there!
I suppose Michael Foot was a man of his time
I miss the old imperial politicians like Michael Foot
As you imply, our so-called govt is weaponising “quaint”. Another fine example is the language police of the Parti Quebecois who insist on signs at T-junctions bearing the word “arrêt” (as you might admonish an annoying child) when in France they almost all bear the term, “stop”.
We can all be different, but get along if we are accommodating.
Define yourself by what you are, not by what you are not.
Our s-c g defines itself by incompetence and inflaming distractions.
That reminds me of how the government of Flanders violates the rules about city names in road signs.
The universal rule is that you put the city on the road sign with the name that is used in that city itself. I don’t know if this is a legal rule, but it’s definitely a rule used everywhere I’m aware of, much to the convenience of foreign travellers who can avoid learning what city X is called in language Y. But in Flanders they resolutely refuse to use the French names of cities that also have a Dutch name. So if you drive from Rotterdam to the formerly Dutch-speaking city of Lille, in the Netherlands, Wallonia, and France the signs will say “Lille”, but for a bit inbetween they will say “Rijssel”. Good luck figuring that one out if you don’t speak Dutch (or even if you do).
The admonition to the infantry is ‘Arrête!’ (or ‘Arrêtez!’ if to infants in the plural).
‘Arrêt’ is a noun: a halt or a stop.
David
Thanks for a very informative post.
I am sure you must have harrumphed at para 62 of the Thoburn judgement. When the judge enumerates some examples of constitutional statutes, there’s a real shocker in the way he refers to a certain statute of 1215.
A single measurement system is undoubtedly the best option for simplicity and market efficiency. The UK started the metrication process in the 19th century. As a retired weights and measures inspector who started work in 1980, metrication has been rumbling on throughout my career. The unfortunate reality is that any measurement system is very “sticky” which has left us with a strange hybrid of two systems. The current arrangement of mandatory metric measurement together with optional Imperial conversions seems like a sensible compromise. Changes will add confusion and costs for no benefit.
*breach
Contrary to the prevailing view in the UK, people on mainland Europe think it is the British who are far more obsessed with paperwork and nit-picking rules than the EU and the countries within it. Put another way, the European view tends to be that the seriousness of both the paperwork and enforcement for a given issue should reflect the (somewhat) objective need for said issue to be taken seriously.
In contrast, the British are historically viewed (from Europe) as a country both obsessed with the minutiae of rules, and (at least since the Thatcher years) as somewhere where the degree of regulation and enforcement applied to an issue is not proportionate, but largely depends on whether something has recently tracked across the radar of British politicians and (even more so) the UK tabloid press.
So – if you’d asked someone in Europe about laws barring sales in non-metric units the answer you’d likely have got is that “they exist for cross-border and bulk trade…”
“…but only the British would be so *ridicule* as to use this to prosecute some poor fellow selling potatoes to elderly ladies in a street market”.
Somewhat analogously, anyone who crosses a border into France is aware that there are all sorts of documents that under French law they *can* ask you for, but never do.
There is a problem if regulations are not adhered to. Those who breech regs gain a competitive advantage over those who comply.
In the case of weight indications, those who display prices in imperial unit prices gain an advantage over those displaying metric prices. I’m not saying it’s the crime of the century, but letting these things go makes a mockery of the controls and those who abide by them. We effectively allow traders with lower standards to push out traders with higher standards.
I’m not sure it’s always advantage imperial – e.g. milk sold in 2 litre bottles (which is commonplace here in independent shops and also the likes of Costcutter and Poundland) is less milk than a 4 pint bottle – but a common story (which James’s book may or may not debunk) is that metrication had been somewhat stalled in the mid 1970s due to the financial crisis and then the whole system of gentlemen’s agreements with industry started falling apart when one of the main carpet retailers switched back to selling by imperial because a square yard is less than a square metre but a public who had absorbed a campaign saying they are about the same would not realise the price trick.
True. Historically the UK was always most inclined to gold plate EU directives when they were transposed. (And transposed through regulations, not through Acts of Parliament as elsewhere!) And the UK was one of the countries most rigid about enforcement.*
* This is also my theory about Partygate: The Tories thought that that was OK because they assumed everyone else would ignore the rules a certain % of the time too. So they got trounced when the puritans and the liars seized the moral high ground by insisting that they obeyed the Covid regulations to the letter.
You’re not wrong. Boris is a cheating liar, and has surrounded himself with the same, and so assumed everyone else is too. And the rules are for the little people anyway.
[A reply not to, but inspired by, Dr Aust.]
Can we have an italicising and emboldening function, please?
I think you do
Miles and yards, perhaps.
But – seriously – rods, poles and perches?
How else would you catch fish?
Allotments are still measured in poles and perches – really threw me when I saw that, even when I learnt them at school in the 60s they were barely used!
The Conservatives need to apologise for and explain away the six year delay behind this policy
To be able to fully restore halcyon times pounds shillings and pence need to be restored alongside.
I could then bet you a tanner that you will not be getting a full pint in your can of lager.
A reintroduction of traditional pub opening and closing times is also much needed.
Some of us can remember the distinction between public and private bars with working men in their dirty shoes able to to buy the same beer for a penny a pint less in a women free environment.
Is the continued denial of our past customs a betrayal of Brexit itself ?
There is also that historic gem from Harold Wilson. Having devalued sterling he then in all sincerity told people that the pound in their pockets would be just the same.
Many people were daft enough to believe Wilson then but are people daft enough to believe Johnson now ?
Can of lager? Only Yanks drink beer in cans (I was told by my father in about 1955).
My sister who was living in Stuttgart in the mid-1960s, tells me that local people still asked for ‘ein Pfund Äpfel’ in the market 100 years after metrication in Germany.
And we still do, with no hint of an zealous inspectorate itching to collar us. Our bananas are bent or straight as they come, our fish sadly is more likely now to come with “Pommes” (French fries) than proper chips, and there is a sad befuddlement when looking across the Ärmelkanal at what odd paroxysms the formerly sensible & fun English have got themselves caught up in. After that we forget about this & go back to worrying about the AfD…
My mother-in-law, an 83 year old lady from Cologne, still asks for “ein Pfund” another 60 years later.
In 1963 I was walking along a semi-rural lane near Koblenz and spotted an almost overgrown milestone. It gave the distance of a place whose name I have forgotten in “Meilen”. I couldn’t tell whether it dated from pre-metric Germany or from the Allied occupation.
And presumably when they did they got half a kilo…
How much does a dead cat weigh? and is the species facing extinction seeing as how many cats have died at the hands of this Government!
Perhaps my favourite aspect of any imperial vs metric measurement discussions, is that the current imperial units are defined with metric.
There isn’t a prototype yard, it’s defined as 0.9144 metres exactly. There isn’t a prototype pound, that’s 0.45359237 Kg, etc.
Thank you for this post on a fascinating topic.
On the verge of the sack from my weekend job for giving the wrong change in the £sd system, I thanked my lucky stars for decimalisation. My older colleague felt the opposite, but rather undermined her claim by pretending that multiplication and division by ten was impossibly difficult. Some people just like to rail against change, even when it makes their life easier.
I suspect if you’d had to suffer the old currency system, you might have been a bit less understanding of the metric martyrs.
There was nothing preventing them, of course, in inviting their customers to order in pounds, and to get their goods in pounds.
Their main infringement, in addition to the price labelling issue, was in refusing to use scales calibrated in the metric system. In getting their 454g’s worth, their customers would ironically have had greater assurance of accuracy…
Oddly enough, there was a later case of a publican pursued, but ultimately not prosecuted, for selling beer, contrary to UK law, in half litres instead of pints.
In a different, but related, field, in moving over to drive on the right, Sweden had initially held a referendum which unsurprisingly rejected the move. It took honest and factual discussion to prepare the final decision which, with no referendum, led to a changeover with little sign of martyrdom.
The absence of public discussion and preparation, rather common under our ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ system, was found to be a major cause of metrication stalling in Britain.
This whiffs of a Boris wheeze designed to last for the Jubilee weekend. I hope this is not anything like a serious notion, just another waste of time and money. Cue much cheering and Imperial glass raising at the Spoons and the delightful Mr Farage grinning on the telly.
Just to amuse, computer chips usually have their pins or connections spaced at submultiples of an inch. Older chips at 0.1 inch, more modern at 0.05 inch. The Americans made/make the rules. Although just to confuse, some chips prefer 0.5 or 0.8mm. Your smartphone is very confused as to whether it is a metric or an imperial device.
Being a generation older than yourself, I missed learning the metric system at school. So I should be a prime candidate for this desperate nonsense, but am not. I’m appreciative of having learned the predecimal systems, which were always taught with a greater emphasis on fractions, so that I seem to have more facility with switching backwards and forwards between fractions and decimals in calculations that are harder in decimals alone – but that’s it. The only thing I regularly miss is being able to compare temperatures today with temperatures in my childhood, to have more of a feel for how global warming is messing things up. I know just how unusual a temperature of 80 was in my childhood, and how unusual a temperature of 30 is now – but how do they compare? And having written that down I shall now fix the problem by finally getting round to listing some equivalents (the actual conversion is too painful to become instinctive).
Double and add 30, it’s close enough to make the comparison!
I notice that Celsius is hardly mentioned. Perhaps that is because the 100 (roughly) degrees between ice and steam is widely understood.
Key is that there is an explicit or implied contract to use agreed measures. So I know that if I am doing 130 (kph) on the motorway I am speeding in UK but not here in France. An advantage of mediaeval towns here was the common local weights and measures. A disadvantage of having to convert things is that if you get it wrong it can be costly. (Someone lost an expensive satellite because a measurement had not been transferred from inches to cm. )
Despite being a fan of SI units and habituated to a decimal world, I am sure its OK to use other measures locally (subject to the above). But I fail to understand, at all, what the utility of all this is, other than its relationship to a Norwegian Blue feline. Unless it’s all a scheme to illustrate that this is the best Brexit Benefit we shall see, so we must get over it.
The full that required a space shuttle mission to fix the Hubble telescope was of that nature.
Sorry, fat fingers, that should have read “The fault that …”
NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter – a $330m plus program – was lost in 1999 due to one software package outputting data in pound-force seconds, and a second piece of software using those same numbers as inputs but expecting newton seconds. (The second was in accordance with the design specification, but the first was not.)
As I understand it, the spherical aberration of the HST’s primary mirror (the wrong shape by a few microns, which is a country mile by the expected accuracy) was due to a faulty bespoke testing device, with one element misaligned by a millimeter or so. But I’d not heard that was due to an imperial versus metric SNAFU. At least it could be fixed with some corrective optics, but without the Space Shuttle, a servicing mission would be almost impossible now. Touch wood, the JWST seems to be almost perfect.
Chapter and verse about the HST error here – https://sma.nasa.gov/docs/default-source/safety-messages/safetymessage-2011-07-10-hstopticalsystemsfailure-vits.pdf
Chipped non-reflective paint, the insertion of washers, failure to tell anyone, disbelief of supposedly less accurate measurements, and a culture of secrecy.
About as banal as the frozen O-rings that led to the Challenger crash.
Another “unit conversion” error, which nearly ended in tragedy, was the famous “Gimli Glider” incident. A Boeing 767 ran out of fuel because it had been refuelled using Imperial units instead of the required metric units. In 1983 Canadian aviation was in the process of converting to metric units. Most aircraft were still instrumented to show fuel weight in pounds but the then new Boeing 767 aircraft ordered by Air Canada were built to use the metric system. When refuelling the flight crew work out how much weight of fuel is required for the flight then need to convert that to a volume in litres to be pumped onboard. To complicate things the aircraft’s computerised fuel quantity system had failed and they had to measure the amount of fuel onboard using dripsticks, an inverted dipstick installed in the aircraft fuel tanks as a backup, calibrated in litres. The Air Canada crew asked the refueller for the fuel density figure (which varies with fuel temperature) and were given a number in the still usual lb/litre, not the kg/litre they needed. Using this figure, they worked out how much additional fuel they needed, converted that using the same incorrect density figure to litres and gave that number as the amount to be pumped. With blank fuel quantity displays the crew had no way to verify the fuel weight was correct and no means of reading how much was left during the flight. So the aircraft took off with 22,300 lbs of fuel instead of the required 22,300 kg and ran out of fuel en route. Luckily the Captain was an experienced glider pilot and they were within gliding distance of a disused runway at Gimli and they were able to land safely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
Like many accidents and incidents, this sort of thing was not really the result of a single point of failure: it is easy to blame unit conversion, but it can only result in a serious problem when other errors all happened at once or in series. Broken dials, maintenance not done, mistaken assumptions, and errors by engineers and the flight crew.
Leaving out the HST – which illustrates another series of failures, but not problems with units – it is notable that we are talking about one satellite from 1999 and one aeroplane flight from 1983. That suggests that problems with unit conversions are rarely catastrophic, and the error usually gets picked up somewhere along the way. Systems thinking and resilience are often more important than improving efficiency of individual parts of a process.
Thanks for this post. As your post points out the laws that led to the prosecutions and resulted in supposed Metric Martyrs were self imposed British laws and had nothing much to do with being in the EU.
I watched Mark Francois MP interviewed on Good Morning Britain today and he outright lied that it was the EU that forced the laws and prosecutions.
Given the the Scruple was an old unit of measurement it seems we desperately need these to come back.
As usual, it is this government’s currency to wind the rest of us up in order to appeal to its base.
You could call it shilling.
Thanks, a good sidelight on the fatuousness, pointlessness and wastefulness of this policy announcement from a government running on empty. What next? The return of pounds, shillings and pence. Why not farthings and groats?
My two penn’orth of trivia, gleaned when I was the Decimalisation Training Officer for a local authority in 1971: the first decimal coins dated from an abandoned attempt to decimalise the currency in the 19th century. Namely the florin — 2s, or a tenth of a pound.
Apart from farthings, ha’pennies & groats… It was always my understanding that, amongst folk of quality (like lawyers?) fees were always payable in Guineas. I like to quiz my students at the University now and again to see if anyone has even heard of the fabled guinea…
They certainly will have if the follow the sport of Kings or they frequent “turf accountants”. Two classic races use the old coin’s name and Racehorses are still auctioned in guineas, apparently.
I suspect the cachet associated with professional fees – barristers, doctors, etc – being set in guineas (21 shillings, or £1.05 for anyone who is confused) died out in the period after decimalisation. I’ve never seen an instance of it in the last 20 or 30 years, but perhaps it persists in some places for old time’s stake.
But horses are still sold in guineas. For example, see conditions 3 and 4 here. https://www.tattersalls.com/uploads/general/conditionsofsale.pdf
These auctioneers typically charge a 5% fee, so (ignoring VAT) the seller gets the £1 and the auctioneer keeps the 5p.
Fortunately the Government is not proposing to restore 20 shillings and 240 pence to the pound (nor yet the groat), but will conservative Brexiters really welcome a return to the British Imperial system under which the traditional system of weight is based on (lest we forget) the … “avoirdupois” (!) pound?
A system of weights based on a pound of 16 ounces – or 7,000 grains or 256 drams of 27.344 grains each, or 16 ounces of 437 1/2 grains each – will be a nightmare for children and teachers alike.
Here are some genuine examples of mental arithmetic from 1960 (for pupils aged 10):
– How many 1/4 lb. packets of tea could be made from 3/4 cwt. of tea?
– 1 gill of milk equals 4 oz. Find the weight of 2 gal.
– Potatoes average 5 to the lb. How many in 2 st. of potatoes?
– If 1 st. of potatoes costs 2s. 4d. Find the cost of 21 lb.
I rest my case.
I seriously doubt Johnson is proposing a return to official use of Imperial units in place of metric ones. I suspect it will merely permit people to sell loose goods in Imperial measurements if they wish. Anything more radical might please Jacob Rees-Mogg but will cause even more costs of living to be absorbed as producers transfer back to Imperial idiocy.
I did them all in my head. The cost of a time-machine was omitted from the calculation about 21 lb of potatoes. 2/4 a stone! Ye gods!
When I go to the builders merchants, like most others, I ask for, say, 3 metres of 4×2 and I get 3 metres of 100×50. What’s the problem?
You are obviously buying unplanned wood. If you are buying planned wood, you will get 95 x 47 mm timber. The old UK law allowed the timber merchant to measure the wood BEFORE planning it, to keep the shavings and to charge you for them. EU rules demanded that the timber merchant state the size of the timber that he ACTUALLY DELIVERED to you.
Prior to the United Kingdom metricating in 1971, the British Architectural Journal brought out a book in 1968 called the AJ Metric Handbook. This was a very detailed book covering all possible aspects of metrication for the architectural and allied professions. IMHO it was a masterpiece and led the English speaking world (we won’t include the Americans here) in converting to the metric system. Subsequent editions where brought out over the years given its popularity.
Certainly, in South Africa, when it also arrived, metrication was complete, from currency, to dimensions, to weights, to volumes, to areas, etc. There was no going back to the Imperial System. The one possible exception was for surf boards, which were and are still classified in feet and inches. (Surfers are sometimes slow in catching on!)
However, in the United Kingdom, metrication was seemingly adopted in a very half heartily manner with a mixture of metric and imperial terms used, and to this day, as I understand, this is still the situation. British exceptionalism?
Perhaps this ongoing half pregnant approach is partially the reason why there are still certain parties wanting to revert back to the Imperial System when the majority of the world (other than for the American Exceptionalists) have embraced and adopted metrication. Britain sees itself as a trading nation and surely to best do that you need to use the measures that your clients do.
Perhaps someone else can best explain this phenomenon.
If I understand correctly the problem in the UK was the lack of compulsory powers for the Metrication Board (or whatever the title was) compared to overseas counterparts, combined with the mid 1970s economic crisis making postponing completing metrication an easy saving with the result that as time dragged on the dual usage became set in. As noted above there’s a tale of a leading carpet retailer reverting to pricing by the square yard and when they got away with it other retailers felt no obligation to change over (if they hadn’t already) or retain metric if imperial could be more profitable.
Many people who would be the last to be found in an anti-metric campaign often look at me strangely when I give my height in metres. Some measurements are just so ingrained in the culture that it will take a major effort to get everyone to switch over in their heads and nobody has wanted to do that. Nor have successive Transport Secretaries wanted to spend their limited budgets on repainting every road sign in the country.
My personal metrication journey began in 1966 when I started at secondary school. Everything at primary school had been taught in traditional units, and I knew the many unit conversion factors. From then on everything mathematical or scientific would be taught using SI units, with some MKS thrown in. I much preferred it to be honest, so much simpler. Then when I got to Uni we were taught to use so called Engineering Units (in both Imperial and metric flavours), which was a form of mental torture. I can easily cope with either Imperial or metric units, but the mere thought of engineering units brings me out in a cold sweat.
When the metrication board was set up in 1968 the changeover was supposed to be completed by 1975. 47 years on people are still resisting it. Like so much of Brexit, this is all about nostalgia for a distant past, not practical measures to benefit people. A pointless distraction, the timing of which is all too transparently obvious.
I was brought up in South Africa and completed my honours degree in 1969. In 1974/5 I enrolled at UMIST to do an MSc. The apparatus that I was given was designed in imperial units, but I told my supervisor that I would be using SI. He reluctantly agreed. By 1980, I had left South Africa and settled in the UK and had a contract at the Newcastle and Gateshead Water Company. While I was there, I converted their displays of reservoir levels from feet and decimals of a foot to metric units.
The silliest one I am aware of is lead sheet for roofing: the metrication gurus baulked at a true arithmetical conversion of 8lbs/sq ft, so we buy metric Code 8 lead instead!
The silliest imperial unit that I have heard of is the way in which petroleum engineers quoted the content of an oilfield. The units that they use are barrels per acre-foot (the “foot” part being the thickness of the oil-bearing strata. When this is converted to consistent dimensions, one gets a dimensionless number, so one could express the oil content as a percentage of the rock in the strata (regardless of whether one uses metric or imperial units).
Fantastic article.
I look forward to looking forwards 22 years when the Daily Mash is propagandering for us 40 year olds over the everyday use of ‘trash can’, ‘sunscreen’ and ‘going to the movies’ rather than the proper olde English.
Hopefully by then there will be some legalese on my side but I fear that YouTube will have better lawyers… sorry attorney’s
Few have mentioned the cultural significance. Weights and measure are part of our culture just as our national flag and anthem – two more National emblems the EU have sort to supplant. The whole EU ethos is the suppression of national identities. The Metric Martyrs are all due a pardon.
But it’s another cut. Just like the trade deals soon to be announced with a few US states, not significant on their own, but taken as a whole we’ll get to the ‘death by a thousand cuts’: the dream of ever rejoining the EU will be dead.
Well, congratulations: the cultural significance for a lot of us these days is that pounds and ounces have gone from “oh, the weird old units people in this country used to use” to a hated emblem of the wilfully ignorant culture-war attitude behind a lot of pro-Brexit sentiment – a project which is hugely unpopular with people under the age of 40. Which is precisely the way to make sure retailers don’t go out of their way to adopt Imperial for everyday use.
To suggest the so-called “Metric Martyrs” are due a pardon you presumably know what offence they should be pardoned for…?
That’s because there is no cultural significance. It’s just nostalgia for a time when Britannia ruled the waves. Reverting to Imperial measures will not bring that time back.
Britain was firmly on the path of metrication years before we joined the EEC. The EU never sought to supplant the British flag or anthem, nor is suppressing national identity central to it’s ethos.
We can’t make trade deals with individual US states. The only meaningful US trade deal is with the Federal Government. And that won’t be brought any closer by reverting to Imperial units. A retrograde and potentially very expensive exercise. It wouldn’t even make rejoining the EU impossible.
I remember many years ago giving my weight to my obstetrcican in Canada in stone and pounds, to which he replied “What size stones are we talking about here?”
A pity this Cabinet aren’t minded of:
“Please to put a penny in the old man’s hat.
If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do,
If you haven’t got a ha’penny, a farthing will do,
If you haven’t got a farthing, God bless you!”
I don’t want to go back to LSD as metric is far easier but older money was beautiful – farthings with a wren, 12-sided threepenny bits, rusty-red ten shilling notes, crispy green pound notes. You could buy a whole sweet with a farthing!