Vindicated: The 'Metric Martyr' Steve Thoburn, who died in 2004, insisted on using imperial measures
Posted on 09/11/2007 12:44:53 AM PDT by Stoat
Brussels will today give up the fight to make Britain drop pints, pounds and miles.
The right of Britons to use imperial weights and measures will be enshrined in EU law under plans being announced by the European Commission.
Traditional measures will remain legal "until Kingdom come", the Commissioner responsible for the move told the Daily Mail last night.
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Vindicated: The 'Metric Martyr' Steve Thoburn, who died in 2004, insisted on using imperial measures
The decision was hailed as a victory for the "metric martyrs" and campaigners who have refused to accept successive governments' attempts to abolish measurements dating back to the Middle Ages.
But the European Commission said it had acted merely to "get the Government out of a hole" and claimed it never targeted Britain's well-loved imperial system.
A directive published today will be put to the Council of Ministers to be approved by EU member states within the next few months.
It will confirm the UK's right to carry on using non-metric measures such as the pint, the mile, and pounds and ounces.
But shops and traders will have to stick to current rules which require those using Imperial weights and measures to show their equivalents in metric as well.
British governments have repeatedly asked for delays in implementing the switch to metric agreed by the EU nearly 30 years ago.
The current delay - or derogation - expires in 2009 and it would have become illegal for UK shops to display the imperial measurements after January 1, 2010.
But a consultation by the Commission found that the UK could carry on using imperial measures without harming the single market, which governs trade across the 27-member bloc.
Gunther Verheugen, the Commissioner for the Single Market, told the Mail he was acting to end "myths" that "the EU was banning the pint and that this was part of a wider plot against Britishness".
Mr Verheugen said: "Let's get one thing straight from the off.
"Neither the European Commission nor any faceless 'Eurocrat' has or will ever be responsible for banning the great British pint, the mile, and weight measures in pounds and the ounces.
"These imperial measures form part of the traditions that are the very essence of the Britishness that all Europeans know and love."
He added: "We at the Commission have decided the time has come to nail these myths once and for all by setting out in black and white what has always been our view: that Britain should continue to use imperial measures for as long as it likes.
"Much as it may dismay those who have peddled the metric myth for far too long, we have now proposed legislation enshrining Britain's right to retain pints of milk and beer, miles on road signs and dual indications of weights and measures from now until Kingdom come."
The agreement to switch to metric was signed by the British government in 1980 as part of the preparation for the introduction of the Single Market.
But its implementation came up against determined opposition from campaigners and the public, who showed repeatedly they were unwilling to give up traditional measurements.
At least 15 consumer surveys between 1995 and 2000 found the British people overwhelmingly rejecting metrification.
Brussels granted a series of derogations, and last night claimed that the decision to go metric had actually been taken by a Tory government and supported by its Labour successor.
A Commission spokesman said: "We have thought long and hard about this and rather than getting periodically slagged off we have decided to solve the problem once and for all.
"We are effectively getting the British government out of a hole. And we are happy to do that."
Last night, the widow of Steve Thoburn - nicknamed the Metric Martyr after he was convicted for selling bananas by the pound - demanded he now be pardoned.
The greengrocer, who worked a local market in Sunderland, became a national hero in 2001 when he refused to abandon his old imperial weights in favour of metric measures.
Until his death three years ago from a heart attack ,the 39-year-old father of two fought against the bureaucracy of the European Commission and inspired the Metric Martyrs Movement.
Led by his friend and fellow market trader, Neil Herron, it continued its work in his name and refused to back down despite the threat of legal action. But his criminal conviction remained.
Now, his widow, Leigh, 33, is calling for his name to be cleared.
Mr Thoburn was prosecuted by Sunderland City Council in 2001 for breaching the Weights and Measures Act after selling bananas by the pound. His imperial scales were confiscated and he was given a sixmonth conditional discharge.
Mr Thoburn was one of only four shopkeepers ever prosecuted for using pounds and ounces - an offence which carried fines of up to £5,000.
b.brogan@dailymail.co.uk
PING
Hooray! The metric system is for idiots.
It’s a german strawberry harvester.
Excellent !!!
I hate grams, liters and kilometers. Too French.
Pounds, miles and pints rule the day.
But, having a yard as a basic measure of length doesn't seem all that stupid until you pair that with the Newton, the basic measure of force to get a derived unit for the physical property called pressure. The meter is "too big" and the Newton is "too small" and this creates absurd consequences. In the English system, one atmosphere pressure, a basic necessary quantity is approximately 15 pounds force per square inch. But, because the unit of pressure in the metric system is the Pascal (1 Newton per square meter) you get a bizarre number for just one atmosphere, 101,000,000 Pascals. (101 Mega-pascals).
The implications for engineering of this "little" problem are stupefying. The great downfall of the metric system turned out that real world situations impose "constants" that have to be multiplied into almost every calculation. Gravity, Atmospheric pressure, the Speed of Light are all such constants and they take away the easy multiply by 10 or divide by ten aspect of metric work. Worse, often one synthetic unit forces another synthetic unit to be difficult. The English system grew out of "practical" units growing in popularity for their ease of use.
The ever popular "Furlongs per fortnight" criticism of English units repudiates two units that made sense for horse drawn times but not in modern times, where as miles per hour is quite handy and no one looked back except for the metric mind police. But, the Mega-pascal is a curse to all of engineering as well as its still too small sized companion the Newton per square centimeter. You must use a calculator for all work in these units because you aren't doing it in your head. And thats the base problem. Right sized units help you around the impacts of the physical constants rather than you up against them like shoals. The slug, much maligned as a unit of mass allows the pound mass and pound force to co-exist and saves the mental gymnastics of dealing with this problem in every calculation. The rightsizedness of the pound leads to the rightsizedness of the BTU (British Thermal Unit) which is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of water 1 degree F.
Yes, you have to mulitply by 12 frequently in the English system, but the deep reality of the English system is not 12 but instead 2. At the core of the English system is binary, pints, pounds, ounces, gallons and feet often fit together in relationships of powers of 2. A square foot of water is 8 gallons. A gallon of water is 8 pounds. A pound of water is 16 ounces. And folks used to dealing with binary, find these conversions just as swift as the base 10 relationships that metric was supposed to provide.
You got that right - I have more wrenches than I can count.
Just think what Monty Python could do with material like this.
That was done so that people around the world could have the same length for the metre (meter, in American English), as used everywhere else.
IIRC, the new standard foot is defined in terms of the metre, simply because the definition of the metre is more universally accurate(as in, that wavelengths-of-light measurement is the same wherever it is used as a definition for). Because it borrows from this definition, the foot too becomes just as accurate. But the main point is that the definition in terms of wavelengths was declared to make the measure universal.
BTW,
The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.
;^)
Bucket-wheel excavator. Largest in the world. Built by Krupp (yeah, THAT Krupp).
I just realizes that it's also far easier to measure, cut out a pattern, and sew in English than in metric. I LOATHE metric patterns, can't make head or tails of them. Give me that 5/8" seam allowance every time!
The metric system is for idiots who can’t do simple math.
I actually had a guy claim he didn’t like miles as he had no visual concept of 5280 feet but somehow magically understood the kilometer at 3280 feet.
A funny thing about the metric system: It doesn’t match real-world measurements, such as navigation. Aviation still uses such measurements as knots as it agrees with navigation.
Woo Hoo! Pounds are back!
Thank you for your kind words :-)
Here's a nice piece of cheesecake for you (the ingredients of which were undoubtedly measured using ounces, cups, and teaspoons)
Do I have permission to quote you when arguing with liberals?
I'm honored, and of course you may. However, you may find that people will take you more seriously if you do not tell then that you heard a scruffy stoat say it :-)
((((snicker)))))
LMAO!
My pleasure! :-)
You mean not THIS Krupp?
I think that it's somewhat similar for the stoatmobile, and I've noticed that it doesn't seem to run quite so well after a trip to Canada where the gas pumps are set to liters. There seems to be a visceral rejection of these artificially contrived measurements.
Better be careful the metric folks don’t creep up on us in this country. During the recent tennis matches, the height
and weight of the tennis players was shown in metric
terms.
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