Inner Thought

Despite the media hype of recent weeks, the EU is not going to withdraw metric from the UK. Here in the UK the law requires all traders to use metric for pricing and measuring goods being sold, the only exception being pints for milk delivered to homes in glass bottles and beer and cider sold in pubs on draught. Bottled beers and ciders must be metric, all loose foods, e.g. fruit, veg, must be metric and all packaged goods have required to be metric for many years. I remember the metric sizes on packaging back in the 1970s.

Traders such as grocers may price their goods using a per kg price with a supplementary per lb price. The EU has been requiring that the UK forbid the per pound supplementary price and have a per kg price only, from 1 Jan 2010. But then someone in the EU decided it would be better to remove the 2010 limit so that supplementary pricing could continue beyond that. As far as I know, the EU has not yet formally made this law, so that at present we are still probably going to have to abandon imperial pricing completely by the end of 2009. And quite rightly so. Why should we cling to these old useless foreign units like pounds?

It is still illegal for traders to price things per lb only, as many do, but local authorities are failing to prosecute these traders, many of whom no doubt are deceiving their customers by making their prices look less. A shop like Tesco might sell tomatoes at £2 per kg, a local trader might sell them at £1 per lb. So which is cheaper? It is hard for consumers to see which is correct. As 1 lb is 454 grams, i.e. 1 kg = 2.2 lb. Thus the price of £1 per lb is actually £2.20 per kg, making the small trader's tomatoes 20 p more expensive, per kg, that those of Tesco. (I made the prices numbers that are easy to deal with, they are not based on actual prices of tomatoes in Tesco).

It is about time that we all went metric and that all trade, without exception, was in metric. Many English-speaking countries went metric decades ago, e.g. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada. And they are not even in Europe, so it is hardly an EU conspiracy to make the UK use the same units as its own Commonwealth countries.

Go metric now, it is the best way for Britain and the world.

There is a strange idea amongst British people that the use of "old units" is somehow essential to their national identity.

People sometimes believe that metric is foreign, yet imperial-lovers feel so patriotic about using "avoirdupois" weights (French) and Fahrenheit temperature (Prussian).

The UK has made many contributions to the modern metric system. The idea for a consistent set of measurement units came from the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in the 1860s, in the form of the metric system. BAAS also proposed the prefixes mega- and micro-. Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Louis Gray, James Joule, James Watt and Lord Kelvin all have metric units named after them.

When I see joules (energy), kilowatts (power), megabytes (something which uses the mega- prefix meaning million), newtons (force) and micrograms (used a lot for medicines, the prefix micro- is used, meaning millionth) I can feel proud of our Great British contribution to the international system of units, aka metric.

Metric is more British than the imperial system. Consider as well that the mile is Roman, the stone is Babylonian and the pint is French. Do we really want to hang on to these foreign units? I would rather use a British-based system like metric any day.