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.
