Imperial units: do we want them back?
Many people responded with understandable cynicism last week, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph, when the Government launched a review to restore the rights of imperial measurements against metric ones. But even if the move was just an attempt to distract attention from Boris Johnson’s political travails, it addresses a legitimate issue. The fact is, many Britons have never warmed to the metric system, first introduced here in 1965, and would be happy to see greater use of the imperial one. These ancient measurements are easier to relate to: you can see where feet and stone came from, and “understand why an acre (meaning ‘field’) arose from how much an ox-drawn plough could manage in a day”. For some internationally traded goods – medical equipment, say, or precision tools – conforming to common measures makes sense. But, generally, we should enable people to use whichever system they feel comfortable with.
There is a long history of anti-metric feeling in Britain, said James Vincent in The Guardian. From the moment the French intellectual elite finalised the system in the 1790s, defining the metre as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, it was regarded as being “overly complex, unnatural… and – worst of all – foreign”. An editorial in The Times in 1863 warned that adopting the system here would fill every household in the land with “perplexity, confusion and shame”.
Although Britain is now officially a metric country (only the US, Myanmar and Liberia haven’t adopted the system), it has yet to relinquish many imperial measures, said Kit Yates on The Independent. We still drive miles, drink pints; measure our height in feet, our weight in stones. And it’s still legal to price goods in pounds and ounces, as long as the price in grams and kilograms is displayed alongside it. So it’s unclear what the consultation hopes to achieve. A wholesale switch back to imperial would be costly and time-consuming, and would complicate trade – which is the last thing we need. This cause may play well with nostalgists, but the truth is that “imperial units are yet another ‘Brexit benefit’ we can do without”.