My thanks to Lorelle Young for drawing my attention to the following: FIRST PERSON MICHAEL LE PAGE Let them eat kilos! In the great pantheon of heroes, street market traders tend not to figure prominently, but Steve Thoburn hasn't let this hold him back. In July, police and trading standards officers swooped on his stall in Sunderland in north-east England. They seized the scales he was using to weigh his wares, and he now faces criminal charges. His dastardly deed? Selling vegetables in pounds and ounces instead of in kilograms and grams. The plight of the "metric martyr" is fast becoming a cause c�l�bre in Britain. Tabloid newspapers have seized on his prosecution as an example of bureaucracy gone mad. Even sober broadsheets have denounced the "idiotic zeal" of the officials involved and dismissed the local police chief as a "politically correct" officer with "no common sense". Thoburn's treatment may be a little over the top, but the reason why people are so upset about his case has nothing to do with the relative merits of the metric and imperial systems. No, what's really touched a nerve is that the stalled process of metrication is now being kick-started from across the Channel. How dare the French, having had the cheek to come up with a better system in the first place, now attempt to impose it on Britain through a directive from the European Union? Supporters of Thoburn, including the UK Independence Party, argue that a 1985 Act of Parliament that permits traders to sell goods in pounds and ounces takes precedence over the Brussels directive, under which the use of imperial weights is to be phased out by 2009. They intend to fight the case in the courts. If they succeed, Britain will remain stuck in the no-man's-land between imperial weights and the SI system (as metric measures are more correctly known). The US is in a similar position. Despite being the first country to adopt a metric measure, with the introduction of the dollar in 1792, progress has been distinctly on and off since then. Whichever system of units you prefer, you can't deny that the halfway house where Britain and the US find themselves is an unworkable fudge. Just look at the loss of NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter last year, caused by confusion between pound-seconds and newton-seconds. It's clear that we need to get off the fence and adopt one system or the other. And even amid the reactionary indignation, there's only one way to jump. A survey done several years ago revealed that only Liberia and Burma had no plans to go metric. As for Thoburn, let the authorities make an example of him. Small traders don't deserve much sympathy in my book. Wasn't it the daughter of another such, a certain Margaret Thatcher, who helped create Britain's current mess by abolishing the Metrification Board in 1979? More than 200 years after the metric system was adopted in France, it's definitely time to do ourselves a favour, and finish what the French Revolution started. --From New Scientist, 30 September 2000 -- Metrication information: http://www.metric.org.uk/ UK legislation, EC Directives, Trading Standards links and more
