To all,
News from the BWMA. Do NOT enjoy!
Han
Defend your freedom to useBritish weights and measures
Criminal to be British?
>From the end of 1999 it is to be illegal to sell fruit, vegetables, etc.,
priced by the pound. It will be a criminal offence to use our own- weights and
measures for trade in our own country. An ancient freedom will be lost.
Compulsory metrication is undemocratic
The edict already making metric units compulsory for pre-packaged goods, and
those sold by length, was rubber-stamped by Parliament without proper
consultation or debate, against the public's wishes.
Our weights and measures are preferred
Most people, in all age groups, prefer customary weights and measures - overall
74% of us prefer them. Only 7% want metric-only labelling.
Feet and inches, gallons and pints, pounds and ounces are better
They are more practical than metric units for easy division into useful
fractions. They are also more convenient in size for everyday needs.
Part of our heritage
Our weights and measures have been used for centuries in our literature, from
Shakespeare to Roald Dahl. Their loss would further weaken understanding and
appreciation of this inheritance.
Our units are used internationally
Aircraft heights are in feet; computer printers all work in inches. German
plumbers use inches. Few, if any, countries are wholly metric. The U.S.A., with
the world's largest economy, uses our feet and inches, pounds and ounces, and
intends to continue doing so. Why shouldn't we?
Ending compulsory metrication
Many trade associations and chambers of commerce back our call to end
compulsory metrication. So do over 90 MPs of all parties. But it needs more
active public support to get the Government to end compulsion.
Helping to defend freedom
You can help to restore freedom of choice and to save part of our heritage by
joining the British Weights and Measures Association. Tell others about the
campaign by distributing this leaflet (copies sent on request). Write to your
MP and to your local newspaper. The time to speak up is now.
SUPPORT BRITISH WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
Peter Alliss: "Sincere good wishes."
Sir Tim Rice: "More power to your elbow!"
Fritz Spiegl: "I support your aims passionately."
Dick Francis: "May you whole-heartedly succeed."
Sir Ranulph Fiennes: "I approve of your excellent aims."
Bernard Levin: "I have every sympathy with its [the BWMA's] aims."
Sandy Gall: "I should be delighted to be a member of your Association."
Fred Dibnah: In my job as a steeplejack I will always measure everything in
yards, feet and inches."
Christopher Martin-Jenkins: "Feet and inches are miles better and I shall waste
no chance to say and write so."
Edward Fox: "Would not the entire world be wise to adopt our British weights
and measures system! Sophisticated simplicity."
Jilly Cooper: "I'm so proud of being an honorary member of the British Weights
and Measures Association... and I'm very proud of all you're doing."
Lord Shore of Stepney: "I deplore and condemn, unreservedly, the ludicrous
legislation that would make the sale of foodstuffs in the United Kingdom in
pounds and ounces a criminal offence from the end of this year."
Paddy Ashdown, MP: "Across Britain there are many shopkeepers who put pounds
and ounces on the food they sell. But ... Europe has decided they will be
banned from doing this ... even if it helps their customers. This is farcical!"
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British Weights and Measures Association
Patrons: Lord Monson, Lord Shore, Vice-Admiral Sir Louis le Bailly, Dr Patrick
Moore 45 Montgomery Street, Edinburgh EH7 5JX. Tel: 0131556 6080
Subscriptions Secretary: BWMA, 157 King Henry's Road, London NW3 3RD
The subscription for one year is �10 (minimum).
Visit the Association's Website at http://members.aol.com/footrule/INDEX.HTML
Related Articles: -
Stupidity beyond measure by Roger Scruton
Metric switch forces village shop to close by Christopher Booker
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Stupidity beyond measure
ROGER SCRUTON
While politicians debate whether to keep one kind of pound, they have silently
allowed the disappearance of another. After December 31 it will be a criminal
offence to sell products by the pound and the ounce. The reason for this is
that the DTI has not bothered to obtain the ten-year extension of our old
imperial measures that was offered by the EC as a preliminary to forbidding
them. No more blatant example could be imagined of random law-making in
defiance of popular wishes. The law compelling us to use the metric system was
never discussed or voted on by our elected represent- atives; and although
opinion polls suggest that nine people out of ten are opposed to the change,
their desires count for nothing. The Eurocrats have decreed that the metric
system will be used, and another foundation-stone is to he removed from the
already tottering edifice of our national culture.
Do weights and measures matter? Those who introduced the metric system -
the French Revolutionaries - answered with an emphatic "yes". Weights and
measures mediate our day-to-day transactions; hence they are imprinted with our
sense of membership. They are symbols of the social order and distillations of
our daily habits. The old measures were redolent, the Revolutionaries believed,
of an hierarchical, backward-looking society. They were muddled, improvised,
and full of compromises. What was needed was a system expressive of the new
social order, based on Reason, progress, discipline and the future. Since the
decimal system is the basis of arithmetic, and since mathematics is the symbol
of Reason and its cold imperatives, the decimal system must be imposed by
force, in order to shake people free of their old attachments.
The conflict of currencies therefore expressed a conflict both
political and philosophical. The distinction between the imperial and the
metric systems corresponds to the distinction between the reasonable and the
rational, between solutions achieved through custom and compromise and those
imposed by a plan. Muddled though the imperial measures may appear to those
obsessed by mathematics, they are the produce of life. In ordinary
transactions, measurement proceeds by dividing and multiplying, ihit by,
adding. It makes sense to divide a gallon into half, a quart and a pint, or to
have 16 ounces to the pound.
The antiquity of these measures - like that of our old coinage,
arbitrarily jettisoned in a.previous fit of rationalism - is testimony to their
common sense. But the most important fact about them is that they are ours.
They are commemorated in our national literature and in our proverbs; they have
shaped our eating and drinking habits; they are the lingua franca of all our
books of recipes, all our manuals of gardening and husbandry and handicraft,
and the subject matter of a thousand schoolbooks.
THE idea that we should be committing a crime by using them, and just because
some foreign bureaucrat has said so, is such an offence to the sense of law and
justice that we are surely under a moral obligation to go on using them
nevertheless. If ever there were a case for civil disobedience, this is it.
There is another and deeper reason to resist these mad imperatives. The
French Revolutionaries believed that by changing weights and measures,
calendars and festivals,
street-names and landmarks, they could undermine the old and local attachments
of the people, so as to conscript them behind their international purpose. The
eventual result was Napoleon, who spread the metric system by force across the
Continent. In a small way the same is being done to us. The effect of
destroying our weights and measures will be not only to undermine the old local
loyalties between shopkeeper and customer. It will be to destroy the small
businesses that cannot afford the change. And we should ask who would really
want such a result.
The answer, it seems to me, is clear. The supermarkets are
international players, who have a vested interest in the metric system, since
it is applied in most of the countries from which they import their products.
If the measures on which old and local businesses depend are criminalized, the
supermarkets will score yet another advantage in their war on behalf of the
global government that will do most for their profits. Is that what we want?
Surely, it would have been nice of our dictators to ask us, before commanding
us to change.
The Times, 9 December 1999
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Metric switch at the pumps forces village shop to close
VISITORS to the remote Somerset village of Withypool on Exmoor are delighted to
see its vintage petrol pumps still in use, complete with 1950s Shell globes.
But the petrol station's owner, Tony Howard, 31, who also runs the village shop
across the road, has been faced with an impossible dilemma by the European
Union's compulsory metrication policy, the final stage of which comes into
force in Britain on January 1.
Earlier this year Somerset trading standards officials observed that
his pumps were still measuring petrol in gallons. They told Mr Howard that,
since this was now a criminal offence under the EU's metrication directive
80/181, he must take steps to comply with the law. He discovered that to instal
new metric pumps would cost him around �11,000.
"Since my average monthly profit from petrol sales is only �23.93, this
is out of the question," he says. "I only keep the pumps going because they
provide a service for the local community and give such pleasure to visitors."
But Mr Howard was then horrified to discover that even to discontinue
use of the pumps would cost him nearly �9,000, because under safety rules he
would have to pay to have the tanks filled in. Either way will cost him far
more than could be afforded by the small business into which he sunk his
savings when he moved from Buckinghamshire two years ago. Withypool will thus
lose not only the only petrol station for miles but also its shop.
In Septernber Mr Howard wrote to Howard Burnett, "head of metrology at
Somerset council, asking what he should do. He emphasized how vital his shop
and post office is to the rural community, by providing a whole range of
additional services, from taking in dry-cleaning to supplying newspapers. In a
letter last month he was reminded that, with "the final metrication of trade
transactions taking place at the end of this year", he must comply with the law
by January 1.
More informally, the local officials say they have made inquiries of
central government as to whether Mr Howard's existing pumps could not he
modified much more cheaply, to show litres rather than gallons on the dial. But
the response has not been hopeful. And in 12 days' time, if Mr Howard continues
to sell petrol in non-metric measures, he will be in breach of European law,
liable to fines of up to �5,000 or imprisonment for each offence,
Ironically, as the same deadline approaches, the European Commission
itself is still grappling with the problem of how, when use of non-metric units
becomes illegal, European exporters can comply with United States law which
makes use of imperial units compulsory. Last week another directive was rushed
through the European Parliament, allowing continued "interim" use of non-metric
measures as "supplementary indications" on products sold between America and
the EU. But the Commission expressed angry impatience at the US's failure to
join the worldwide metric system, suggesting that, until the Americans see
sense, they "should amend their present legislation" to allow EU firms to sell
them goods labelled in metric only.
To demonstrate the beautiful rationality of the metric system, the same
directive enacted a new legal definition of Celsius temperature, where "t is
defined as the difference t = T - Tn between the two thermodynamic temperatures
T and Tn where Tn = 273.15K. An interval or difference of temperature may he
expressed either in kelvins or in degrees Celsius. The unit 'degree Celsius' is
equal to the unit 'kelvin' ".
Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph, 19 December 1999
