Flags? Statues? Imperial delusions in the Indo-Pacific? Imperial weights and measures that were certainly not going to be used by the supermarket chains that funded the Conservative Party and which fed almost everyone?
If there really were a culture war, then there would be primary legislation to ban puberty blockers before the age of 16, which still seems rather young. This is something concrete; something very, very real. As such, it is an overdue test of the Government's seriousness.
And the Court of Appeal said today that at the time of the Gillick ruling, then contraception for the under-16s was as controversial as puberty blockers were today, but that no one could imagine that now.
Couldn't they? A good generation on, and it is very high time to revisit the allegedly uncontroversial practice of putting underage girls on the Pill, which can have only one purpose.
If the Government were serious about a culture war, then it should be doing this, and to hell with the giant Union Flags that Ministers had rather oddly found lying around their houses.
You've seen straight through them.
ReplyDeleteThis is the test of whether there is anything behind them.
DeleteThe UK agreed to adopt the metric system when it joined the International Organisation of Legal Metrology (OIML) in 1856. Metric measures have been lawful in the UK since 1875. Only Myanmar still uses imperial measures, the American ones are slightly different. So much for ‘Global Britain’.
ReplyDeleteAll that is going to happen is that traders are going to be permitted to use imperial measures again. A very few will, and good luck to them. But that will be all. As much as anything else, there is no suggestion that they are going to be taught in schools. Taught by whom?
DeleteIn a free market, companies sell to customers in the units people like snd therefore there’ll be an immediate resurgence of imperial measures by popular demand. Metric measures are clunky because they were never designed for human applications like cooking. Ask yourself if imperial measures weren’t popular why did they have to be banned by law and traders like Steve Thoburn prosecuted for using them?
ReplyDeleteEven where they’re outlawed as in France people still use imperial equivalents (that’s the whole point of the Pulp Fiction scene about a “royale with cheese”).
It was an Act of Parliament. By the Tories, in fact. And there will be no "resurgence by popular demand", because you have to be in your sixties to have been taught them. Let people have them if they want, but hardly anyone will. And the corporate sector, which is most retailers, has no intention of even giving them the option.
DeleteOf course they have never had imperial measures in France. The historically similar names mean something different. As they did in different parts of Britain before 1824, the hardly Arthurian starting point of the imperial system.
The Abbé Mouton got the idea for the metric system from John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford; Master of Trinity College, Cambridge; Dean of Ripon; and Lord Bishop of Chester. It's the most English thing in the world, used by the entire Commonwealth, and legal in Britain since only 24 years after the creation of the imperial system which forcibly replaced a whole array of customary units not yet 200 years ago.
ReplyDeleteWilkins. That was it. Cromwell's brother-in-law, but a very successful player of the game.
DeleteThe EU has never believed in free markets and its totalitarian ban on traders using imperial-only measures, even if their customers want them, is proof positive of that.
ReplyDeleteNow we’ve left the EU, bring back free markets and let the customers choose what units they want to buy in.
It was an Act of Parliament. By the Tories, in fact.
Delete