The Metric Martyrs were 20 years ago, and the best known has been dead for 17 of them. Most small traders are decidedly right of centre, and perhaps even more so in those days, yet precisely five in the entire country could be found, even then, to demand the right to label their wares in imperial measures alone.
Were the law to be changed to allow that, then it is more than likely that absolutely no one at all would now take advantage of that change. Buying and selling things in imperial weights and measures is already a perfectly simple, everyday occurrence, as it always has been.
Similarly, Section 7 of the Equality Act already protects anyone who is undergoing, or who has undergone, or who proposes to undergo a process, or part of a process, to change their legal sex. Gender self-identification would greatly endanger women and girls, especially, while affording any new protection to, again, absolutely no one at all.
Like the obstinate refusal even to display metric units alongside imperial ones, the demand for gender self-identification has the strong sense of what happens when being "a bit of a character" gets out of hand. But it is a vastly more dangerous variation on that theme.
As the BBC reported: “A 1994 EU directive was signed into British law and took effect in 2000, making it an offence to sell loose goods in pounds and ounces. Customers can ask for a pound of bananas but traders are obliged to weigh them in metric units. Thoburn had used imperial scales and was prosecuted.”
ReplyDeleteImperial will soon be back in mass circulation now that EU Directive is to be repealed not only because it’s Britain’s traditional measurement system but because it’s a bottom-up human system designed by ordinary traders, farmers and engineers for everyday usage and thus takes things we all have or use (feet, thumbs, cups, pints etc) as it’s reference points. The imperial system is more natural and human because it was made for human applications while the metric system was intended for scientific applications and never intended to measure people or buildings, food and drink.
The Government is right to get rid of that totalitarian EU Directive and let’s have truly free markets where the customers choose. Instead of being forced to use the clunky top-down measurement system imposed by Emperor Napoleon and the Bolsheviks.
There is that junk history again. But anyway, in, what, 2025 or thereabouts, literally no one is going to revert to selling things in imperial measures alone. Do not invest in imperial scales, in the extremely unlikely event that anyone started making them again.
DeleteThere are people who would compel a return to imperial, although bluntly they will soon be dead. But then, there are people who want to ban imperial units altogether, there are people who want to abolish British Summer Time, and there are people who want to have it all year. Some "characters" do not know when to stop. Thankfully, everyone else does know when to stop them.
You're right of course, people could have the right to do this No Metrics Here thing but almost nobody wanted to do it in 2001 so nobody would want to do it 25 years later once the law had changed.
ReplyDeleteBy all means, let them be able to. But they won't. They just won't.
Delete