Wednesday, 27 December 2023

Weighed and Measured

Long ago, I was taught that a gentleman drank champagne by the pint. The only Briton ever to have been President of the European Commission was later known for taking a pint of claret to his desk in the House of Lords to get him through the afternoon.

But it turns out that only 1.3 per cent of people want any extended use of the imperial system, so that is the end of that. The peculiarly British compromise between the metric and the imperial systems is the most lasting monument to this country's bitterest culture war in living memory, the one between scientists and humanities graduates in the 30 or 40 years after the Second World War.

The question of turning away from the Old Empire and towards Europe was also in the mix, but it was secondary. Much of the Old Empire was going metric at the time, and almost all of it has now done so. Rather, this was and is about whether the weights and measures used in everyday life, and taught in schools, should be the ones used in science, or the ones named in Shakespeare.

Only named, of course. The imperial system dates only from 1824, making it not yet 200 years old. Far from being Arthurian, it suppressed numerous customary weights and measures across these Islands and the Empire, replacing them with ones that often bore the same names, as certain customary units on the Continent still have names such as livre, but which had most definitely been devised by a committee. Scottish pints and gallons were more than halved.

Britain joined the EU in 1973. New Zealand has had only metric road signs, which there has never been any serious suggestion that Britain might adopt, since 1972. Was that the work of the EU? Although New Zealanders still sometimes give their height in feet and inches, and by convention announce their children's birth weights in pounds and ounces, they have, again since 1972, measured even milk in the metric system, unlike the practice in Britain.

By 1973, all schools in Australia were teaching only the metric system. Was that the work of the EU, too? All road signs there converted to metric in July 1974, and all cars made after that year have had only metric speedometers. Australians now rarely even convert their babies' birth weights into pounds and ounces, and such units are employed for trading purposes only when exporting to the United States. 

Where there is residual use of imperial units in casual conversation in Australia, then it tends to be attributed to the cultural transmission of American English. But the reason why the American system is different, despite using much of the same vocabulary, is because it is older. Nor does it ring true that the United States went to the Moon using non-metric units. If, for the sake of argument, that were the case, then it was more than 50 years ago. There is no way that the Americans are doing anything remotely comparable in anything other than the metric system today, even if they were doing so in the 1960s, which itself strikes me as highly unlikely.

Corresponding to the lazy assumption that the imperial system is ancient is the lazy assumption that the metric system is foreign. Unlike, I believe that it is correct to say, any part of the imperial system, the metric system was invented by an Englishman. It has a very long history in this country, having been devised by John Wilkins, who managed to be both a brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell and later a bishop in the Church of England. It is not a product of the French Revolution. The first attempt to mandate it in Britain was made in 1818, six years before the imperial system existed. Britain legalised the use of the metric system in 1875. Numerous industries have used nothing else in living memory, if ever. Even leaving aside how long ago Imperial Britain's industrial zenith was, the bald claim that that was achieved entirely by the application of the imperial system does not stand up to the slightest analysis.

Why not teach both systems? Have you ever met British scientists and my lot, British humanities graduates? In any case, who could possibly teach the imperial system these days? But at popular level, a remarkably enduring compromise has taken hold. Britain is the only country in the world where the use of two completely different systems of weights and measures, but with only one of them taught in schools, could result in anything other than total collapse. We should cherish the fact that in ordinary conversation everyone gave their height and weight in imperial measures when only the metric system had been taught in schools since before most people had been born.

The only problem is the legal ban on selling certain items in imperial measures by name, a piece of domestic legislation enacted by a Conservative Government. By all means let that ban be repealed. In practice, that repeal would change almost nothing. Corporate retail giants would have absolutely no intention of adopting the imperial system, but small traders should be free to use it if customers wanted it. At a significant markup, I expect. Almost no one under 60 would ask for imperial, since almost no one under 60 would ever have been taught it, but let those who wanted it have it. If they could afford it.

I hate to advocate for the other side, but Britain is in fact rather good at science. Yet imagine that the imperial system really were to be reincorporated into school Maths. Would you fail if you could not do it? That would be most people these days, deprived of the Maths certificate necessary to progress to further scientific education, for want of competence in a system that was not used for such purposes anywhere in the world. If you could find anyone to do so, then by all means teach it. But even those of us who probably quoted Shakespeare in our sleep ought not to wish to make anything else conditional on it. It is not as if it is anything important like Classics.

We await much taking of the opportunities of Brexit to pursue an egalitarian economic policy by harnessing the powers of the liberated British State. Brexit makes it possible to renationalise the railways, but no one is trying to do that anymore. Brexit ought to be a spur to pursue an independent and peaceable foreign policy. But after a very brief moment of hope, then no one is trying to do that anymore, either.

Instead, we have had blue passports, which we could always have had if we had wanted them, and which look nothing at all like the old ones, since those were black. The new, blue ones are being made in Poland by a company that is French and Dutch. And we were to have had the Conservative Party's vague suggestion that it might repeal its own Act of Parliament outlawing some, but not all, use of the imperial system of weights and measures. Have you ever had any trouble buying a pint of beer? Good luck to any licensed premises that sought to revert to the old measures of spirits, since those were shorter.

The never threatened pint of milk or beer will always be readily available in the Irish Republic, which will never leave the EU. Our own and so many other traditional weights and measures survive for the sale of bread or beer all across Europe because they are perfectly adequate, and even ideal, for the sale of bread or beer. But they are at least arguably too imprecise for anything much more than that, and an international scientific and technological culture could not function without a universally accepted system of weights and measures.

And so on. Let anyone who wanted to do so buy or sell a pound of potatoes, although that is not an arduous thing to do within the present law. But if this and the complete novelty of blue passports are all that we are getting out of Brexit, then we need a Government in the tradition of those who had always opposed the EU, and not made up of the fanboys of a Prime Minister who had gone off it only when we now know that she had been in her early dotage.

When I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.

6 comments:

  1. Some markets on the Continent may have labels referring to ‘livre’ or ‘pond’ and it is implied that imperial pounds are being used there while being forbidden on UK weighing machines.

    The truth is that when metric was adopted on the Continent expressions like ‘livre’ or ‘pond’ were used as colloquial expressions for half a kilogram. Weighing machines on markets use grams and kilograms and not imperial pounds.

    It has been argued that these units are not permitted by EU Directives. However, it is important to note that these terms do not have any legal standing. To argue against colloquial terms is like saying we should not use terms like ‘quid’, ‘bob’, ‘fiver’ (or ‘buck’ and ‘penny’ in the USA), because these have never been legal terms of currency.

    The U.S. wine and spirits industry made the change back in the 1970s, the car industry went metric in the mid-1980s (with considerable savings), and many goods are appearing in shops in rational metric sizes. Dual-labelling of goods is now mandatory for most products. The semiconductor industry is metric, and U.S. Government programs, such as NASA, are required to use the International System of Units for measurement “except where impractical”. The Apollo Guidance Computer, onboard the Apollo 11 Lunar Module that landed on the Moon in 1969, used SI units for powered-flight navigation and guidance calculations.

    Contrary to urban myth, NASA did use the metric system for the Apollo Moon landings. SI units were used for arguably the most critical part of the missions – the calculations that were carried out by the Lunar Module’s onboard Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) during the computer-controlled phases of the spacecraft’s descent to the surface of the Moon, and for the journey of the Ascent stage of the craft during its return to lunar orbit, where it would rendezvous with the Command and Service Module (CSM).

    As is the case in the UK with road signage, the use of metric units in the USA is often hidden from public view. The Apollo Guidance Computer is a good example of this. The computer display readouts were in units of feet, feet per second, and nautical miles – units that the Apollo astronauts, who had mostly trained as jet pilots, would have been accustomed to using. Internally, however, the computer’s software used SI units for all powered-flight navigation and guidance calculations, and values such as altitude and altitude rate were only converted to imperial units when they needed to be shown on the computer’s display.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The thriving American wine industry uses the same 250cl, 500cl and 750cl bottles as everyone else, and it may also do litre ones, although the contents of those on the Continent are not always the best. But pints of wine are going to be novelty gifts if made in Europe for a niche British market, and they will probably not be economic enough to be worth making at all anywhere else.

      I am laughing at the suggestion in certain quarters that a pint of champagne was ideal for a couple to share at lunch, or for one person to have at dinner. I was taught these things, and I have taught them, at very different lunches and dinners than that.

      Delete
  2. They've got their pints of wine, which didn't exist except for champagne before we went into the EU, if they can afford to pay whatever arm and a leg they'd be charged for the inconvenience of manufacturing them. That's their lot.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The 1.3 per cent figure did surprise me. That was for any more use of the imperial system, even just this, never mind anything beyond that. I mean, I would repeal a Tory Government's domestic legislation to allow the sale of goods in imperial measures if that were what people wanted. But it turns out that they just don't.

      Not quite three years ago, the newspaper closest to the then Prime Minister was calling for the return of pre-decimal currency, specifically because there were references to it in nursery rhymes. That was the background against which this consultation was launched. How the world turns.

      Delete
    2. Simon Heffer, born in 1960.

      Delete
    3. 18 in 1978. Jacob Rees-Mogg was 18 in 1987. He is younger than Noel Gallagher, Damon Albarn or Kylie Minogue. Where do they find these people?

      Delete