Give Them An Inch?

Where was Patriot Platform when we needed it? Why did we ever let in someone called William the Conqueror? The clue was in the name. And the Battle of Hastings was in fact fought about seven miles northwest of Hastings itself, at the nearby town of Battle. What are the chances of that happening? Anyway, although writers nearer the time greatly exaggerated the numbers for effect, it was won by an army of between 7000 and 12,000 Normans. After the most tedious roll call in history. Of the Bayeux Tapestry, Peter Hitchens writes:

I suppose I had better go and see the exhibition. But I do wish the King would stop saying how long it is in metres. As my Daily Mail colleague Robert Hardman has pointed out, it was made in feet and inches. And wasn’t one of the things our fathers fought for again and again the Britishness of Britain and the Englishness of England?

I cannot find the Hardman quotation, but while this is very on brand from Hitchens, it is quite misleading. Demands for the imperial system alone come from people who could not calculate according to it, as invariably comes out when they are tested, but that is not a new phenomenon. Into living memory, the average customer could have had little or no idea whether or not his change was right, but took it on simple trust, a “high trust society” that it is bewildering that a journalist, of all tradesmen, would wish to see restored.

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 turned out in 2023 that only 1.3 per cent of people wanted any extended use of the imperial system, so that was assumed to have been 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 barely 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. The claim that the imperial system was “more natural” needs to be squared with the existence of different traditional weights and measures, and with the absence of any organic reversion to our own, much less emergence of them. When uncontacted tribes turn up, then do they know the number of yards in a rod, perch or pole?

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 well over 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.

Unlike, unless I am very much mistaken, any part of what eventually became the imperial system, the metric system was invented by an Englishman, 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.

Who could possibly teach the imperial system these days? 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 Classics.

Yet at the 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. Good luck to any licensed premises that sought to revert to the old measures of spirits, since those were shorter.

Have you ever had any trouble buying a pint of beer? 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. The never threatened pint of milk or beer will always be readily available in the Irish Republic, which will never leave the EU, the rest of which the Irish increasingly call “the Mainland”.