Imperial measures are culture war bait

The idea of reintroducing imperial measures in honour of the Queen’s Jubilee has one quality that will have commended it to No. 10’s wizard wheezes department. It seems to have driven remoaning liberal elite types pleasingly bananas. It’s the perfect culture war bait, because it plays into the stereotype: if you are unshakeably complacent in your conviction that Brexit, and the government which advanced it as a project, are pandering to empty symbols of trad patriotism and little Englander nostalgia, you’ll shriek with a sort of delighted horror at the news.

Here is confirmation of everything you imagined. These backward-looking clowns, with their Union flags and their saudade for wars they never fought in and imperial power that had vanished a generation before they were born! Their Enid Blyton worldview, their privet-hedge parochialism! Is this really what counts as electoral politics in the age of digital mass media, climate change, pandemics, just-in-time supply chains, virtual currencies, and the transformation of the entire European security order? Selling tomatoes in pounds and flipping ounces? Well.

Speaking as a remoaning liberal elite type myself, though, I think bemusement is a more appropriate response than outrage. Fellow wets: comrades, we