I was in the Netherlands over the weekend, which is always nice; it’s a bit like England, but just better. I’ve always wanted my country to be a bit more like our neighbours, especially Germany and Holland, and that includes standardisation with European norms when they clearly make more sense.
Driving on the left, for example, when the entire continent drives on the right, is just annoying, and must make our cars more expensive and cost a handful of lives each year. And if you don’t have anyone in a passenger seat you have to get out whenever dealing with any sort of parking or toll machine; as I get older this is one of those things that just get more annoying, like having to tie shoelaces.
Another quirky annoyance is the imperial system of weights and measurements, which is quaint but clearly less rational than the metric. British politicians have been debating metrification for almost two centuries now, but it has never really happened, and remains unpopular with a lot of people. Curiously enough NASA, of all people, carried out a study into why metrification had failed to take off in Britain, attributing it to a lack of funding and leadership in government.
Views on measurements are bound to be subjective, because we all like what we were raised on, but in some instances imperial measurements seem to better articulate a concept; measuring people in height, for instance, and I’d need to look up my height in centimetres. And while I was raised with centigrade, Fahrenheit seems obviously more useful in everyday parlance; saying it’s in the 70s or 80s gives across a clear idea of what you basically need to know about the weather, which is what to wear. On the other hand I’m not sure why we still use miles on our road signs, as it doesn’t seem to have any advantage over kilometres and just confuses people.
Anyway, today it’s reported that the British Weights and Measures Association is suggesting shops should be allowed to measure fruit and vegetables in imperial as well as metric. This, of course, like anything in relation to the EU, targets some key moral foundations and the responses have been low on the rationality that is at the heart of the metric system.
Like most things about Europe, the response is not really about Europe, but values, and so if your group identity is that of the modern urban social liberal then ‘returning to the imperial system’ is clearly a return to the dark ages or racism and rations, turning Britain into ‘Singapore on stilts, combined with 1950s social values’.
But then, of course, no one is suggesting ‘bringing back’ imperial measurements, and as Mark Wallace of Conservative Home put it:
Is it really that hard to understand the difference between allowing something and the nation "returning" to it?https://t.co/5iM65VpXkW
— Mark Wallace (@wallaceme) August 30, 2016
All that is being suggested is that customers be allowed to choose imperial if they want, which is currently illegal. I appreciate that standardisation of weights and measures is important, and even appears in Magna Carta (Clause 35: ‘There is to be one measure of wine throughout our kingdom, and one measure of ale, and one measure of corn, namely the quarter of London, and one breadth of dyed, russet and haberget cloths, that is, two ells within the borders; and let weights be dealt with as with measures.’)
But the technology is available to allow consumers to use imperial measurements, if they want, while leaving metric as the default system. I wouldn’t use it, but I don’t see what harm it would do to allow some older people to use a system they feel more comfortable with.
There were lots of reasons why ‘Remain’ lost the referendum, but the tendency of its most vocal supporters to sneer and condescend its opponents must have played some part. Since June 23, this has turned to anger, partly because social liberals have been used to winning things for many years and so don’t take defeat well. Well, welcome to my world.
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