IN THE great pantheon of heroes, street market traders tend not to figure
prominently, but Steve Thoburn hasn鈥檛 let this hold him back.
In July, police and trading standards officers swooped on his stall in
Sunderland in north-east England. They seized the scales he was using to weigh
his wares, and he now faces criminal charges. His dastardly deed? Selling
vegetables in pounds and ounces instead of in kilograms and grams.
The plight of the 鈥渕etric martyr鈥� is fast becoming a cause
c茅l猫bre in Britain. Tabloid newspapers have seized on his
prosecution as an example of bureaucracy gone mad. Even sober broadsheets have
denounced the 鈥渋diotic zeal鈥� of the officials involved and dismissed the local
police chief as a 鈥減olitically correct鈥� officer with 鈥渘o common sense鈥�.
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Thoburn鈥檚 treatment may be a little over the top, but the reason why people
are so upset about his case has nothing to do with the relative merits of the
metric and imperial systems. No, what鈥檚 really touched a nerve is that the
stalled process of metrication is now being kick-started from across the
Channel. How dare the French, having had the cheek to come up with a better
system in the first place, now attempt to impose it on Britain through a
directive from the European Union?
Supporters of Thoburn, including the UK Independence Party, argue that a 1985
Act of Parliament that permits traders to sell goods in pounds and ounces takes
precedence over the Brussels directive, under which the use of imperial weights
is to be phased out by 2009. They intend to fight the case in the courts.
If they succeed, Britain will remain stuck in the no-man鈥檚-land between
imperial weights and the SI system (as metric measures are more correctly
known). The US is in a similar position. Despite being the first country to
adopt a metric measure, with the introduction of the dollar in 1792, progress
has been distinctly on and off since then.
Whichever system of units you prefer, you can鈥檛 deny that the halfway house
where Britain and the US find themselves is an unworkable fudge. Just look at
the loss of NASA鈥檚 Mars Climate Orbiter last year, caused by confusion between
pound-seconds and newton-seconds.
It鈥檚 clear that we need to get off the fence and adopt one system or the
other. And even amid the reactionary indignation, there鈥檚 only one way to jump.
A survey done several years ago revealed that only Liberia and Burma had no
plans to go metric.
As for Thoburn, let the authorities make an example of him. Small traders
don鈥檛 deserve much sympathy in my book. Wasn鈥檛 it the daughter of another such,
a certain Margaret Thatcher, who helped create Britain鈥檚 current mess by
abolishing the Metrification Board in 1979?
More than 200 years after the metric system was adopted in France, it鈥檚
definitely time to do ourselves a favour, and finish what the French Revolution
started.