Cheers! You will soon once again be able to buy champagne and wine in pint bottles – Winston Churchill’s favourite measure. It will be possible for the first time since an overbearing Common Market (as it was then) effectively put an end to the practice in 1973. This is very good news, and I’m certainly looking forward to drinking my first pint of fizz – the ideal unit for one person – over dinner.
But look further, and any satisfaction may well vanish in much the same way the bubbles in your celebratory glass might if you put it down too long. How this whole affair of reintroducing imperial measurements has been handled is a horrible sign of a flailing Tory administration that has lost its way.
Switching fully to imperial measurements wouldn’t even have involved much logistical difficulty
Even though compulsory use of metric measurements played a large, if subliminal, part in the Brexit saga, this is not an end to it. It has become merely a small piece of gesture politics, greeted predictably by many as an anticlimax. Outside the fairly rarefied area of still and sparkling wine, the corpus of mandatory metrication remains. We still have the requirement to deal and count in metric units, with everything else essentially for play only. If your butcher weighs you a pound of rump for old time’s sake, he must make it clear that any imperial units are for information, and less conspicuously marked on price labels and the like. For those of us who fought to get rid of nonsense of this sort as one of the dividends of Brexit, this looks like a piece of serious short-changing.
All this is a betrayal of what should be the Tory principles of freedom and of nurturing existing institutions. The conservative case for leaving the EU was sound precisely because the principle of the absolute supremacy of European law not only relegated parliament to the level of some subordinate provincial council, but also demanded that the state intervene forcibly to suppress well-established and organic ways of doing things. The need to steamroller anything seen as an obstacle to the creation of a notional single market out of the way required the state to intervene to forbid us from using the system of weights and measures we had grown up with. It should be clear that the state had no business doing that when we were in the EU and certainly has no business doing it now.
It need not have been like this. The government could perfectly well have announced this Christmas that all metric compulsion in matters of trade – including, of course, the trade in champagne – was to cease. It could have been put forward that, as a natural consequence of Brexit, the country should return to the pre-1973 situation. A situation that had existed ever since an Act of Parliament passed by Lord Salisbury’s Conservative administration in 1896 allowed any trader who wanted to use the metric system to do so, but left the choice up to individuals.
Such a measure would have shown a government that knew where it was going. It would have been difficult to fault as a matter of principle, and would have inconvenienced no one. Furthermore, it seems a racing certainty that Labour would not have been so foolish as to promise to reverse it. Switching fully to imperial measurements wouldn’t even have involved much logistical difficulty: electronic scales are increasingly just as happy in metric and imperial, flipping from one to other at the press of a button.
Why did this not happen? We are told that, in a public consultation, 99 per cent of people said they were happy overall with metric units. But the consultation certainly doesn’t appear to have been widely publicised. In any case, the result of any such exercise depends on the questions you ask. If it had quizzed respondents directly on the essential issue – namely, whether people should be free, if they so wished, to deal in imperial measures, with no compulsion being imposed either way – who knows what the outcome might have been? And one figure is certainly suggestive: to the question of whether the metric system should be rigidly imposed in the UK, less than 20 per cent said yes.
What one suspects happened was a combination of two factors. One is a prime minister who for all his good points is, at bottom, a banker-turned-technocrat. Bored by matters of this kind, he – like Keir Starmer – is inclined to see everything in terms of efficiency and avoiding upsetting people or business interests unless he has to.
The other is that this bears all the hallmarks of an operation by the British bureaucratic class, almost to a man and woman anti-Brexit and certainly anti-populist. No doubt business and its PR consultants discreetly lobbied to stop serious change. And one can almost hear a grizzled Sir Humphrey: ‘This is potentially awkward, Minister. Let’s have a public consultation: no need to publicise it too widely. My executives will be happy to arrange it and draft the questions. I don’t think you need worry too much.’
With people like this in the background, perhaps it’s not surprising that issues of principle, like your right to deal in the measures you like, should play a very second fiddle. Regrettably, whichever party is in power, the technocrats are increasingly in charge.
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