Geoffrey Howe published this article in The Times. We reproduce it for information and views.


MEASURE FOR MEASURE, A COMEDY OF ERRORS

Thirty years after decimalisation, we're still inching into the metric world

The villains responsible for the "persecution" of the Sunderland
greengrocer Steve Thoburn - the so-called Metric Martyr - have been widely
identified as "Brussels bureaucrats", "European tyrants" and the like.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The guilty men (and women) are
here in Britain. Mr Thoburn's plight has been caused by the cowardice, lack
of candour and irresponsibility of most of our political leaders over the
past quarter of a century - and by even greater recklessness on the part of
most of the media. Even our business and academic leaders have played an
inglorious part in the Martyr's Tale. I am ready to accept my share of
responsibility.

The story begins more than 200 years ago, when Britain
declined an invitation from Napoleon's revolutionary predecessors to join
in the planning which would lead to the creation of the metric system. But
over the next half century, the new system swept across Europe and to many
other parts of the world. By 1862 a Commons Select Committee on Weights and
Measures had concluded unanimously that "the best course to adopt is,
cautiously but steadily, to introduce the metric system"; because "no
country, especially no commercial country, should fail to adopt the metric
system, which will save time and lessen labour". Nine years later a Bill
providing for a complete change to the metric system (coinage as well) was
defeated by a mere 82 votes to 77. And in 1904 the House of Lords voted in
favour of a Bill to the same effect. Almost half a century later, in 1950,
the Hodgson Committee recommended unanimously action, "in concert with the
Commonwealth and the USA", to abolish the imperial system over a period of
20 years.

In 1965 the Wilson Government, in response to a request from the
FBI (later the CBI), announced that metrication should be substantially
completed within ten years. Four years later the Metrication Board was
created to co-ordinate the changeover. In 1972, with metrication under way,
I joined the Heath Cabinet as Britain's first Minister for Trade and
Consumer Affairs, responsible for the metrication programme. We were then
still in the first wave of Commonwealth countries to have embarked upon
metrication - not surprisingly, as the only one about to join an entirely
metric single market. Yet today we are the only Commonwealth country not to
have completed it. We must surely be about the only country where the
motorist sees the roadsign "Birmingham 51 miles" and, a moment or two
later, "Roadworks 500 metres", where he buys petrol by the litre and yet
compares fuel consumption in miles per gallon.

Only one major country now
remains to go fully metric - the United States, where about 40 per cent of
businesses have made the changeover. America provided a dramatic
demonstration of the folly of trying to cope with both systems
simultaneously in 1999 when the Mars Climate Orbiter took the wrong course
and disappeared - all because one programme was written in imperial rather
than in the metric units, which Nasa has been using for years.

So why is
Britain almost alone in still being stuck between two worlds when our
schoolchildren have been learning and working in metric for 30 years? There
is one important factor. The system we have adopted was designed not by or
for citizens and consumers but by and for Space Age scientists and
mathematicians. We don't use the everyday metric system in a way that works
so well on the Continent. The Metric Sense Campaign (championed almost
single-handed for years by Clement Attlee's daughter-in-law, Countless
Attlee) has tirelessly explained the cause of the problem: many industries
in Britain do not express measurements in centimetres, or even metres,
preferring to use huge numbers of millimetres instead. So a bathtub is
1,700mm long, instead of 1.70m. Liquid measure, too, is more difficult in
Britain because we usually drop centilitres and don't use ˝. For example, a
bottle of tonic water is marked 500ml, instead of 50cl or ˝litre.

But the
main reason Britain is still in a metric no man's land is the obtuse
willingness of too many politicians to resist and obstruct the process of
change, which they - which we, I should say - had set in hand. I have to
acknowledge, for example, that within six months of being elected the
Thatcher Government abolished the Metrication Board, whose job it was to
oversee the completion of the change. I went along with this, as Chancellor
of the Exchequer, because it represented a (very) modest saving of public
expenditure. We made the implausible excuse that the board had very largely
completed its work. There was little complaint from our political
opponents. Mrs Thatcher, it has to be said, positively rejoiced in the
change. And so it was that the former Education Secretary, who had (with
private reluctance) once helped to steer our schoolchildren into the metric
world, became in due course one of the leaders of a "heroic resistance
movement", which has since fought every inch, foot, yard and mile of the
way to "prevent Brussels imposing upon us" a modernisation of weights and
measures to which, in our own national interest, successive British
governments had at last had the courage to commit themselves.

Had the
process been properly managed and explained - in the same way as
decimalisation of the currency, for example - then Steve Thoburn, and his
customers, would have had time and the means to know exactly where we were
going and why - and how. I dare say that one or two "martyrs" might still
have volunteered. But, as in the rest of the Commonwealth, they would have
had less excuse and much less sympathy. Oh, what a shameful way to govern a
country!

This reply to Geoffrey Howe's article appeared in today's Times.

METRICATION IN ABSURD AND SORRY STATE OF CONFUSION

From Christopher Booker

Sir, I commend Lord Howe of Aberavon’s honest admission (Comment, February 10) that the way Britain’s conversion to the metric system has been carried out has reflected “cowardice, lack of candour and irresponsibility” by our politicians. Right from the start in 1965, the decision to impose metrication by stealth as a way of avoiding a proper parliamentary debate and vote was bound to end in our present sorry state of confusion.
Lord Howe suggests that the United States is on the way to full metrication because 40 per cent of its businesses have made the change. The truth is that the US enjoys that choice between the two systems which used to prevail in Britain until criminal penalties were brought in to impose exclusive use of metrication

US industry is free to convert to metric where it wishes. On the other hand, since the decision to convert public administration is reserved to individual states, a complete switch to metric is highly unlikely. Some states have even reversed their earlier change to metric speed limits. It is precisely this freedom which is no longer allowed in the European Union, where all member states must now accept the centrally imposed system.

What Lord Howe also omits from his account of what happened under the Government of which he was a member in the 1980s is that, when Douglas Hurd, Lynda Chalker and Francis Maude signed up to the EC’s metrication Directive 89/617, the official policy of the Conservative Party was still that there would be no more compulsory metrication in Britain.

It was that betrayal of party policy which has led to the present absurd situation in Sunderland where Steve Thoburn faces the criminal charge of selling a pound of bananas.

Having lived here my whole life, I can assure you that the government statement that 40% of the American economy is metric is a lie. The government says that so the foreigners will think we've made some significant change since the 70's. In reality, the figure is closer to 20%, if that.

40% is a lie, or, at the very least, a confusing statement. If the government measures it by "dual marking" packages and such, then yes, perhaps 40% of what we do has a metric label, albeit impossible to read, somewhere on it. And another point I'd like to make for the Lord, the reason our spacecraft crashed into Mars was because of mindless government legislation that forced agencies like NASA to use the metric system, even though Boeing designs and builds all its craft in English units only. Next time you're on a 747, or see a B2 Stealth Bomber on TV, remember your pitifully weak argument that English units are "antiquated."