Imperial Rule(d out)
The government's imperial measurements consultation was designed to stoke a culture war. Fortunately it failed to go the distance.
Over Christmas Rishi Sunak’s Government quietly and unceremoniously dropped proposed plans to legislate for the large-scale increased use of the imperial system in the UK. They tried to hide the humiliating announcement behind a fanfare of publicity for a proposal to allow the sale of still and sparkling wine in pints - supposedly Churchill’s favoured measure of champagne.
It’s an embarrassing row-back on a project which began in earnest in the summer of 2022. Twenty months ago, Boris Johnson’s government (yes it is only twenty months since he was PM) shared a public consultation on one of the then Prime Minister’s signature “Brexit Dividends” – the greater use of imperial weights and measures in the UK.
The survey was assembled by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), then under the oversight of the minister charged with identifying “Brexit Benefits”, Jacob Rees-Mogg. As I and others pointed out at the time, the survey itself was horribly constructed and woefully biased, presumably to elicit a favourable response towards the imperial system. It contained questions like
“If you had a choice, would you want to purchase items:
(i) in imperial units?
(ii) in imperial units alongside a metric equivalent?”
giving no option to express a preference for metric alone.
Originally, options for responding to the form were also limited, with respondents being asked to download a form, fill it in and email or post it back. Only after a public outcry was an online form made available to allow a more accessible way for respondents to share their opinion. Nevertheless I and others were keen to encourage people to make their feelings on this important issue heard.
Despite the obstacles placed in their way, over 100,000 people felt sufficiently moved to do just that. I have written before about the overwhelming advantages of the metric system over the imperial system. The feedback received was overwhelmingly in agreement with my position. Just 0.4% of respondents (400 people) favoured moving to a completely imperial system, while 98.7% were in favour of allowing the use of metric alongside imperial (the current status quo) or metric only.
In the face of such strong opposition the government had little choice but to backtrack on their plans. However, the fact that the consultation was proposed and executed in the first place smacks of a government woefully out of touch with their electorate and indeed with the practicalities of modern science and business.
Seemingly the whole affair was never anything more than a plan to stoke an under-fuelled culture war that it was hoped would reinforce the cracks introduced by Brexit. The consultation document talks hyperbolically of the “ban on the use of imperial units for sales and marking”. But it has never been illegal to sell products in imperial measurements. The EU Weights and Measures Directive, introduced in 2000, simply required that metric be displayed as well (except in a small number of exceptional cases) and be at least as prominent as the imperial measure. Perhaps the ardent government ‘Imperialists’ who drafted the consultation forgot that that they probably buy their milk in pints, but did they really think they remembered the last time they went to the pub and asked for 568ml of beer?
Jacob Rees-Mogg, champion of the original survey is one such conveniently forgetful individual. Upon hearing of the dropping of the plans he said “It is hard to see why this harmless little measure is not being implemented, especially as our largest trading partner, the United States, still uses imperial units."
Setting aside the fact that the EU is still by far the UK’s largest trading partner, Rees-Mogg is also incorrect about the United States using imperial units. Whilst it is true that the US remains one of only three countries worldwide not to make extensive use of a metric system, their US customary units are not the same as the UK’s imperial measurements. An imperial pint is 1.2 pints in the US. A US gallon is approximately 0.83 imperial gallons. Either Rees-Mogg knew this and hoped that the rest of the country would believe his weak justification, or he didn’t and was himself ignorant of the difference between the two anachronistic measurement systems. I’m not sure which is worse.
In fact, if anything, as I outline in my book The Maths of Life and Death, the US presents a cautionary tale of the use of mixed measurement systems – US customary units for most everyday usages and metric for science and engineering. On the 15th September 1999, after successfully negotiating its nine-month journey through the solar system, a final series of manoeuvres was initiated to bring the Mars Climate Orbiter to its ideal altitude of around 140km above the surface of Mars. On the morning of the 23rd of September, the Orbiter fired its main thruster and then disappeared out of sight, 49 seconds earlier than expected, behind the red planet. It never came back into view.
A post-accident investigation board concluded that the Orbiter had been on an incorrect trajectory which would have taken it to within 57km of the surface, low enough for the atmosphere to destroy the fragile probe. When the board further investigated the reason for the discrepancy, they found that a piece of software, supplied by US aerospace and defence contractor Lockheed Martin, had been sending data about the Orbiter’s thrust in US customary units. NASA, one of the foremost scientific institutions of the world, was, unsurprisingly, expecting those measurements in standard international metric units. The error meant that the Orbiter fired its thrusters too vigorously and consequently became just another 338 kilograms (or, if you prefer, 745 pounds) of space junk as it fell apart deep in the Martian atmosphere.
In homage to the Mars orbiter, the government’s out-of-touch plans for greater use of imperial units have spectacularly collapsed. As Conservative MP Alicia Kearns tweeted at the time “This isn’t a Brexit freedom. It’s a nonsense.”, but hopefully in light of the consultation response, a nonsense we won’t have to deal with again.
Hahaha Sunk is only 'in touch' with one thing in this world - his money.