OUR WEIGHTS AND MEASURES STILL COUNT

Most of the world's aircraft heights are in feet. Computer printers work in inches. German plumbers use inches. The USA, the world's largest economy, uses our feet and inches, pounds and ounces. Many products are internationally based on British units.

Traditional measures were used for the first moon landing. The US space shuttle uses them. Despite the antiquity of their origins they are capable of the most precise use. We have many reasons to be glad, not ashamed, to continue to use our weights and measures.

Our measures are part of our literature - from Shakespeare to Roald Dahl and J K Rowling's "Harry Potter" books - just as for centuries they have been part of our architechture and engineering.

Schools which do not teach children to know and work with our measures (rather than just how to convert them to metric) are ignoring real life. They should cultivate familiarity with units which are important for understanding both the past and the future in a world which is far from totally metric.

THE PRACTICAL BENEFITS OF BRITISH WEIGHTS & MEASURES

Can you divide a cake into ten equal pieces without using a protractor?
The metric system is supposed to be easier and better because it is based on the number ten. However, ten has its disadvantages and artificial metric measures are in other ways clumsy and inefficient.
In any case ease cannot be the only consideration. Phonetic spelling would make written English easier for children, but it would also make it harder to read the accumulated knowledge of previous generations, most of which would remain unconverted. Ill-judged change can damage collective memory and wisdom.

Size is also important. Pounds and ounces, feet and inches and convenient sizes for many everyday needs. A unit similar to the foot arose in most societies around the world, but there is no metric equivalent.
Metric units are often too large or too small, resulting  either in decimals or in invonveniently large numbers. The current version of the metric system (known as "Systeme International d'Unities" or SI) has gaps of a thousandfold between units.

Measures need to be divisible. Metric units are inferior in this respect, since ten is divisible only by two and five. The twelve month year divides neatly into quarters, and the 24-hour day and 60-minute hour are more flexibly divisible than ones based on 10 or 100 - decimal time, though part of the original metric system, was fortunately soon abandoned.

Customary weights and measures evolved out of practical experience to serve human needs. The 12 inch foot is particularly easy to divide in a variety of ways. Packaging by the dozen or the gross is often more economical than using tens or hundreds, since it allows packs which are not only more compact, so less packaging material is needed, but also stronger. So eggs are often packed by the half-dozen, and bottles three by four.

For weights, however, repeated halving allows ready division of a quantity by eye without special equipment. It also produces the most economical set of weights for scales, so our 16-ounce pound is ideal. Camera shutter speeds became more practical when decimal ones were replaced with those got by repeated halving. Even the "metric" sizes of paper (A4, A5 etc) are practical because they are in fact NOT decimal but, again, based on each size being half the next larger. Computers work fundamentally in 2s not 10s.

The metric system has advantages in certain areas of science, having been developed by and largely for scientists, but we should not let this make us overlook the fact that for everyday use it is cumbersome and inconvenient. Even the names of many of its units are long and similar, unlike the names of most traditional units which are short and yet distinct.
Decimals are far from perfect, and for many purposes it is useful to have a more factor-rich number of parts in a whole. The advantages of the metric system are obvious but superficial. The merits of our traditional system of weights and measures are more profound.

Ours is the more sophisticated system.