NAPOLEON'S REVENGE
Compulsory metrication violates the Treaty of Rome and the European Convention on Human Rights

Vivian Linacre

One of the many absurdities of compulsory metrication is that the EU authorises eleven different languages but cannot tolerate two systems of measurement. Another absurdity is that, for the purpose of creating a European economic community, a common currency is obviously a far higher priority than a common system of weights and measures, yet the UK is enforcing the latter before any decision has been taken on the former.

Furthermore, compulsory metrication patently violates both the Treaty of Rome's entrenched commitment to 'the flowering of cultures of the member states' and the European Convention on Human Rights' commitment to freedom and expression. This brings us directly to the reason why compulsory metrication is legalistically co objectionable.
British law is essentially proscriptive in nature. It lays down what one must not do - commit murder or walk on the grass or whatever - whereby anything not expressly prohibited is presumed lawful, in the same way that one is presumed innocent of any crime until proven guilty.
But competitive metrication is prescriptive, laying down what units are permitted for use in trade, with the effect that use of any other denomination of weight or measure is presumed unlawful. This is a constitutional abomination, entirely contrary to natural justice; ordering that unless we do exactly what we are told we are guilty of a crime.

It means that whether or not some customary practice may continue (such as the sale of soil by the lorryload or cloth by the bolt or flowers or watercress by the bunch or strawberries by the punnet or even oranges by the number), or constitutes a criminal offence, depends merely on whether some junior official has remembered to add to it some schedule attached to the regulations; and it also means that no flexibility is allowed for the manufacturing and retailing innovations in the global market that could render some authorised units obsolete and require some new trading standards altogether.

Rigidity is the curse of the metric system for it is a relic of the French Revolution which attempted to plan Utopia in detail for all eternity, as every totalitarian state since has done. So a Conference Generale de Poids et des Mesures has to be held periodically to bring the system up to date and try to eliminate discrepancies, for each country produces its own variations and hybrids that retain characteristics of its own indigenous units. Thus the 'tonne' emerged, already in Britain we have the 'metric foot' of 30cms, and centimetres are still used in France but are already obsolescent here. So the desire for uniformity is wholly self-defeating!

The 1972 White Paper on the subject expressly undertook that metrication would always remain a voluntary process. That pledge by Edward Heath was reaffirmed by the next three Prime Ministers - Wilson, Callaghan and Thatcher . But the fabricated official histories evade the real issue which is not metrication but compulsory metrication - that is, being enforced solely and directly in compliance with EC Directives.

How our elected representatives and senior civil servants can forever tell the lie that compulsory metrication has not been imposed by the EU (they pretend that we committed ourselves to it voluntarily in 1965 or 1972) is beyond belief. No political party in Britain ever mentioned compulsory metrication in its election manifesto nor did any Queen's Speech outlining an administration's legislative programme.

Parliament passed an Act in 1897 making the optional use of metric units in Britain lawful for trade purposes. So for 98 years, until 1995, we enjoyed freedom of choice - the two systems happily co-existing - just as they still do in the USA where Congress had passed a similar Act as long ago as 1866. Consequently every trade, profession and industry that ever wanted to go metric in either country did so long ago.; It follows that compulsory metrication in Britain affects only those who don't want to, including - according to every independent opinion poll - over 80% of the population!

Compulsion was imposed by the EU, after almost a century's discretionary metrication and a quarter of a century's metric education and intermittent government pressure, because nothing short of compulsion backed by criminal sanctions would ever convert the people. The real motive was loathing and envy of the Anglo-American cultural and commercial community - the UK's sharing a common system of customary weights and measures as well as a common language with the world's superpower - which was seen as giving us an unfair competitive advantage in transatlantic trade as well as undermining our European loyalties.

Is there any conceivable reason not to clamour for repeal?

First published in Freedom Today, March 2001