Article by Stewart Steven in the Mail on Sunday 21/01/2001
Click on the blue text for amplification.
Steve Thoburn, the green-grocer and market trader from Sunderland who is paraded before the world as a 'metric martyr', has my sympathies. You will know the case because this great newspaper is foremost among those who have pleaded Mr Thoburn's cause. Poor old Steve - a puppet in a wider game in which others are pulling the strings. His legal bills are being paid by the UK Independence Party, which wants this country out of Europe, the Bruges Group, which pretends it is not quite so extreme but in truth is, and an organisation called the British Weights and Measures Association, which has close links with the UKIP. People say the local authority was a bit heavy-handed in prosecuting him. Forget it. Mr Thoburn's backers were gagging for it- forcing the issue until Sunderland City Council had no alternative but to act. How do I know that? Because in 1995 the BWMA told us so. In a Press release it has been careful not to remind newspapers about recently, it announced a campaign of civil disobedience because 'this unpopular law will only be repealed when the jails start to fill with Britons'. I hope William 'Law and Order' Hague didn't know that when he sent his emissary to meet Mr Thoburn and offer his support. Everyone involved in Mr Thoburn's high-profile campaign, even his barrister Michael Shrimpton, a leading member of the Bruges Group (a fact I hope he told the court), is involved in one or other of the organisations I have mentioned. Everything about Mr Thoburn's case is politically motivated. Well, you may say, so what?
Mr Thoburn is a victim of a piece of anti-democratic legislation inspired by Brussels. Let's take a look. Almost everything we buy is sold by weight, volume or length. Since the earliest times, as the most basic piece of consumer protection, these matters have been closely regulated. Weights and measures are mentioned in the Magna Carta. In his first message to Congress, George Washington drew attention to the need for 'uniformity in currency and weights and measures'.
The decision to introduce metrication into Britain was made by Parliament long before we joined Europe, under the Weights and measures Act of 1963 (Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas Home). In 1968 a Metrication Board was set up by two of Labour's foremost anti-European ministers, Tony Benn and Douglas Jay. We can go back still further. In 1875 (Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli) Britain signed up to an international agreement, called the Systeme International d'Unites. The object was to establish a universal system of weights and measures based upon the metric system. That work and the organisation it spawned is still very much alive today. Its standards of measurements - known as SIs - are pretty well universally accepted. The world eventually will be a metric world A lot of people question why we need all this uniformity. If all we ever did was to go shopping to the local market, we wouldn't. But there's more to life than that. As Ian Lang, the then Tory President of the Board of Trade, put it in 1995: 'The United Kingdom adopted a metrication pro-gramme following representations in the Sixties from British industry which was concerned it would be put at a disadvantage internationally …the metric system is now used almost universally
Oddly enough, it is in sport that you will find the point perfectly illustrated. When I was at school, I ran the 100 yards and the quarter of a mile. Today that would be 100 metres and 400 metres. Why did our governing bodies of sport capitulate? Not because they were a bunch of cringing, toadying, namby pamby crypto-federalists, but because not to have done so would have been a piece of self-defeating nonsense which would have led to national humiliation and shame How could our athletes have competed successfully on the world stage running over one distance, when all their preparation in this country was over another? What is true of sport is true of trade and industry a thousand times over. Probably our friend Mr Thoburn isn't aware of all of this but you can be sure his backers are. They hate the whole idea of the EU and bend and twist respectable argument to convert more of us to their cause. They are not interested in truth, only in politics. They distort facts, run bogus campaigns and, most disgracefully, risk the imprisonment of a decent if deluded man. They know perfectly well metrication has little or nothing to do with Brussels. If the EU had never been invented, we would still be where we are today.
For us, the generation caught in between, it is difficult and some-times infuriating. I doubt I will ever have a fixed image in my mind of what constitutes a hectare. I know what a mile is. I have very little sense of a kilometre. I ask my butcher for a pound of sausages. He knows what I mean and weighs them out in kilograms. I am afraid it has to be like that. We can't run two systems in parallel for long without making our weights and measures utterly incomprehensible. We're unlucky because we're the folk that got the short straw. But should Mr Thoburn go to prison? Of course not - and he doesn't need to. He risks imprisonment not because of the offences but because he will have refused to pay a fine.
Actually, contrary to what you may have read, the law itself is not that onerous. If Mr Thoburn wants to sell his bananas using imperial weights he is free to do so. All the regulations (agreed by the Eurosceptic Francis Maude at the EC Council of Ministers in 1989) insist upon is that anyone who sells loose goods displays the weight in metric as well as imperial and weighs those goods on a metric scale You may find that a bit pettifogging but throughout history weights have been carefully regulated.