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Brits cheer as EU gives in on metric
11th September 2007 16:56
“A victory for the common man against the madness of Brussels”. That was how one observer greeted the news today (11 September) that the UK will be allowed to continue using imperial measurements. Local campaigners have fought a very vocal campaign against the “right” to continue to use the pound, the pint and the ounce. After years of rancor against what many in the UK regarded as a misguided dictat from Brussels, the European Commission has ditched plans to force metric measures on the Brits. “There is no good reason why these imperial measures should not continue to be used and we've decided to enshrine this fact in EU law,” said Günter Verheugen, European Commission vice president responsible for enterprise and industry. The EU finally realised that the UK love for the pound and ounce would not affect intra-EU trade – in fact, one could say that the use of imperial measures actually helps in trade with the US. No doubt many Brits will be raising a pint to the news tonight…
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Why the obsession with regulating and banning measures anyway? Measures are easily convertible, and people should be free to use the ones that they like. People seem to complain about meeting the the same dull brands worldwide - Coca Cola, Starbucks, McD etc - but then seem happy enough to impose uniform measures. They'd do better to ban minor languages. Or perhaps standardise on one particular word processor, say. A stupid point, but made to point out the stupidity of legislating measurements. By all means voluntarily standardise, but don't ban people using other measures if they want to.
Andrew Denny