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Give An Inch, Take A Mile
Commissioner attacks British press as EU announces it will not pursue "abolition" of imperial measurements
The European Commission has confirmed that it has abandoned its demand that Britain phase out its system of weights and measures within the next three years. Newspapers are describing the change of direction as a victory for Britain's "metric martyrs" - a group of traders who risked criminal convictions for their refusal to trade in metric measures.
Writing on the EU's Europa site, EU Vice-President Günter Verheugen, Commissioner for Enterprise and Industry said, "Britain should continue to use imperial measures for as long as it likes."
"After an extensive EU-wide consultation exercise including the Great British public, to assess the impact of Britain's use of imperial measures on the EU Single Market, we're delighted the results have confirmed what we always knew to be the case: there is no problem whatsoever with Brits drinking in pint glasses, operating in miles, or using pounds and ounces alongside their metric equivalent."
The Commission is producing legislation which it says will grant Britain the right to use its system of weights and measures indefinitely. Traders, however (he doesn't mention this) will still face prosecution if they fail to present their goods for sale in metric measurements: The EU reversal simply means they can continue to use imperial measurements too.
He adds, though, that "Eurocrats" never tried to ban Britain's imperial system, pointing the finger at Britons who set up metrication committees in the 1960s. Verheugen can't resist a swipe at Britain's Eurosceptic press, who he blames for stirring up anti-EU "metric myths."
"Some sections of the British media have regularly jumped on the bogus bandwagon that maintained with varying degrees of hysteria, that the EU was "banning" the pint and that this was part of a wider plot against Britishness," he writes. Sounds to us like a Scooby Doo villain hauled before the cops, muttering "if it wasn't for you pesky kids, I'd have gotten away with it."
