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For decades, Britain has had campaigners against metric (or the “Napoleonic system” as some of them call it), who were generally on the populist right. There was a grocer who refused to display prices in metric measurements and, when he was fined, refused to pay and was sent to gaol; the tabloids called him the “Metric Martyr”, and lionised him as a hero alongside those who vandalise speed cameras. One of the promises of the Brexit campaign was to abolish the metric system and go back to imperial measures, though after they won, they realised that the imperial measurements have been legally defined in reference to SI units for decades, and establishing a new basis for measurement would be far too expensive and disruptive to do just to placate a bunch of pub bores and opinionated van drivers, so they dropped it.
So Britain has a mixed system (beer and milk are measured in pints, and road distances/speeds in miles, but most other things are metric), only the fluid ounce, which is 1/20 of a pint, is legally defined as 28.4ml or so. Even worse, road distances given in yards (each being around 0.9 of a metre) are actually in metres, going on the assumption that the average person can’t tell the difference. Of course, they can’t call them metres, as there’d be irate letters to The Times and questions in Parliament.
There were some polls asking why people voted for Brexit. Not only where there respondents wanting imperial measurements, there was even a small but significant group that wanted the return of pre-decimal currency, which was abolished in 1971.
For those not familiar with the UK’s old currency, it used to be 12 pence in a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound, and with a variety of coins representing odd combinations of those.
When Canada abolished the penny I was advocating for renaming our currency the pound, just so we could divide it up into 20 shillings. Each shilling would of course still be 5¢.
Oh Jesus. Imagine what Nigel Farage would say if he overheard me giving the measurements of my curtains in centimeters. He'd have me catapulted to Rwanda.
Wait, the yard distances were metres all along!? I could have used the time spent learning my 0.9 times tables for better things!
imperial measurements have been legally defined in reference to SI units for decades
This is the important bit.
Effectively, we are metric, but display things using the old units sometimes.Gaol is jail, for the rest of us.