British Industry and the Metric System
Everyone who gripes about the metric system has contributed to the loss of all UK motor and engineering factories, which continued manufacturing their products designed in inches after 1975. The job losses since Accession have been published as between 8 and 10 million. That is a vast national scandal.
The 1964 Wilson government's policy that British Industry would adopt metric units "within ten years" was announced in Parliament on 24th May 1965 by the President of the Board of Trade at that time, Rt Hon Douglas Jay MP through a Parliamentary Written Answer to a question by John Horner, Labour MP for Oldbury and Halesowen.
The reason for this was that the Commonwealth nations started to dismantle the Commonwealth Preference System of trade protection, so that they could import foreign products like FIAT, VW, Renault and Citroen cars and trucks,buses, trains, generators, construction equipment and all kinds of vital products from other countries. They wanted change from the Mother Country.
British industry, including the UK operations of US industrial companies, was bound to lose its existing market share in the Commonwealth countries, and market share in the home country, as British garage owners and users of transport and industrial equipment started to buy imports in volume.
Certain British companies, particularly BMC centred on Longbridge, thought they were safe concentrating on the North American market, so they ignored the government policy and continued making inch cars. However, the Annus Horribilis of BMC was 1967, which is recorded in the book "The Leyland Papers" by BBC journalist Graham Turner. In 1968 the Americans imported 80,000 cars from BMC, but this fell literally to zero over five years to 1973. It may have been pique by America at the UK joining the European Common Market. Some of them are resentful people if they are not top dog, as was plainly seen when the UK and France jointly presented Concorde.
The above market shifts meant that British industry had to find alternative markets to replace losses in its traditional markets. The major option was the European mainland, which had dropped Whitworth threads, inches and all the things which Britain celebrates and promotes through heritage culture.
The industrial metrication programme was necessary because we depended for the survival of our engineering-based industries on foreign people buying them in volume, who also realised that we were losing our Commonwealth, or at least exclusive terms protecting our trade. We make a fundamental and fatal mistake by ignoring, shunning, lampooning or despising our European neighbours. The weakness lies with us, not with them. UK companies cannot hope to survive if our nation through its media publicly insults its actual and potential customers abroad. Foreign opinion-formers can read and on TV understand our language, but we cannot comprehend theirs.
The famous British scientists Sir Isaac Newton and James Prescott Joule did their experiments and wrote their theses in English weights and measures. It was difficult comparing them with the French Academy of Sciences in the 17th century, and our industries based on pounds, feet and inches were prosperous in the British Empire of the 19th Century, through to its demise in 1945.
At the opening of the first motorway (the Preston Bypass) the metric system was introduced on the distance posts along the hard (and sometimes soft!) shoulder, and the Weights and Measures Act of 1st July 1963 for the first time fixed the relationship between the yard and the metre, and the pound and the kilogram in Law. This would enable us to communicate with equality in science and industry and economic development with our neighbours, but we messed it up and threw it all away. We make nothing, import everything, export nothing, are subservient to all other industrial nations, yet make ourselves out to be successful. Britain is a nation of complacent leaders, who have been unable to run anything except catering establishments since the Americans dumped us. They did it first at the Boston Tea party and again in 1968. More detail can be obtained from the UK Metric Association website.
By: The Metric Crusader
Comments from visitors
Can you let us know if Heaven has gone metric please, are they still using good old miles and feet, or maybe rods, perches, chains etc?
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What is even more laughable is when a program is filmed in the USA and the participants use miles and the commentators use Kilometres.
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1. While the joiner making new windows for a kitchen renovation and the builder who would be building the openings were discussing sizes, the joiner used millimetres and the builder used inches. The conversation would have been hilarious if we weren't spending a few tens of thousands of pounds on the project!
2. My wife's new car has a digital dashboard, and the ability to display speed and distance in either miles per hour or km/h (I assume for compatibility with driving on the European mainland). However fuel consumption (actually, fuel economy) is always displayed in miles per gallon and the trip odometer only displays journey distances in miles! WTF? (Should I be grateful that the temperature readout is always in °C and the tyre pressures in the manual are only given in kPa?)
3. Down at my local greengrocers, some of the labels have the metric unit prices in larger print or on top, while some have imperial unit prices more prominently displayed. As the units are not often clearly written, you have to stop and double-check every price to discover whether something is rather cheap or rather expensive! (Oh, and sometimes the conversion is wrong as well. Aaarrrggh!)
4. My nephew and niece are taught metric units, not imperial, at school. I know this because I am a teacher myself and this is what teachers are supposed to teach (though later one one teaches how to convert between metric and common customary units). I was also taught in metric only when I was at school through the 1980s - again, because this was/is the policy. Yet when we asked them how heavy they were recently the answers were in stones! (Needless to say, they don't actually know that stones are made up of pounds, or how many pounds they consist of.)
5. (there's many more, but I've run out of time...)
Why can this country seemingly never just do something properly and move on?
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"1829 mm = 6 feet" I said.
"Yes!" was the reply
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Metric Measures - 11-Dec-10 09:08
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Jojo Bizarro - 26-Sep-10 14:09
I use metric myself when measuring anything, to the nearest mm is better than nearest 1/16th of an inch.
All our road signs are in imperial so why are commentators using Kilometres?
It is sometimes farcical.
I was watching a documentary, filmed in the u.sa., on TV the other day
the commentary was in metres and kilometres but the participants on the program were using imperial.
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the SI unit of radiation dose. Radiation carries energy, and when it is absorbed by matter the matter receives this energy. The dose is the amount of energy deposited per unit of mass. One gray is defined to be the dose of one joule of energy absorbed per kilogram of matter, or 100 rad. The unit is named for the British physician L. Harold Gray (1905-1965), an authority on the use of radiation in the treatment of cancer.
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L. Harold Gray - 15-Sep-07 21:19
Is this the relative amount of cloud cover over Britain on a miserable winter's day?
A HectoGray equal to 100% percent cloud cover
A milligray equal to a single whisp of cloud in the sky.
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KiloGruesome - 15-Sep-07 20:33
Germany, a solid metric country where no one debates obsolete versus metric issues, is the worlds largest exporter. They flood the world with metric products. As does China and every other country in Asia.
The US and UK are in deep financial trouble as a result of exporting their manufacturing to metric countries. As long as imperialists hide behind the disguise of tradition the world will continue to do their buying elsewhere and play a major role in impoverishing both the US and the UK. A deserved punishment.
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Who was the first person to propose a coherent system of measurement based on decimal numbers? John Wilkins, first president of the Royal Society in 1668. It should be noted that Gabrielle Mouton published his proposals in 1670.
Who cast the current prototype kilogram? James Mathey & Co of London in the mid 1880’s. They also cast the prototype metre which was in use from 1889 until 1960 when the meter was defined by reference to a particular wavelength of light rather than to a particular artefact.
Who says that the metric system is not British?
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"Firstly, don't try to obtain a quarter of a quantity using the metric system. You can't do it without resorting to fractions"
Mr 2007, isn't a quarter a fraction? Or am I missing something? 1/4. That looks like a fraction to me. 1/4 inch - an imperial fraction. 250 mm (1/4 metre) - a metric fraction?
Get your "facts" right before lecturing others on theirs.
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Dave the Rave - 14-Sep-07 08:38
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The Miracle of Septenary Desig - 11-Sep-07 20:32
God, Queen and Country
The Paris Commune did not happen until 1871
There was nothing "Communist", in the modern sense with the French Revoution
The French "Communes" were very similar to the English Parishes. They had their poor laws too. Nothing Communist about these parishes either.
English, too, is full of stupid words like
hemidemisemiquaver
floccinaucinihilipification
Oracle2007's feeble history of science beggars belief
Don't take a bag of 12 or 16 apples if you're going to a party of seven.
Metric prefixes Deka- and Hecto- are in very common use; as are Milli, Centi- and Deci-
Kilo- is the most common.
Oracle2007 failed to provide us with a formal definition of what a pound was.
Oracle2007 is probably a diehard on the currency: a believer in the English Pound Sterling. Would he like to explain what a Troy pound of sterling silver is?
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SI Unitarian - 11-Sep-07 16:02
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arguments if you show them the flaws in their thinking! As I posted my previous
comments, I thought "Here come all the insults about chains, furlongs, barleycorns, etc.,
again. Surely someone will have a new angle this time?"
But, no. SI Unitarian, desperate to parade his knowledge of archaic terms, wades in with
the usual mishmash of obsolete measurements to support his immature view that the
imperial system is out of date and should be laid to rest. In case you haven't noticed, SIU,
nobody uses such terms any more - except those who have run out of anti-imperial system
arguments.
What SIU overlooks (perhaps deliberately) is that the metric system itself is riddled with
equally potty terminology, unintelligible to the point of lunacy to the average human
being. Try using the prefixes deca, hecto, tera, peta, exa, zetta, yotta, atto, zeppo, yocto, etc., in everyday speech and count the baffled looks you receive. But, hey, it's metrication so it's good for you.
As for Communism starting in 1848, SIU should go back to his history books and study
what was happening in the French Communes. Marx, Engels and Co., just wrote down
and extrapolated what was already established fact. But I forgot: nowadays they don't
teach history prior to the late Nineteenth Century, do they?
It's sad really. As predicted, this metrocrat ignored practically every single one of the
points I made. I suggest he goes back to measuring the distance between the Equator and
the North Pole in yoctometres. But don't take along a bag of 10 apples if you're in a party
of 3: you'll go mad before you find a way of dividing them evenly.
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There are exactly 10,000,000 metres from the equator to the north pole via the Paris meridien.
Oracle2007 would like his beer served in kennings, though the span of his brain is limited, being of a barleycorn size.
Perhaps he still buys cloth for his trousers in ells; I cannot fathom why.
Or he still ploughs his land in oxgates and bovates.
I will be charging him a knight's fee for all this information.
Communism was not defined until 1848 in the Communist Manifesto, so I can't see how the metric system can have anything to do with it.
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SI Unitarian - 11-Sep-07 11:30
imposed on nations by compulsion. It's a Communist system, of course, perfected by the
French Revolutionaries to ensure that, not only would all people be equal, they would
also think exactly the same - or forfeit their heads. To this end (while the blood-crazed
Terror was raging through Paris streets) they originally proposed not only kilometres,
decagrams, etc., they also wanted a 100-minute hour; a 10-day week; and a 10-month
year. It couldn't possibly work, of course, but, hey, it's metrication, so it's perfection!
The absurd system would never have taken off at all had not Napoleon marched across
Europe, leaving millions dead and countries forced into adopting metrication in his wake. At first, Napoleon had listened to the siren voices of the barmy Revolutionaries but, as the years
went by, he began to have doubts. One day, very puzzled, he said "I can envisage a
quarter of an inch but I find it impossible to envisage the thousandth part of a metre".
Napoleon had finally realised that long-established traditions of human existence carried
more weight and were more desirable than trendy, new thinking, applied just for the sake
of change. On his death bed, he was asked "Is there anything you regret?" He replied,
"Yes, the Metric System and how my Armies inflicted it on Europe".
But, alas, it was all too late.
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