Peter Hitchen gives his take on our Stalinist councils' treatment of traders who use Imperial measures.....
We’re getting pounds and ounces back: Oh, and pigs might fly...
18th October 2008
Daily Mail
Legally impounded: Janet Devers was prosecuted for using imperial measures on her market stall
So sorry but I don’t believe for a moment that the furious, spiteful campaign against British customary weights and measures is over. Just because some powerless ‘Minister’ issues a few guidelines to town halls, do you really think that you will be getting your pounds and ounces, pints and gallons back? Not a chance.
Even an intervention by a senior member of our real government, the EU, has made no difference. European Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said last September that the British Press had ‘invented’ the idea that selling by the pound was illegal.
Brussels had no desire to ban it.
Two days later the little Stalins of Hackney Council (aided by our police force, always zealously available when political correctness must be served) descended on Janet Devers, a market trader, and began to prosecute her for doing exactly what Mr Verheugen had said she was allowed to do.
She now has a criminal record. Some invention, Commissioner Verheugen.
Nothing has really changed. It’s just New Labour trying desperately to get votes wherever it can by pretending to care what we think. The Useless Tories will probably join in. You’ll see more of this, as the Election nears. But it is a fake.
Schools - even monstrously expensive private ones where parents are supposed to be more important than the State - will continue to suppress our customary measures and refuse to teach them, even though anyone travelling or working in the USA needs to know them.
The BBC will continue to use metres and (mispronounced) kilometres aggressively in all its news bulletins, nature programmes and soap operas, signs on motorways will increasingly be in kilometres, fuel will gush out of pumps in litres that almost nobody understands.
Our official classes hate our ancient, polished-in-use, human measures precisely because they are ours and because they are British.
Like the Common Law, jury trial and constitutional monarchy, we fashioned them here during a thousand years of freedom and independence.
And they have all got to go because that freedom and independence are rapidly coming to an end. We live in the afterglow of our dying liberty. From now on it’s top-down, do-as-you’re-told standardised, globalised, bland, inhuman and ugly, like it or not.
Those who think this is just a quirky side issue are mistaken. Once the State has the power to force its way into private transactions between individuals, you are no longer free.
dailymail.co.uk
We’re getting pounds and ounces back: Oh, and pigs might fly...
18th October 2008
Daily Mail
Legally impounded: Janet Devers was prosecuted for using imperial measures on her market stall
So sorry but I don’t believe for a moment that the furious, spiteful campaign against British customary weights and measures is over. Just because some powerless ‘Minister’ issues a few guidelines to town halls, do you really think that you will be getting your pounds and ounces, pints and gallons back? Not a chance.
Even an intervention by a senior member of our real government, the EU, has made no difference. European Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said last September that the British Press had ‘invented’ the idea that selling by the pound was illegal.
Brussels had no desire to ban it.
Two days later the little Stalins of Hackney Council (aided by our police force, always zealously available when political correctness must be served) descended on Janet Devers, a market trader, and began to prosecute her for doing exactly what Mr Verheugen had said she was allowed to do.
She now has a criminal record. Some invention, Commissioner Verheugen.
Nothing has really changed. It’s just New Labour trying desperately to get votes wherever it can by pretending to care what we think. The Useless Tories will probably join in. You’ll see more of this, as the Election nears. But it is a fake.
Schools - even monstrously expensive private ones where parents are supposed to be more important than the State - will continue to suppress our customary measures and refuse to teach them, even though anyone travelling or working in the USA needs to know them.
The BBC will continue to use metres and (mispronounced) kilometres aggressively in all its news bulletins, nature programmes and soap operas, signs on motorways will increasingly be in kilometres, fuel will gush out of pumps in litres that almost nobody understands.
Our official classes hate our ancient, polished-in-use, human measures precisely because they are ours and because they are British.
Like the Common Law, jury trial and constitutional monarchy, we fashioned them here during a thousand years of freedom and independence.
And they have all got to go because that freedom and independence are rapidly coming to an end. We live in the afterglow of our dying liberty. From now on it’s top-down, do-as-you’re-told standardised, globalised, bland, inhuman and ugly, like it or not.
Those who think this is just a quirky side issue are mistaken. Once the State has the power to force its way into private transactions between individuals, you are no longer free.
dailymail.co.uk
