British firms could be allowed to use Imperial measures after Brexit

[Blackleaf]

British food manufacturers could be able to sell goods in pounds and ounces once laws are repatriated from Brussels after Brexit, Andrea Leadsom, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary, has said.

Mrs Leadsom also suggested that, after the UK leaves the European Union in 2019, food manufacturers could be allowed to use teaspoons to demonstrate how much sugar is in food products...

Return of pounds and ounces? Britain might allow firms to use imperial measures after Brexit

EU rules say that imperial measurements can be displayed alongside metric ones, but cannot 'stand out more' CREDIT: DANNY LAWSON/PA

Christopher Hope, chief political correspondent
18 February 2017
The Telegraph

British food manufacturers could be able to sell goods in pounds and ounces once laws are repatriated from Brussels after Brexit, Andrea Leadsom, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Secretary, has said.

Mrs Leadsom also suggested that, after the UK leaves the European Union in 2019, food manufacturers could be allowed to use teaspoons to demonstrate how much sugar is in food products.

Speaking after announcing the winners from councils and schools which promoted British Food Fortnight last Autumn, Mrs Leadsom said that the Government would be able to re-examine labelling rules after Brexit if there was demand to do so.

She said: “Once we have left the EU, we will get the opportunity to look at how we can change rules that will be better for the United Kingdom and whether that’s on weights and measures or issues like teaspoons, those are things for the future.”

In her party conference speech last October, Theresa May told activists that one of the dividends of dropping the EU’s rules would be “how we label our food”.

Mrs May said: “We are going to be a fully independent, sovereign country, a country that is no longer part of a political union with supranational institutions that can override national parliaments and courts.

“And that means we are going, once more, to have the freedom to make our own decisions on a whole host of different matters, from how we label our food to the way in which we choose to control immigration.”

Currently, only beer, cider, milk and precious metals can be sold solely in imperial measures. Manufacturers must use metric measurements - grams, kilograms, millilitres or litres - when selling packaged or loose goods.

Imperial measurements can be displayed alongside metric measurements, but they cannot “stand out more than the metric measurement”, according to EU rules.

Warwick Cairns, a spokesman for the British Weights and Measures Association, said: “I think the key word in all of this is freedom.

“For well over a hundred years, people in Britain were free to buy and sell in whichever measures they pleased. If they wanted to use imperial, they could. If they wanted to use metric, they could. It didn’t hurt anyone or inconvenience anyone.

“In January 2000, that freedom was taken away. There were raids on greengrocers’ shops and market stalls. There were prosecutions. Honest traders were turned into criminals.

“It was madness - and the fact that ‘metric martyrs’ like the late Steven Thoburn still have criminal records on file is nothing short of wicked. It would be a truly wonderful thing to have our freedom back.”

Alexia Robinson, from Love British Food, says EU rules hamper the UK from promoting homegrown produce CREDIT: CLARA MOLDEN FOR THE TELEGRAPH

The news came as Alexia Robinson, the founder of the Love British Food campaign, which organised the Great British Food Awards with the Telegraph, said that leaving the EU would allow public bodies to market British food to shoppers in the UK.

She said that the UK was “doing a great job” promoting British food overseas but was hampered in doing the same to British consumers because of EU rules which do not allow the government to favour British food over produce from other EU member states.

Leaving the EU will allow the Government “to explain properly to the consumer why British farmers' standards are higher and of benefit to the consumer," she said.

Return of pounds and ounces? Britain might allow firms to use imperial measures after Brexit

 

[Curious Cdn]

I can't wait to see the return of the Hog's Head.

 

[Blackleaf]

I can't wait to see the return of the Hog's Head.

Me too. So much better than the boring gram or litre.

A hogshead of beer is 54 gallons - 432 pints - which is about the amount of beer I drink each week.

 

[Curious Cdn]

Me too. So much better than the boring gram or litre.

A hogshead of beer is 54 gallons - 432 pints - which is about the amount of beer I drink each week.

It shows.

 

[Blackleaf]

It shows.

No, not at 2pm. If I was posting here at 11pm tonight it probably would.

 

[EagleSmack]

Brexit!

MAGA!

 

[Bar Sinister]

Right - that would be a marvelous step backward to a system that even its advocates don't know.

Chains, rods, and furlongs anyone?

 

[Blackleaf]

Right - that would be a marvelous step backward to a system that even its advocates don't know.

Why's it a marvellous step back? Imperial measures (based on everyday life) served the British Isles well for centuries before the EU came along and tried to pointlessly shove Metric measures (based on unfathomable science and which are more useless than Imperial measures because they are based on units of 10 rather than units of six, 12, 18 etc) down our throats

Chains, rods, and furlongs anyone?

We all know what a furlong is. Horseracing is a very popular sport in this country.

By the way, do you know what a dekametre, a hectolitre, a newton, a pascal and an ampere are?

 

[DaSleeper]

Right - that would be a marvelous step backward to a system that even its advocates don't know.

Chains, rods, and furlongs anyone?

I still use MPG as a reference point to measure my car fuel consumption
Liters per 100 kilometer don't mean a damn thing to me
My tape measure has both metric and imperial and I use both for different things...I wouldn't know unless I looked it up what a 2"X4" is in metric unless I accessed the converter app on my phone
Temperature I read in Celcius because I was used to Centigrade in science....

I'm bilingual in many ways

 

[Remington1]

Whatever is needed to make sure small and large business can continue to survive. Pettiness and holding grudges are ugly beast.

 

[EagleSmack]

Brexit!

 

[White_Unifier]

Why not just let each business chose as long as it marks clearly which system it's using. Done.

 

[Curious Cdn]

Right - that would be a marvelous step backward to a system that even its advocates don't know.

Chains, rods, and furlongs anyone?

One that I HAVE used a lot in my life is fathoms (6 feet). I have a lot of nautical charts from all over and just a few of them are in metric. The rest are generally in fathoms, which is a useful measures while sailing in keel boats. The bigger ones generaly draw one fathom, on the nose.

 

[Bar Sinister]

Why's it a marvellous step back? Imperial measures (based on everyday life) served the British Isles well for centuries before the EU came along and tried to pointlessly shove Metric measures (based on unfathomable science and which are more useless than Imperial measures because they are based on units of 10 rather than units of six, 12, 18 etc) down our throats

We all know what a furlong is. Horseracing is a very popular sport in this country.

By the way, do you know what a dekametre, a hectolitre, a newton, a pascal and an ampere are?

I notice you did not answer the question even when you were given a chance to look it up. I was raised under the imperial system and it was a horror show. If you think that completely outmoded form of measurement is wonderful why not go back to pennies, half-pennies, and farthings? Oh, and crowns, half crowns, etc. We could also bring back the stone, a measurement no Canadian understands. And then there are hundredweights, gallons, quarts, pints, cups etc. Learning of of this rubbish requires an enormous amount of memorization, time that could be put to much better use.

The really nice thing about S.I. measurements is that people in every nation on the planet are familiar with them, unlike the imperial system which is used in only a handful of nations. Also using imperial forces many people to learn two systems of measurement since anyone in science has to know S.I. in order to work in that field. And then there is the fact that industries like the automobile industry and many others went metric decades ago.


But go ahead. Britain has long been in decline as an industrial power - this will just push it further into insignificance.

 

[Ludlow]

I notice you did not answer the question even when you were given a chance to look it up. I was raised under the imperial system and it was a horror show. If you think that completely outmoded form of measurement is wonderful why not go back to pennies, half-pennies, and farthings? Oh, and crowns, half crowns, etc. We could also bring back the stone, a measurement no Canadian understands. And then there are hundredweights, gallons, quarts, pints, cups etc. Learning of of this rubbish requires an enormous amount of memorization, time that could be put to much better use.

The really nice thing about S.I. measurements is that people in every nation on the planet are familiar with them, unlike the imperial system which is used in only a handful of nations. Also using imperial forces many people to learn two systems of measurement since anyone in science has to know S.I. in order to work in that field. And then there is the fact that industries like the automobile industry and many others went metric decades ago.


But go ahead. Britain has long been in decline as an industrial power - this will just push it further into insignificance.

You don't know sap.

 

[Bar Sinister]

You don't know sap.

But I know a sap when I see one. Thanks for the revelation.

 

[Curious Cdn]

You don't know sap.

The US is backwards and in steep decline, too, now that you mention it.

 

[Tecumsehsbones]

Right - that would be a marvelous step backward to a system that even its advocates don't know.

Chains, rods, and furlongs anyone?

They'll start posting speed limits in furlongs per fortnight.

 

[Blackleaf]

I notice you did not answer the question even when you were given a chance to look it up. I was raised under the imperial system and it was a horror show.

How? The British people were alright with it for centuries.

If you think that completely outmoded form of measurement is wonderful

How can you have an outmoded form of measurement?

l why not go back to pennies, half-pennies, and farthings? Oh, and crowns, half crowns, etc.

Well, we still use the penny here in Britain. One hundred pence (the plural of penny) makes up one pound.

And why NOT go back to half-pennies and crowns and farthings? Why is a farthing and a crown somehow less legitimate than a penny or a pound?

We could also bring back the stone, a measurement no Canadian understands.

No need to bring the stone back. The stone is routinely used in Britain to measure people's weight. I weigh around 14 stone.

And just because no Canadian understands what a stone is does not mean than nobody elsewhere in the world should use it. Many Canadians can't speak Urdu. Should we ban that, too?

And then there are hundredweights, gallons, quarts, pints, cups etc. Learning of of this rubbish requires an enormous amount of memorization, time that could be put to much better use.

You mean to tell me that, in Canada, you ask for a half litre of beer in a pub rather than a pint of beer?

The really nice thing about S.I. measurements is that people in every nation on the planet are familiar with them, unlike the imperial system which is used in only a handful of nations.

Not a good reason to use such measures. Hardly anybody in the world understands Finnish, but the Finns still intend to carry on speaking it.

Also using imperial forces many people to learn two systems of measurement since anyone in science has to know S.I. in order to work in that field.

Scientists do NOT have to use Metric measures. There's nothing stopping the British government ordering all British scientists and scientific institutions to use Imperial measures.

this will just push it further into insignificance.

How? For using her own measurements rather than having foreign measures foisted upon her? The Empire builders used Imperial measures, not Metric.

 

[Bar Sinister]

How? The British people were alright with it for centuries.

How can you have an outmoded form of measurement?

Well, we still use the penny here in Britain. One hundred pence (the plural of penny) makes up one pound.

And why NOT go back to half-pennies and crowns and farthings? Why is a farthing and a crown somehow less legitimate than a penny or a pound?

No need to bring the stone back. The stone is routinely used in Britain to measure people's weight. I weigh around 14 stone.

And just because no Canadian understands what a stone is does not mean than nobody elsewhere in the world should use it. Many Canadians can't speak Urdu. Should we ban that, too?

You mean to tell me that, in Canada, you ask for a half litre of beer in a pub rather than a pint of beer?

Not a good reason to use such measures. Hardly anybody in the world understands Finnish, but the Finns still intend to carry on speaking it.

Scientists do NOT have to use Metric measures. There's nothing stopping the British government ordering all British scientists and scientific institutions to use Imperial measures.

How? For using her own measurements rather than having foreign measures foisted upon her? The Empire builders used Imperial measures, not Metric.

How? The British people were alright with it for centuries.
Actually the British people and those who copied them struggled with it for centuries. That is why every British scientist used metric long before Britain converted. As for the BS about British scientists switching to imperial measures that is something that would make all British research useless so far as the rest of the world is concerned. They might as well publish in Esperanto.

How can you have an outmoded form of measurement?
Because no one else uses it perhaps?

Well, we still use the penny here in Britain. One hundred pence (the plural of penny) makes up one pound.
The 100 pence pound, eh? So you admit that a system based on ten is superior.

No need to bring the stone back. The stone is routinely used in Britain to measure people's weight. I weigh around 14 stone.
Good - I still don't know what you weigh. Do you also measure your height in cubits?

Many Canadians can't speak Urdu. Should we ban that, too?
Urdu? That is a non-sequitur. No one is suggesting learning Urdu. We're talking about going back to a system of measurement that was devised in the Middle Ages.

You mean to tell me that, in Canada, you ask for a half litre of beer in a pub rather than a pint of beer?
No idea what people ask for in pubs - I don't go into them as I don't drink. People who I go to restaurants with who want to drink usually as for "A beer" without mentioning any volume. I expect the same thing happens in bars.

Not a good reason to use such measures. Hardly anybody in the world understands Finnish, but the Finns still intend to carry on speaking it.
Your comment about Finns is also a non-sequitur. The S.I. system is used world wide because everyone knows what it means. It is the reason why no one uses Imperial for scientific studies, manufacturing, or trade. BTW when Finns communicate with the rest of the world I'm betting they use English - Why? Because it is a language used worldwide just as metric is used worldwide.

Scientists do NOT have to use Metric measures. There's nothing stopping the British government ordering all British scientists and scientific institutions to use Imperial measures.
You also don't seem to understand how modern manufacturing, science, or trade works - everything is in S.I. units. A good example is that of the North American auto industry switching to metric years before it became an official measurement. As I said if you really want to push Britain farther back into insignificance go ahead and switch back. Somehow, however, I suspect it is not going to happen just to satisfy a few neo-luddites.

The Empire builders used Imperial measures, not Metric.
Right, and how many of those ex-colonies still use Imperial? I am guessing not one. Imperial has faded as a unit of measurement just as so many other systems have disappeared as well. Give it up. Imperial is not coming back.