This is the title of a recent article by Robert Peston, the BBC’s Business Editor. Clearly, successive UK governments over the years have failed to steer the country away from the latter and towards the former. We suggest a simple step that would help.
Category: Education
Familiar with imperial? Do you know that…?
Miles, yards, feet and inches, pints, pounds and stones. Yes, fifty years after the UK embarked on the metric transition, we still need to be familiar with some of those old units. In this article, Ronnie Cohen looks at some of the less well known and largely forgotten features of the imperial system.
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The 1895 Select Committee on weights and measures
This article looks back to the findings and recommendations of the 1895 Parliamentary Select Committee on weights and measures.
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What do imperial traffic signs cost?
One of our regular readers, John Frewen-Lord, a quantity surveyor, has attempted to answer this question. In this article J F-L refers to the junior Education Minister’s suggestion that there would be more teaching of imperial units in the future school curriculum (subsequently played down by Department officials as “no significant change”).
UKMA regards the Minister’s suggestion as a political stunt to appease Eurosceptic critics (not that it has anything to do with “Europe”). It has still to be formally consulted upon and is unlikely to get any further. Nevertheless, John’s analysis is a useful demonstration of the order of possible costs of the DfT’s obstinate refusal to join the rest of the world and permit metric units on the UK’s road signs. This is what he wrote:
A UK metric time line from 1980
In June last year, we published a time line up to 1980 showing progress towards the adoption of a single, simple, logical and coherent measurement system in the British Isles. We now bring this story up to date.
A trip to the Imperial Scrapyard
When consulting a reference book from 1896, we came across an article about imperial measures which provides a timely reminder that, even in its heyday, this ‘system’ was not as straightforward as some would now have us believe.
Cabinet Office gets its kilowatts in a twist
Visitors to the Cabinet Office website will see that this branch of the Government is measuring its energy use in “kilowatt-hours per hour”. It is a sad reflection on the quality of civil service support given to this crucial part of the Government machine that such an incongruous and scientifically illiterate measure should be published.
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London 2012 – winners and losers
As the Games draw to a close, we take a look at some of the winners and losers.
UK metric myths tumble during the Games
Metric Views revisits some of the myths around the metric system, and asks readers to suggest how many of these might have lost credibility as a result of the welcome given in the UK to the Olympic Games of 2012.
Metric majority attained
Preliminary results of the 2011 census for England and Wales indicate that those of the population who were taught metric at school now comfortably outnumber those who were taught Imperial.
Metric Views 