Your article rightly mocks the government’s announcement that wine can now be sold in 568ml (1 pint) bottles (Pint of wine, anyone? UK looks to bring back ‘silly measure’, 27 December). If this is as far as the “benefits of Brexit” go then they are very sparse indeed.
Using imperial measures in the retail trade is without logic, and this consultation outcome showed that the British people have sense. Out of over 100,000 respondents, just 0.4% said we should use imperial units only, and just 1.3% said imperial deserved more prominence; 81% favoured the status quo, whereby metric is the primary indicator on packaging; the rest favoured metric only. This despite the consultation using leading questions.
Metric units have been the main units taught in schools since 1974. Few people under 60 remember learning imperial units properly. How many people know how many stones there are a ton or how many yards in a mile? In metric all you have to do is add zeros.
Ironically, metric is a British invention (John Wilkins in 1668), while imperial is not. After all, the other name for imperial is the French term Avoirdupois.
We can now confidently say that imperial units should go the way of shillings and old pence, and the people are behind us. We are pleased that of the three new wine bottle sizes proposed by the government, two, namely 200ml and 500ml, are metric. Common sense at last!
Dr Peter Burke
Chair, UK Metric Association
• You report that the public found “little to like” in the government’s 2022 consultation questionnaire on the reintroduction of imperial measures. Indeed – 98.7% of respondents were in favour of using metric units as the primary or sole unit for the sale of goods.
This represents a remarkable result in the face of the questionnaire’s devious use of the word “choice” in its series of manipulative questions, such as: “If you had a choice, would you want to purchase items (i) in imperial units? (ii) in imperial units alongside a metric equivalent?” It was the Henry Ford school of questionnaire design: “You can choose any measures you like as long as they’re imperial.” The result suggests that to express a preference for the metric status quo, other respondents must have had to do as I did: bypass the questions and make maximum use of the comments boxes.
It was clear, however, that the government was never entirely going to take no for an answer, and so, in its desperate search for Brexit benefits, we are after all to have wine by the pint. But one wonders if it will find any more favour with the public than the consultation’s unpersuasive offer of red meat by the pound.
Helen Johnson
Sedbergh, Cumbria
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