The prime minister is tapping into a history of xenophobia, pseudoscience and fears over lost political sovereignty, says author James Vincent
The prime minister is tapping into a history of xenophobia, pseudoscience and fears over lost political sovereigntyPhotograph: George Marks/Getty ImagesPhotograph: George Marks/Getty Imagesof measurement seems, at first, like an odd choice for Boris Johnson. From a political perspective. The move is obviously pure piffle: a dumbshow designed to placate the conservative base while distracting and antagonising rivals.
My own introduction to the subject came a few years ago when researching the history of measurement.
Prior to the introduction of metric units, France’s system of measurement was in disarray. The right to define units of length, capacity and weight was a privilege of the nobility, which led to a profusion of units, often traded under different values while retaining the same name. “[T]he infinite perplexity of measures exceeds all comprehension,” the English agriculturist Arthur Young commented when visiting the country in 1789.
As a result, reforming weights and measures was high on the revolutionary agenda, and seen as a way to restore power to the ordinary woman and man. The French intellectual elite, the, France would have the metre; a unit derived from the latest scientific research and defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole.
Naturally, this was the cause of a great deal of suspicion in the UK. And in the following century, as metric units spread across Europe and the debate over their adoption gained momentum in the UK, anti-metric campaigners marshalled all manner of bombastic arguments. They decried the metric system as overly complex, unnatural; the product of atheist revolutionaries, and – worst of all –
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