Britain tells merchants: Go metric or go to jail

LONDON -- Never one to give an inch in matters European, Britain nevertheless has followed a mandate from its European Union partners and reluctantly banished its 800-year-old system of imperial weights and measurement in favor of metrics.

The result has all but left Britons crying into their 0.5683 liter of beer.

Retailers face fines of up to $8,000 and possible imprisonment if they refuse to adopt liters and meters -- a law traditionalists believe is more a measurement of bureaucratic stupidity.

"If somebody told me 20 years ago that 'inch,' 'foot' and 'yard' would be four-letter words, and that I could be sent to prison for using them, I would say they were mad," says Bruce Robertson, chairman of the British Weights and Measurements Society.

Britain's beloved draft beer will still be sold in pints, road signs will remain in miles and precious metals will still be measured in troy ounces. But under the legislation, which took effect Jan. 1, it is a criminal offense to sell most packaged or loose products in imperial measures.

Britain has been inching toward metrification since 1965, but this year marks the most ambitious overhaul. More than 60,000 retailers were ordered to convert 200,000 scales at a cost the government estimated at $54 million.

The Brussels-based European Commission has allowed British retailers to print imperial measures alongside metric ones until 2009 -- but shopkeepers are forbidden to use the words "pound" or "foot" during any sale.

National grumbling has not reached such epic proportions since 1971, when Britain abandoned shillings and pennies for a decimal currency system.

"We wish the British would stand up like the Americans and say 'no,' but we're too polite," says Jose O'Ware, who so far has refused to convert her Fourth Avenue Blinds shop in east London.

"These champagne socialists over in Brussels are having a field day at the public's expense," says butcher David Stephens, co-owner of Mandy's Chop Shop in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, northeast of London.

Stephens was served with a metric infringement notice and had until Feb. 3 to get rid of six illegal scales. But the deadline passed with no action taken -- and his scales securely in place.

Stephens, who says he's had thousands of supportive phone calls and letters from across the world, is itching to be a test case.

Imperial measures were first introduced to Britain by King Edward I in the 13th century. He ordered that a common iron yardstick be used throughout the kingdom, and decreed that the foot should be one-third the length of the yard.

By the 1670s, French scientists had developed their competing metric system. The meter was designed to be one-ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the poles.

The recent imposition of the French system has forced Britain's metric martyrs to adopt desperate measures.

Not too long after the new system went into effect, Bruce Robertson set up a "Pound of Flesh" stall outside his Trago Mills food store in Newton Abbot, Devon, in southwest England, to sell apples, potatoes and English sprouts.

Dressed in a prison uniform, he handed out receipts with names of the local trading standards officers and encouraged customers to report him, while a scoreboard kept a running total of his metric offenses.

By midafternoon he'd broken the law 200 times, but he was not fined.

Britain's Department of Trade and Industry has said its policy is to work with retailers while the transition is under way, and the prospect of anyone serving prison time for metric offenses is unlikely.

The new rules bring Britain in line with the rest of the continent, and most of the world. Officially, the United States is next to follow Europe into metrification, although -- as in Britain -- the weight of public opinion is firmly against it.

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