Daily Mail
By Peter Hitchens
31st January 2011
To forget is to betray. That is how I feel when I ponder that it is ten years since poor, brave Steve Thoburn was ordered before an English court for an action that could not possibly be a crime.
A market trader who cared nothing for politics, he had sold bananas to a customer in pounds and ounces, rather than in kilograms. And he had grown angry when official busybodies had sought to interfere with this honest private transaction.
He had sniffed the sour scent of totalitarianism, and he had been right. Before I met him, I too was angered by efforts to force metric measures on me, but I did not know why. Since then, I have understood. It is all about liberty. 

Right Side News
Written by TheDailyBell
Eurosceptic Robert Oulds on the Bruges Group, British Global Alternatives, and the End of the EU
The editors of The Daily Bell are pleased to present an exclusive interview with well-known Eurosceptic Robert Oulds.
Introduction: Mr. Oulds is the Director of the London-based Bruges Group, and an international political analyst who has made a specialty of analyzing and opposing the European Union and its political propaganda. Still a young man, Robert not only holds the position of the director of the Bruges Group, he also became a Conservative Councillor in Chiswick for the Chiswick-Homefields ward in May 2002 after discovering how Labour "ripped Chiswick off."

Portsmouth News
By Ruth Scammell
A market trader says he is refusing to convert to the metric system despite facing punishment.
Perry Leon has a fruit and vegetable stall in Gosport High Street, which he runs on market days every Tuesday and Saturday.
For 16 years he has advertised his products in imperial measurements using pounds and ounces.
But when trading standards officers from Hampshire County Council visited his stall on Tuesday he was told to change the signs and the imperial scale he has been using and start measuring in kilograms

Sunday Telegraph Letters
SIR – I would like to congratulate David and Samantha Cameron on the birth of their daughter, who, it was announced, weighed a healthy 6lb 1oz.
When the late Steve Thoburn’s son was born in 2002 he announced the birth weight as 3,790 grams and said: “If birth weights were announced in metric most people wouldn’t have a clue whether the baby was the size of a small tomato or a premature hippopotamus.”
Let us hope that Mr Cameron and the Coalition do the decent thing and announce that it will be their intention to move towards a pardon for the five Metric Martyr traders convicted under the metrication regulations and let justice prevail, allowing us to inch towards a victory for common sense.
Neil Herron
Campaign Director
Metric Martyrs Defence Fund
Boldon, Tyne and Wear

The Shields Gazette
27th August 2010
I WOULD like to congratulate David and Samantha Cameron on the birth of their daughter, who weighed in at a healthy 6lb 1oz.
It is nice to see they have followed in the footsteps of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who both announced the birth weights of their children in Imperial measures.
The difference with the Labour prime ministers and Mr Cameron was that their Government was actively prosecuting market traders and shopkeepers for using such Imperial measures.

West End Extra
by JAMIE WELHAM
ANTI-terror laws have been used by Westminster Council to snoop on members of the public 82 times since 2005.
City Hall authorised surveillance under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) to spy on greengrocers refusing to convert from imperial to metric measure, investigate an anti-social “street preacher”, monitor retailers suspected of selling knives to children and identify dog-owners who allow pets to foul the pavements.

Daily Mail
By Christopher Leake
Last updated at 1:01 PM on 27th June 2010
British shoppers are to be banned from buying eggs by the dozen under new regulations approved by the European Parliament.
For the first time, eggs and ­other products such as oranges and bread rolls will be sold by weight instead of by the number contained in a packet.
Until now, Britain has been exempt from EU regulations that forbid the selling of goods by number. But last week MEPs voted to end Britain’s deal despite objections from UK members.

Daily Telegraph
The law lord ruling that backed the sacking of a Christian relationship counsellor was irrational, says Christopher Booker
Lord Justice Laws last week ruled that Gary McFarlane was rightly given the sack as a relationship counsellor for refusing to give "sex therapy lessons" to gay couples because it was against his Christian principles. According to Laws, "law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds is irrational, divisive, capricious, arbitrary".

The Ecologist
Molly Scott Cato
Molly would glady have been tied to the stake with the other Metric Martyrs... but, being that she wasn't, she's keen to point out why weights and measures matter to all
My inability to cope with metric measurements is a source of endless amusement to my children. My second son, who is now studying medicine at Cambridge, has to be called in on an annual basis to measure the dried fruits for the Christmas puddings, while my daughter has recalibrated my cake recipes by working out that an egg, which I still think of as 2 oz., actually weighs 100g. If economics must be, as it would seem from the academy, a matter of numerical precision, then you will have to count me out.
 

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