Call to end metric confusion

For almost 40 years Britain has been in a state of confusion.

Caught in limbo between the metric and imperial systems of measurement, we gauge our weight in stones but buy much of our food by the kilo. We drink beer by the pint but bottles of water by the litre.

Today the confusion was highlighted by a report from an influential body.

The UK Metric Association (UKMA) urged Tony Blair to phase out all remaining imperial measurements "as soon as possible" - by 2009 at the latest.

It said the use of "two confused, competing systems" was hugely wasteful and potentially dangerous.

However, the campaign - launched almost 40 years after Harold Wilson's Labour government first ordered metrification - was condemned by backers of the imperial system. They said Britons would never be forced to use a system they did not like. The UKMA said Britain was the only country in the world apart from the USA that started converting to metric and then failed to complete the process.

In a report called A Very British Mess, it said successive governments had lacked the courage to force through metrification. This had allowed opponents to successfully portray metric measurements as an alien system imposed on Britain by foreigners, and had left a "confusing muddle".

The report pointed out anomalies such as petrol being sold in litres but its consumption being measured in miles per gallon. Most bizar re, it said, was the hybrid "centiheit" temperature system, where cold winter weather tended to be measured in centigrade, while hot summer weather is sometimes referred to in fahrenheit. The campaign is supported by former Tory Chancellor Lord Howe, a member of the Conservative Cabinet that scrapped the government Metrication Board in 1980. He said he was driven by guilt over "my role in allowing the present shambles to develop".

However, Neil Herron, campaign director of the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund, said it would be "political suicide" to abolish the imperial system.

He added: "The day you get people to say they watched a 1.9-metre tall footballer score from five metres is the day you can start thinking about abolishing imperial. But they don't. They say Beckham missed a penalty from 12 yards and it went 45 feet over the crossbar."

So far, four so-called "metric martyrs" have been convicted for using imperial measures when selling groceries, but there have been no new prosecutions since 2002.