United Press International
LONDON
April 10th. 2001

The United States, Liberia and Myanmar (Burma) appeared to be the last remaining nations on earth Tuesday where goods can legally be sold in imperial measurements after a British court convicted a market trader for selling bananas in pounds and ounces. In a much-awaited ruling that is expected to become a political issue in the June 7 general election, Sunderland grocer Steven Thoburn, 36, was held convicted by a judge to have breached a European law aimed at implementing metric standards across the European Union. It was the first time that a court in Britain, which began introducing pounds, ounces, miles, yards and feet nearly 800 years ago, had brought such a criminal case against an individual shop keeper. Thoburn, known as the "metric martyr" because he insisted on giving what he said all his customers wanted -- fruit and vegetables sold in "old fashioned" imperial units -- is being raised as a human rallying point by opposition Conservatives and the U.K. Independence Party, which condemn what they call the elimination of national sovereignty. The opposition view was perhaps most strongly stated Tuesday in a two-page headline in the Daily Mail tabloid, which declared: "The day selling a pound of bananas became a crime like burglary or rape."

But in imposing a six-month conditional discharge on Thoburn, Judge Bruce Morgan said it was clear that the British Parliament had "surrendered its sovereignty to the primacy of European law" when the nation joined the European Union in 1972. He rejected defense arguments that EU metrication rules were put into British law by government officials without ever having been voted on by Parliament. The overriding law, said his lawyer, was the 1985 Weights and Measures Act, which allowed shopkeepers to continue to sell in imperial units if they wished. Judge Morgan, however, said: "It would destroy the concept of a union if member states could go off on legislative frolics on their own." Thoburn is now under intense pressure by his supporters to appeal, but he needs some 200,000 ($300,000) to do so because the local council which prosecuted him vows to recover all its own costs from him if he goes ahead and loses. Opinion polls have shown that up to 92 percent of the population want to buy goods in imperial measurements, and most stores continue to sell them that way. But only alongside metric measurements, which must take precedence. Thus a buyer can ask for a pound of potatoes, be offered it in kilograms on one set of scales, and then have the shopkeeper weigh the required pounds on another set of scales. Shops throughout the nation use both metric and imperial scales. Thoburn's crime, Judge Morgan ruled, was to use only one set of scales -- imperial pounds and ounces. He ordered Thoburn's scales, which he described as "the most famous scales in Britain," to be destroyed. The ruling does not affect some other measurements -- British roads are still marked in miles, a pint of bitter remains a pint, people are still measured in feet, inches and stones -- but slowly time is eroding the nation's commitment to the imperial system. Meanwhile, opinions in the British press varied on the Thorburn ruling. The tabloid left-of-center Daily Mirror expressed the Labor government's view that "eventually, most people will buy things in metric quantities because that is what children are taught in schools." The opposite view was taken by The Sun, which called Tuesday a "Sad Day for Britain," but said the case should not have been brought at all "because it gave publicity to an absurd man fighting an absurd case." The conservative Daily Telegraph said: "Yesterday's judgment marks a defeat for Britain -- not just in the literal sense of confirming the supremacy of EU law over domestic law, but also in the wider sense of striking at the values of freedom and fair play on which our justice system has always rested. "The gradual continentalization of our legal system is infecting our attitude to government. There was a time when a case such as this would never have been brought: it would have been seen as an unthinkable infringement of liberty. That it should have been carried through to a conviction says nothing good about us as a nation." 

By:	PETER ALMOND

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.

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