Sunday  Telegraph
LETTERS

15.4.01

"I COULD HAVE SAVED METRIC MARTYR"

"28 years after joining, Britain is at last getting the measure of the European Union - as the outcome of the 'metric martyr' case in Sunderland shows, it is now a crime to sell fruit and veg in pounds and ounces. Tragically this petty example of Euro-bossiness was implemented quite unnecessarily by the last Tory government.

"I was the department of Trade and Industry's junior minister responsible for weights and measures at the time and refused to legislate for compulsory metrication. I was also responsible for deregulation, one of John Major's flagship policies, and argued that it would torpedo our credibility as cutters of red tape to criminalise the use of Britain's ancient weights and measures. So my boss, Michael Heseltine, appointed another minister, Lord Strathclyde, to do the dirty deed.

"Sadly, although I showed the government the solution, I was ignored. Officials said we had to change because of a Brussels directive - agreed in 1988 by my predecessor Francis Maude. As a lawyer, trained to examine words carefully, I checked and found that it was easy to avoid this Napoleonic nightmare. The directive makes metrication compulsory only if national legislation compels people to use particular units of measurement. Britain's Weights & Measures Act made it illegal to sell goods in units other than those "authorised". The directive requires all such "authorised" measures to be metric in future.

"However, if we abolished the "authorisation" provisions, allowing people to choose for themselves which units to use, we would disapply the directive. the answer was to dereglate.

"To prevent short-measure we would still define legally the terms "pound","ounce", "gramme", "kilogramme" etc. but there is no reson for the Nanny State to force us to use either metric or imperial measures. So long as we all know what we are talking about if we use ounces or grammes, why should anyone worry? this is economic freedom, in which Tories are supposed to believe.

"Fortunately I also provided the means to achieve this simply in my 1994 Deregulation Act. Previously one could amend one Act of Parliament only by passing another. My dergeulation Act allows us to amend Acts by Statutory Instrument (SI) - a procedure usually only involving a 90 minute debate in a committee room upstairs. By passing an SI to remove the authorisation provisions of the Weights & Measures Act, we could escape the Brussels entangling net in a trice.

"William Hague says he will fight Brussels for an opt-out on metrication. Having both been members of the EU Council of Ministers, he and I know this is cloud-cuckoo land. No other country in Europe will back us, as they are all metricated. Fortunately this does not matter. We do not need their goodwill. We can act unilaterally with a measure which can go into the Tory manifesto and be implemented within weeks of winning an election".

Neil Hamilton
Cheshire.

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