Just suppose that 20 million people have to do on average 5 conversions a day while they are at work, and that each conversion takes on average 10 seconds (some will take just a second or two, some may take a minute or more, including checking that the answer is correct, but again we are talking averages). At say an average of £20 an hour (employer’s cost, including overheads and benefits), that’s a total of £5.5 million – EVERY DAY. That’s around £1.4 BILLION a year.

What a waste of time, money and resources, all because too many people want to cling to an antiquated measuring sytem for no practical reason. And it’s a cost that cannot be avoided – we live in a 95% metric world, and we live by trading with it.

Nostalgia is comforting and recalling good memories is heart-warming. But that’s where it ends. It would be sheer lunacy to go back to it, and it was the correct decision to decimalise. The same argument prevails for metric. Spending twenty years of my adult life outside the UK taught me the logic of the metric system, and finding a stubborn reluctance amongst the British to embrace it upon my return made the imperial system seem just an annoyance.

Can Tabitha cite a large segment of today’s British population that would like to scrap decimal currency and revert?

If she means the former definition I am sure she is right as regards most UK residents. However, in the world as a whole, the use of imperial is certainly not normal in any mathematical, or statistical, sense. The question remains unaltered, however, which is whether completing the metric changeover would be beneficial.

If she means the latter definition then there is the implication, as I stated, that those UK residents preferring the metric system are somehow abnormal or disordered, which would constitute, of course, purely a point of view with no logical reason.

Please note that UKMA do not reject reasonable comments from those who oppose metrication. Part of the purpose of this blog is to expose the weakness of the opposition case. Whenever we receive such comments we always endevour answer them in a reasonable manner. We hope that people who are more open minded will judge for themselves and, on balance, see the merits of the case for completing metrication in the UK.

Are non-Brits not normal? What about the 33% of London residents who were not born in the UK? Are they “not normalâ€?? What about the hundreds of thousands of UK citizens who travel to the Continent every year? Are they “not normalâ€?? Finally, what about the HGV and long-distance coach drivers who are compelled to use kilometres and kilometres per hour for their record-keeping and have their speedometers with km/h as the dominant unit. Are they “not normalâ€?? – they are almost certainly fed-up with having to convert between the two all the time.