EU Vice-President Günter Verheugen, Commissioner for Enterprise and Industry writes: "The time has come to take the sting out of a simmering debate which has caught the public imagination. Is Britain to be or not to be metric?
Let's get one thing straight from the off. Neither the European Commission nor any faceless "Eurocrat" has or will ever be responsible for banning the great British pint, the mile, and weight measures in pounds and the ounces.
These imperial measures form part of the traditions that are the very essence of the Britishness that all Europeans know and love.
Did you know that it was actually the British who decided it was time to start the change to metrication as long ago as 1864, when Parliament allowed these units to be used for overseas trade - over a century before the EU even existed?
Britain's Standing Committee of Metrication was set up in 1966 and the UK Metrication Board followed in 1969. There was already a plan to go metric in the sixties when the Beatles were in the Top 10 and people were buying 7-inch vinyl singles for their record players. All of this happened before Britain joined the Common Market, as the EU was then known, in 1973.
Far from pushing Britain down the metrication road, "Europe" has always been willing to extend the deadlines, when it discovered practical obstacles and when it realised the UK public felt things were going too far, too fast.
The iPod generation may measure songs in megabytes and a lot of youngsters may have little idea what an ounce or an inch is, but I'm the first to recognise that some British people of my generation in particular are still more comfortable with imperial measures.
Brits like to get milk and beer in pints and truth be told, so do the thousands of Europeans who live in or visit the UK and love those traditions that make it so unique. Brits also like the signposts to say how many miles it is to London, Cardiff, Edinburgh or Belfast.
For similar reasons there's been a long process, stretching for several decades, when many goods could be packaged, or sold in loose form, provided both metric and imperial weights and measures were clearly indicated.
Some sections of the British media have regularly jumped on the bogus bandwagon that maintained with varying degrees of hysteria, that the EU was "banning" the pint and that this was part of a wider plot against Britishness,
Well, we at the EU have decided the time has come to nail these myths once and for all by setting out in black and white what has always been our view: that Britain should continue to use imperial measures for as long as it likes.
After an extensive EU-wide consultation exercise including the Great British public, to assess the impact of Britain's use of imperial measures on the EU Single Market, we're delighted the results have confirmed what we always knew to be the case: there is no problem whatsoever with Brits drinking in pint glasses, operating in miles, or using pounds and ounces alongside their metric equivalent.
There are, of course, sound consumer-related and business reasons for the parallel use of dual metric and imperial weight measures on goods sold in the UK or indeed exported to the United States.
Much as it may dismay those who have peddled the metric myth for far too long, we have now proposed legislation enshrining Britain's right to retain pints of milk and beer, miles on road signs and dual indications of weights and measures from now 'till Kingdom come!
Someone once said, it would be nice if all rows about the EU could be settled over a pint. Now they can. Cheers!"
Vice-President Günter Verheugen
Commissioner for Enterprise and Industry
