The prime minister is tapping into a history of xenophobia, pseudoscience and fears over lost political sovereignty
Starting a fight between metric and imperial units of measurement seems, at first, like an odd choice for Boris Johnson. From a political perspective. The move is obviously pure piffle: a dumbshow designed to placate (or at least entertain) the conservative base while distracting and antagonising rivals. But knowingly or not, by reigniting what 19th-century observers once called the “Battle of the Standards”, Johnson has tapped in to a long and wild history of anti-metric feeling that encompasses xenophobia, pseudoscience and fears over lost political sovereignty.
My own introduction to the subject came a few years ago when researching the history of measurement. I’d travelled to Paris to see the original metre and kilogram standards, kept under lock and key in France’s national archives alongside the last letter of King Louis XVI and the original engraving of the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen. There, I learned how the history of the metric system is entwined with the events captured in these documents: the end of the French monarchy and the beginning of French republicanism.
James Vincent is a journalist and author. His first book, Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement will be published shortly
