WITH 90,000 civil servants soon to lose their jobs, it’s reassuring to hear that the government is making sure Whitehall’s reduced workforce will be deployed on critical priorities.

Top of the list this week, as shells rain down on the Donbas and parents in the UK pawn their jewellery to pay for food, is a review of how people who use imperial measurements can carry on using imperial measurements.

Last September, Boris Johnson signalled his intention to restore to shopkeepers their “ancient liberty” to sell in pounds and ounces, not allowing himself to be distracted by the fact that they have been weighing goods in pounds and ounces and selling pints of beer without state interference for the last 30 years. That’s not the point. The critical issue facing market traders is that they have been cruelly and despotically required since 2000 also to display the cost of apples in kilos and grammes, alongside pounds and ounces if they wish, and Brexit liberator Boris Johnson is determined to rid them of that Eurotyranny.

At the same time, in a cunning double bluff, the government has intimated that it does not intend for us to move away from metric measurements.

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So there you have it. The government is to strike a blow for freedom by launching a review on us doing exactly what we already do – choosing whether we use the metric or imperial system – for which we require no change in the law. Traders might be given the choice to price their goods only in imperial measures, dispensing with metric, but given that this is likely to annoy many more consumers than it pleases, it’s the sort of post-Brexit “freedom” that many businesses will run a mile from. After all, they’re already enjoying the freedom to spend more time dealing with red tape and looking for staff.

It’s not hard to see why this imperial review is a priority for the government: while we’re talking about imperial feet and inches, we’re not talking about a chronic shortage of metric pounds and pennies caused by the cost-of-living crisis, far less whether the number of Tory MPs who want rid of Johnson can yet be measured by the score.

Never mind that it’s going to flummox the under-30s, many of whom are deeply confused about this ancient and unknowable system of measurement with its 12 inches to the foot, 16 ounces to the pound and eight furlongs to the mile: young people are not the target audience. With two difficult by-elections looming, the government is trying to keep its 2019 Brexit-supporting voters on side by replaying some old hits. This one goes out to the over-65s – who Mr Johnson appears to take for fools.

Many MPs think it's the biggest bushel of bull since the Boris Bridge.

Labour’s Angela Eagle has accused Mr Johnson of trying to “weaponise nostalgia” with the “pathetic” move, while even his own backbenchers have reacted angrily, with Tory MP Alicia Kearns saying “not one” of her constituents was calling for imperial measures and that “this isn’t a Brexit freedom. It’s a nonsense.”

That’s what we have come to expect. This is a government that regularly raids the past for political gain, while gambling on our future.

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As with the return of blue passports, another Brexit totem, this initiative is not what it seems. The new blue passports are exactly the same shape, bendy material, typeface and size – a clean 12.5cm, since you ask – as the EU ones they’ve replaced. They’re nothing like the big old blue hardback passports so idealised by nostalgic Tories. Who knew standardised metric measurements could be so useful?

Similarly this review of imperial measurements won’t be recreating a pre-EU world for its more trusting followers. It’s all just presentation.

It won’t save Mr Johnson. A famous proponent of “dead catting” – distracting from a misdeed by slapping a “dead cat” (a controversial item) on the table to focus attention away from himself – he is losing his touch. The troops are not rallying.

London MP Elliot Colburn, one of the youngest Tories in parliament, is the latest MP, at time of writing, to call for the Prime Minister to resign, coming a few hours after former attorney general Jeremy Wright. Sir Graham Brady must by now have a full peck of angry letters – or is it a bushel? Either way, we shouldn’t be surprised if we get more dead cat ideas intended to distract us – directives for shelf labels to be written in Olde English, perhaps, or a new requirement to wear hats on Sundays – and they’ll keep coming as long as the Prime Minister remains in peril. Which is to say, endlessly.

In an informative Twitter thread, the journalist James Vincent, who has written a book about the history of measurements, makes the point that objections to the metric system going back centuries have been caught up with fears about loss of sovereignty, elitist plots and conspiracy theories, noting that “the shades of Brexit are hard to ignore”.

French revolutionaries eschewed a profusion of old measures from the Ancien Regime, including the pied du Roi (foot of the king), favouring instead the metre, which was considered more scientific as it was one ten-millionth the distance from Equator to North Pole. Defenders of the imperial system argued that by contrast, its units had been “divinely bestowed”. This is a culture war being waged along well-worn lines.

But the metric system has a huge advantage: it’s just easier to understand. That helps explain its wide global application and why here in the UK, industries began voluntarily metricating in the 1960s.

At this point in history, there are only three countries that officially use the imperial system of measurement: the USA, Liberia and Myanmar. It’s doubtful that anyone in Downing Street or Whitehall really wants to Britain to become the fourth, but after a week of lurid stories of rowdy lockdown parties under the PM’s own roof, it was just the latest Brexit bauble to lob into the public debate.

You don’t need to understand imperial to know that’s a measure of how much trouble this Prime Minister is in.

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