Imperial versus metric

Available for over a year

Pints, miles, pounds and inches. They are fiendishly complicated and politicians have tried to ban their use, but for some reason imperial measures have proved impossible to kill off. In December 2008, the European Parliament voted to allow UK consumers to use both metric and imperial measures. It marked the end of a long campaign to make Britain fully metric. Warwick Cairns, author of About the Size of It explains the appeal of imperial whilst Derek Pollard, Secretary of the Metric Association vows to carry on the fight for a "single rational system". Listen to them put their cases to Tim Harford in More or Less, 19 December 2008.