Mocking Jacob Rees-Mogg for his style
guide to staff in his new office is fun, and very easy to do,
but probably only encourages him. It’s
almost as though he is inviting people to continue to refer to him as the
member for the eighteenth century; for him, living in the past is a badge of
honour rather than a criticism. His
insistence on the use of imperial measures, though, is more than mere
eccentricity – it is potentially dangerous.
The UK formally adopted metric measures in
1965 (pre-dating, and nothing to do with, membership of the EEC/EU), which
means that those of us educated during the 1950s and 1960s were initially
taught in imperial and subsequently in metric.
It also means that any child receiving the majority of his or her
education after 1965 – so born after around 1960, and therefore currently sixty
years old or younger – would have been largely or even exclusively taught to
measure distances, weights and volumes in metric units. I don’t know what the age profile of the
staff is in his new office, but given the demographic in the population and the
traditional ability of civil servants to retire before state pension age, I’d
bet that there are very few for whom use of imperial measures will be entirely
natural. He is effectively asking anyone
writing a report for his eyes to ‘translate’ all measurements to a system which
has barely been taught in schools (although perhaps Eton is an exception?) for
the best part of half a century.
The potential consequences for the Leader
of the House of Commons are probably not as significant as the loss of a Mars
probe by NASA, but it’s almost guaranteed that the enforced translation
of quantities into an antiquated system of measures with which most people are
no longer familiar will lead to a misunderstanding sooner or later. There are good reasons for standardising on a
single system of measurement, and none at all for insisting on a different one. Unless, that is, you consider that the
determination of an individual to live 300 years in the past constitutes good
reason for anything.
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