This
is a short extract from my book The Best I Can Do (2016), available from Amazon
and Blackwell
….. The UK has a
pre-modern political system - a Ruritanian monarchy with the usual trappings of
odd local rights and privileges (ownership of swans and such like); an
unelected and completely corrupt second chamber; a first chamber designed to
remind its Members of 19th century public schools. Those members have their own
unbreakable habits - in the UK, the House of Commons, despite modest changes,
remains submerged under fatuous rituals designed to create a backlog of real
work and thus to stop as much change as possible. It is made tolerable to
Members of Parliament only by the availability of large amounts of subsidised
alcohol, recently revealed as the secret ingredient in the famous rowdiness of
the House of Commons.
But even where
politicians are open to change, they have to contend with the electorate's
resistance. Voters are people who stand there, fold their arms and tell you
that they always have done and always will do it THIS way. Urged to change,
they will stamp their feet and cry, Shan't! Can't! Won't! As a result, for
example, the United Kingdom has no coherent system of weights and measures
which everyone uses. For a number of years, the European Union tried to get us
to Go Metric. But teachers had no intention of going metric (they didn't understand
these foreign ideas) and market traders saw the chance to become Metric
Martyrs, and like the pound sterling, wasn't it part of our Tradition and
Heritage to have fourteen pounds to the stone and , er, eight stones to the
hundredweight (which is not one hundred but one hundred and twelve pounds )
and, your turn, how many hundredweights is it to the ton unless it’s a short
ton ….and so eventually the European Union gave up in the face of irredeemable
stupidity. We were granted yet another opt-out.
As a result, the UK remains pre-modern, with an incoherent jumble of systems in use. Just visit any
supermarket. Here you can find pints for some liquids, litres for others. Grams
and kilos on one shelf, ounces and pounds on another. In Cornwall, maybe they still
sell potatoes by the gallon. Weigh yourself on the bathroom scales, and some of
us will use pounds and stones and some kilos. Medications are normally measured
in milligrams and grams, millilitres and centilitres and not everyone
understands what that all means so there are occasional disastrous results. Go
to a fabric shop and you may find meters or you may find yards. Buy petrol and
it's in litres, but distance measurement is in miles not kilometres. And, to
rub it in, road signs show fractions of miles rather than decimal points of
miles - as you approach the Channel Tunnel, you are counted down from
two-thirds of a mile to one-third of a mile, a final flag-waving
Work-That-Out-If -You-Can optout from new-fangled and, above all, foreign
systems.
Two hundred years or
more ago, as countries entered the
modern era, so they unified, simplified and extended the reach of
systems of weights and measures. Local and highly particular traditions
disappeared as did local currencies. The decimal system and the metric system
are the expression of this move to the modern era, and their near-universal
adoption is one of the enduring achievements of the French Revolution. It was a
political achievement but the actual work was done by mathematicians and
scientists of the first rank – Condorcet, Laplace, Lavoisier. They tried to
work with British and American colleagues – Thomas Jefferson notable among them
– but both those countries turned up their noses at what the French were
proposing. It took Britain until 1971 to decimalise its currency and 1984 until
the anomaly of a ½ penny coin was removed.
But we still haven’t made it into the modern
era. Children learn how to use bits of different systems and none of them very
well. They have no idea of how powerful a tool a unified system can be. They
simply become good at bodging which is fine for a nation of bodgers. It’s
obtuse to expect children to be good at maths when their culture constantly
tells them to muddle through with anything to do with numbers.
The moral is this:
dysfunctional and, more generally, sub-optimal states of institutions and
practices can persist indefinitely. They don't necessarily get eliminated any
more than do pandas (who are terribly ill-adapted to their environment and
generally miserable in consequence). All that happens is that people are
generally miserable as they see their societies and economies grumbling and
stumbling along, their politicians still aspiring to nothing more than an Opt
Out from the modern world.
But people won’t do
anything about it. They made their vows long ago.
