![]() OK, unlike passport colours or debates about how we should define the length of a stick there is a policy argument to be had there, rather than merely an aesthetic one. The official consultation provides for an option in which we only use imperial measurements, even though most of us don’t understand them, while entirely ignoring the possibility of only using the metric ones that we do.Įven grammar schools make more sense from this nostalgia perspective. (It’s 22.) Nonetheless, that system was around during the older generation’s youth, while the metric system is French, and so back to imperial measurements we shall go. Instead, it offers a nightmarish series of measurements in which there are 112 pounds to the hundredweight, 34.68 cubic inches to the point, and you’re constantly trying to remember whether the number of yards to the chain is eight, 12 or 16. The imperial system doesn’t do any of that. It provides a system of units which translate neatly into one another (a litre is a cube with sides of 10cm, a hectare is a square 100m on each side, and so on) and where everything is helpfully divisible by ten. The metric system uses prefixes – centi, kilo and so on – that tell you immediately which scale you’re working on. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives. ![]() Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Events and Offers Sign up to receive information regarding NS events, subscription offers & product updates. Ideas and Letters A newsletter showcasing the finest writing from the ideas section and the NS archive, covering political ideas, philosophy, criticism and intellectual history - sent every Wednesday. Weekly Highlights A weekly round-up of some of the best articles featured in the most recent issue of the New Statesman, sent each Saturday. The Culture Edit Our weekly culture newsletter – from books and art to pop culture and memes – sent every Friday. Green Times The New Statesman’s weekly environment email on the politics, business and culture of the climate and nature crises - in your inbox every Thursday. The New Statesman Daily The best of the New Statesman, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. World Review The New Statesman’s global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. Select and enter your email address Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. It also never stopped to ask “iconic to who?” – but since the switch in colour had been made by the Thatcher government in 1988, meaning you’d have to have been born before the early 1970s to have even held a blue one, the answer is pretty clear. The government has repeatedly touted the return of Britain’s “iconic blue passports” as a benefit of leaving the European Union, even though there was absolutely nothing in EU rules that made burgundy ones compulsory in the first place. Lost in a world in which men are men and casual bigotry is encouraged, he asks, in the opening credits to every episode: “Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time?”ĭisappointingly for those of us who enjoyed the show, the answer from the writing team turned out to be, “We don’t know either!” To be fair to them, though, they could never have foreseen a fourth option: perhaps Sam Tyler had woken up in the world a future Conservative government would be intent on creating. In the 2006 BBC TV series Life on Mars the Manchester police detective Sam Tyler (John Simm) is hit by a car and wakes up in 1973.
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