New Metric Martyr Faces 13 Charges

Christopher Booker's Notebook
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 13.1.08

New metric martyr faces 13 charges

An extraordinary thing happened one week last September. Gunther Verheugen, a vice-president of the European Commission, announced that Brussels had abandoned its policy of forcing Britain to go exclusively metric.

The British, he said, could use non-metric weights and measures as long as they wished. Indeed he went further. The belief that it was a criminal offence under an EU directive to sell in non-metric measures, he said, was an invention of the "tabloid press", which had "repeatedly and erroneously printed stories" of "people having to buy their food from markets in kilograms rather than pounds".

Mr Verheugen's announcement won front-page headlines in the national press. Yet, only a day later, trading standards officials made a mockery of his statement by seizing two sets of "illegal" imperial scales from a stall run by the sister of Colin Hunt, one of the five original Metric Martyrs, in London's Ridley Road market.

This event was totally ignored - except by this column.

Just before Christmas the stallholder, Janet Devers, a 63-year-old pensioner, received a 67-page document from Hackney Council charging her with 13 criminal offences, including use of her old imperial scales. Yet only a month earlier, in a letter to the British Weights and Measures Association, one of Mr Verheugen's senior officials had stated that "use of pre-2000 weighing instruments in imperial-only units" remained entirely legal under EU law, since "the directive does not prohibit the use of such instruments".

Mrs Devers was told the council's costs, for the time of the officials who seized her scales (£68 an hour each, equivalent to £141,000 a year) were already £2,000. Fees for Hackney's lawyers will bring the total much higher - apart from any fines to which she might be liable (up to £5,000 each), for offences which Mr Verheugen insists do not exist.

Next Friday Mrs Devers will appear at Thames Magistrates Court in east London. So important are the issues raised by her case that a firm of solicitors, Bates, Wells & Braithwaite, and a barrister, Nicholas Bowen, have already volunteered to defend her at no charge. In light of those statements from Brussels, they believe her case is very strong. Six years ago generous support from readers of this column (some £110,000) enabled the original Metric Martyrs to fight their case up to the Court of Appeal.

Anyone wishing to support Mrs Devers should contact

Neil Herron,
Metric Martyrs Defence Fund,
PO Box 526, Sunderland SR1 3YS
(or email metricmartyrs@btconnect.com).