Meet the shopkeeper who is the latest to have been penalised for her imperial measures
By CHRISTOPHER BOOKER -More by this author »Last updated at 01:08am on 15th January 2008
For Janet Devers, a 63-yearold pensioner who still runs the fruit and veg stall on an East London market started by her mother at the height of the Blitz in 1940, Christmas 2007 was the most frightening she can ever remember.
On Friday, Janet will step into the dock of a courtroom to face 13 criminal charges - putting her at the centre of one of the most shameful farces of recent British politics.
She has become Britain's latest "Metric Martyr" - under EU directives compelling Britain to use only the metric system of weights and measures. She faces financial ruin for breaking that same law which, in 2002, created the original "Martyrs" - the five traders who were found guilty of the crime of selling goods in pounds and ounces.
Since the Metric Martyrs' case aroused massive publicity, around 40,000 market traders all over the country have continued to sell in pounds and ounces without further prosecutions.
But on September 13 last year, trading standards officials from Hackney Council, supported by two police officers, arrived at Janet's Ridley Road market stall to confiscate two sets of imperial, non-metric scales.
Initially, when the metric-only rule came into force in 2000, Janet complied. She went back to her old scales only when her mainly Afro-Caribbean customers protested that they found grams and kilograms baffling.
What makes Janet's plight even more bizarre is that only two days before Hackney's officials seized her scales under EU law, a senior EU Commissioner claimed in Brussels that no such law existed.
On September 11, Brussels announced it had abandoned its 26-year old battle to make Britain an exclusively metric country.
The reason for banner headlines such as "EU Backs Down On Metrication" and "Victory For The Metric Martyrs" was a statement by Gunther Verheugen, a vice-president of the European Commission, that the EU had changed its mind over one of its flagship policies.
Commissioner Verheugen wished to point out that it was never Brussels' intention that it should be a criminal offence for the British to sell in pounds and ounces. We could continue drinking our beer in pints and marking our signposts in miles for as long as we wished.
Mr Verheugen went further. Astonishingly, he insisted that the claim that it was an offence to sell in non-metric measures was merely an invention of Britain's "tabloid press", which had "repeatedly and erroneously" printed stories about "people having to buy their food from markets in kilograms rather than pounds".
Equally startling, in November one of Mr Verheugen's senior aides stated, in a letter to the British Weights and Measures Association, that "the use of pre-2000 weighing instruments in imperial-only units" had always been legal in EU law. "The Directive does not prohibit the use of such instruments."
So what is going on? Why, this week, will Janet Devers appear in court, charged, under EU law, with offences which the EU itself assures us never existed?
This baffling story goes back to the time in 2000 when the EU's compulsory metrication policy exploded into a national cause celebre, after it became illegal to sell any goods in Britain in non-metric weights and measures.
When Sunderland market trader Steve Thoburn became the first person in Britain to be charged with the new crime of selling a pound of bananas, and four more traders were prosecuted soon after, they were scornfully dubbed, by a senior trading standards official, "the Metric Martyrs".
Although the Martyrs took their case to the Court of Appeal - backed by more than £70,000 contributed by readers of the Daily Mail, and thanks to the skillful campaigning of Mr Thoburn's friend and fellow Sunderland market trader Neil Herron - they finally lost.
However, their cause had won such support that no other prosecutions followed - and Brussels was left uncomfortably aware that in Britain the case had done the image of the EU much harm.
This was one reason why, last September, Commissioner Verheugen was keen to show that the EU had softened its line.
But something else which lay behind its U-turn was that, for more than a year, some of the biggest industrial firms on both sides of the Atlantic had been lobbying Brussels to withdraw another highly damaging provision of its metrication policy which was about to do them serious damage.
Still due to come into force in January 2010 is what was intended to be the final step in making Europe totally metric - a law making it illegal for any business not just to sell goods in non-metric measures but to make any reference to them.
After the ban on imperial measures came in seven years ago, businesses were still allowed to assist their customers by providing translations from kilograms into But at the end of next year even this will be forbidden. To mention non-metric measures in any context whatsoever will become illegal. It will even become a criminal offence for McDonald's to sell a "quarterpounder".
These big companies explained to Mr Verheugen that for thousands of firms in the EU and the non-metric U.S., this final step in the drive to total metrication would create havoc.
It would it cost U.S. firms billions of dollars to eliminate any mention of non-metric measures from sales literature or packaging on any goods they exported to Europe.
Even more absurdly it would ban European firms from referring to pounds or inches when selling to customers in America.
On this, the EU finally saw sense. But in announcing his U-turn on one aspect of metrication (although the law is still on the EU and UK statute books), Verheugen went out of his way to make those further claims about how it had never been an offence to sell in non-metric measures in the first place (so absurd was his suggestion that this had all been invented by the "tabloid press" that this particular claim has been removed from the Commission website).
But all this raises a question mark over Hackney Council's decision to charge Janet Devers with an offence which Verheugen maintains never existed.
Just before Christmas, she was served with a 67-page document, setting out 13 charges, such as weighing her goods on the scales seized by the officials, and ordering her to appear at Thames Magistrates' Court on Friday.
Most alarming of all for Janet is a warning that, if she loses the case, she will face massive costs. Just for the work officials have done so far, the bill is nearly £2,000 - the time of two trading standards officials alone is costed at £68 an hour, a rate equating to £141,000 a year each. But this might seem like peanuts when the costs of Hackney's lawyers are added to the bill.
All this, plus the possibility of fines up to £5,000 on each charge, is what Janet faces this week.
When her ordeal began, she and her brother Colin Hunt - one of the original five Martyrs, who runs a stall in the same Hackney market - turned to the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund, so helpful before but which has now run out of money.
Council officials will argue that they are only doing their duty by enforcing the law as it stands. In a sense they are right. Despite Mr Verheugen's huffing and puffing, the laws under which Janet faces prosecution are still on the statute books.
But the fact remains that the UK regulations were only nodded through Parliament under the European Communities Act, to implement a directive which Verheugen insists was never intended to make the use of Mrs Devers's scales illegal.
This is such an absurd anomaly that it would be an affront to justice if her case was not presented with all the force that it deserves.
Opinion polls have consistently shown that more than 90 per cent of the British people are opposed to making it a criminal offence to sell goods in the measures most understand and prefer. In that sense, Mrs Devers will be standing in the dock on Friday on behalf of all of us.
• To offer support, contact Metric Martyrs Defence Fund, PO Box 526, Sunderland SR1 3YS (or e-mail metricmartyrs@btconnect.com).
Actor Edward Fox, right, with Neil Herron, friend of Metric Martyr Steve Thoburn, and the cookbook in which Fox dedicates a recipe to his hero Steve.
It all started when an industrial park sprang up around the bungalow he was building by hand just outside Llandovery.
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