[kreuzberger]

"Passive" racist? Not from where I'm looking.

[Crabcakes]

I see Johnson has his first idiotic wheeze for Nads to tackle

[Abernathy]

There are points here not be missed, though. By replacing absolute duds like Williamson, Jenrick, and Raab with terminally unsaveable thickos like (god help us) Dorries, Zahawi, and Truss, Johnson again demonstrates utter contempt for the people that his government is supposed to be serving.

How can anybody be even slightly impressed by this parade of fucking dimwits?

I’m ever more convinced that a *major* part of the problem of Johnson doing whatever the fuck he wants and getting away with it is the continuing problem of - let’s call it “Long Corbyn”. The decision to elect Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party really has poisoned the electoral well big time, and he and his little cabal of supporters keep hanging around like a rotten smell and nadging their way into the news cycle. Just imagine how a Labour opposition without the Corbyn ball and chain could be - it would be totally dismantling this charlatan and his band of fuck-witted brigands.

And please don’t trot out the “nobody knows what the Labour Party stands for under Starmer any more” bollocks. The Labour Party stands for what it has always stood for - fairness, equality of opportunity, social justice and the collective good. No fucking mystery - if you’ve trouble remembering that, just keep telling yourself it’s the polar opposite of everything that Johnson and his cavalcade of cunts represent.

Apologies - I seem to have ranted.

[Cyclist]

With regards to the reintroduction of Imperial weights and measures, I can only applaud the genius who thought it a good idea to go back to a system which getting on for half of the population have no knowledge of (it was on it's way out when I started primary school in the early Seventies, and to my knowledge hasn't been taught at all for over forty years). People younger than me generally have zero knowledge of pounds and ounces, and only a passing acquaintance with miles. Yards, feet and inches? Quarts, gallons, fluid ounces? No chance.

The government seem to have lost sight of the fact that stuff like this is a total irrelevance to the majority of voters, and the small minority they are pandering to is dying out quite rapidly. It's like they're deliberately trying to antagonise the majority of the electorate.

I really hope this backfires spectacularly.

[Boiler]

He'll be bringing pounds, shillings and pence back next.

I look forward to the fucking Excel plugin for that.

[Cyclist]

Trouble is, if they start bringing all this archaic rubbish back, will it be taught in schools? If so, by who? I feel confident in saying that any teachers who actually know this stuff are of an age where, if they not already retired, will be quite soon..

Anyway, any market trader who uses lbs and oz without clearly displaying the price in kgs as well will become an ex market trader very quickly. People want to know what they're getting for their money, and the number of gammons needed to keep a market stall in profit just ain't there.

What a load of cobblers.

[kreuzberger]

I am 59 and very nearly four quarters, and I haven't a fucking Scooby what they are on about. Who is this aimed at appeasing, the over 75s and their dead donors?

Part of my joy of travelling is to look in estate agents' windows and imagine a life in whatever place we are. It's just a bit of harmless fun. I asked our guide in Sri Lanka what a Perch is. He said that their place - just off the beach at Koggala and beyond idyllic - is seven of them. It might be the house, it might be the overall land footprint. None of us, including him, is any the wiser.

On a less frivolous note, the entire weights and measures act will need to surely be rewritten and one system given supremacy in law. The whole thing is a spiv and crook's charter, (which is possibly what they mean by "levelling up".).

[Boiler]

On a less frivolous note, the entire weights and measures act will need to surely be rewritten and one system given supremacy in law. The whole thing is a spiv and crook's charter, (which is possibly what they mean by "levelling up".).

Fifty years ago last February, Britain decimalised its currency. I can remember relatives at the time moaning about so-and-so marking up smaller items from d into p - a 2.4x increase.

I'm 57 and yet I still ask for "a quarter of ham" in the butchers. Some know that's in the region of 113 grammes but one young lady (since moved on to pastures new) took it to mean a quarter of a kilogramme.

[Oboogie]

I glanced at the comments on the Mail's story about the reintroduction of Imperial measures, surprisingly the Mailtards are not happy. It's 20 years since the metric martyrs I guess everybody's either realised base 100 is easier or died off.

I'm 57, I started primary school in 1968 and I was never taught Imperial measures. All that I know of it is what I've picked up doing DIY (pre-1974, all houses were measured in Imperial) and using old cookbooks inherited from my parents. There must be millions of people my age and younger who don't have a clue about Imperial measures, conversely I don't believe anyone in the UK doesn't understand Metric.

[RedSparrows]

I'll believe it when I see it.

The noise from it can't surely appeal to that many. Yet again the poor repressed gammons are getting the entire country shafted so Johnson can pat them on the head a little more, clothes peg on his nose...

[Malcolm Armsteen]

I agree with all of the above.

Except.

Some people do still use a limited set of imperial measures - pounds, ounces and pints. I'm on about us amateur cooks, where our recipes may come off the internet, and where Sid the Baker (yes, really) on Youtube does everything in Imperial.

My scales and measures all do both Imperial and Metric, as does my brand-new laser cooking temp tool. I often think in pounds, half-pounds and quarters, just as I sometimes measure in inches, especially when channeling Norm.

It's just a gesture. Another snidey little dig at the continentals, the sort of childish, petty spite that we have come to expect. It either won't happen, or if it does, won't change anything...

(And I can order stuff in livres in Normandy...)

[kreuzberger]

It's just a gesture. Another snidey little dig at the continentals, the sort of childish, petty spite that we have come to expect.

(And I can order stuff in livres in Normandy...)

This, nail on head.

(You can order a pfund of something in Germany too. It's just slang for half a kilo.)

[Bones McCoy]

It's just a gesture. Another snidey little dig at the continentals, the sort of childish, petty spite that we have come to expect.

(And I can order stuff in livres in Normandy...)

This, nail on head.

(You can order a pfund of something in Germany too. It's just slang for half a kilo.)

Similar in the Netherlands where a pund is 500grammes (and an onz is 100 grammes).

[kreuzberger]

And up-country in Italy. "Tre etti di pomodori".

Three-eighths (or hundredths, I have never found a definitive answer) of tomatoes which is one juicy big fucker that actually tastes of tomato.

[Boiler]

There's also the pinte in France... and IIRC, the zoll (inch) in Germany.?

[kreuzberger]

Yep, Zoll is used in German but as a translation of inch rather than as a unit of measure. Unless you're rather sensibly buying a Mac.

[Youngian]

Names of imperial measurements provide handy shorthand entrenched in the language (‘give them an inch,’ ‘ten foot barge pool’ ‘I can swallow six inches’ etc). The ubiquity of Irish pubs has popularized the pint (rounded to 0.5 litre) around the continent. An interesting topic for Stephen Fry and Michael Rosen to discuss but has no relevance to metrification. Its not going to make up for pension freezes.

[Cyclist]

Dorries' first act as Culture Secretary is an act of cultural vandalism...

An industrial tower is to be demolished after a last-minute conservation listing was overturned.

Plans to destroy the Dorman Long structure on the former Redcar steelworks site were revealed by Redcar and Cleveland Council a week ago.

However, within hours of the announcement, Historic England granted it Grade II-listed status.

But it has since been stripped of that protection after the intervention of new Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-58593615

Would she have removed the Listed status if the man asking her to do so was a member of Labour rather than a fucking Tory? Anyway, a dangerous precedent has been set.

[Boiler]

I think Telly Centre got its listing when noises were made about the site being cleared for a football stadium.

Thing is though, listing a building doesn't stop it getting demolished - loopholes or delays are often found and the building either goes on fire or the demolition crews turn up before the listing comes into effect. That latter happened to the 16th century pub adjacent to my family home one weekend; cycled off to the station on Saturday morning and it was there, came back Sunday night - gone.

[Crabcakes]

To be fair, the tower looks like utter shit and I can't see what historical value it holds that couldn't be captured by extensive photography before it gets torn down - but it's the willingness to interfere that's worrying.