UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson reportedly plans to restore use of imperial measurements to mark Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee, potentially shoring up support from pro-Brexit voters in the wake of his Partygate scandal.
Johnson is expected to announce that British shops will be free to sell their goods by imperial measures, such as pounds and ounces, for the first time in decades, the UK’s Daily Mirror newspaper reported on Saturday. The European Union’s weights and measures directive went into force in 2000, requiring traders to use metric units, such as kilograms and liters.
The UK left the EU in January 2020, nearly four years after voters expressed their will in the Brexit referendum. The metric directive was a symbol of overreaching EU interference in British life, particularly among conservatives. Shops that continued to price their goods by imperial measurements were required to also display the metric equivalents, such as grams and kilograms.