UKMA Chair – Peter Burke
Peter grew up in Ireland, of Irish and German parentage. He came to the UK as a doctor in 1982, and stayed because he valued working in the NHS. Since 1990 he has been a GP in Oxford. He retired from partnership in 2017, but has continued to do GP locum work and he is involved in teaching, examining and appraisal. He and his wife Geraldine have 3 children and 5 grandchildren, in Hollywood, Leipzig and Oxford.
I am to a certain extent influenced by my background. The Irish connection has taught me that it is possible for a country to go metric with little pain: road distance signs were converted to kilometres in the 1970s and speed signs some years later. At the same time my many German relations find it incomprehensible that the UK should choose to shoot itself in the foot economically by hanging resolutely to dual systems of measurement.
In medicine, metric units have been the norm for many years for weights and measures, as well as for drug dosages, laboratory values and physiological indices. The same applies of course in science and more recently in retail, in the building industry and even in sales of wines and spirits (though oddly not beer). Yet despite this, to my great frustration, it has been commonplace throughout my career for patients to ask me, when I weigh or measure them “what is that in real money?”. The use of dual units in this way causes confusion, wastes time and effort and even involves some risk of causing harm. I find it particularly ironic that many of the advocates of Imperial measures do not actually know how those units relate to each other.
The sooner this matter is resolved the better, and if we are to standardise on a single set of units then quite clearly imperial is not an option.
UKMA Secretary – Ronnie Cohen
Ronnie grew up in London and went to a boarding school in northern England. The school curriculum included woodwork and cookery – subjects where measurements are essential. Ronnie excelled at maths in school and college, and obtained a GCSE and an A-Level in maths. He has been designing, developing, testing and documenting classic and .NET desktop and web applications for over 15 years. He lives in London with his wife Malka.
I wonder why we use two measurement systems to measure the same things when one would be enough. In other European countries, I just see metric measurements whereas I see both metric and imperial measurements in the UK.
Measurement plays a central part in all our lives. It is fundamental for trade and commerce, nutrition information, weather reports, body weight and height, DIY work, maps, transport, cooking, sport and energy. These are just some regular daily activities that involve measurement and is not a comprehensive list. The way we measure things matters. Measurement forms a fundamental basis for a good maths and science education and common measurement standards are essential for consumer protection.
In computing, file sizes, data storage capacity, computer memory, processing speeds and network speeds each use one system of measurement with metric prefixes. There are no multiple units for measuring the same technical specification. Like other Europeans and the computer industry, the British should learn to use a single unit for each physical phenomenon.
The metric system can meet all our needs whereas the imperial system cannot. We should clear up the measurement mess that we have tolerated for far too long by banishing all the medieval measurement units and using the simple, rational, universal metric system for all purposes.
I have served on the UKMA Committee for several years albeit not consecutively. Last year, Derek Pollard decided to step down as Secretary of UKMA. After Derek stepped down, I noticed that there was a risk that UKMA would be left without a secretary or a chair. It would have been bad for UKMA to be without any leadership so I decided to put myself forward for election as Secretary. I thought that the role of Secretary was one I could manage while I still work full time.
Since I became Secretary, I have dealt with membership enquiries applications, answered general enquiries with detailed responses, streamlined the application process for new members and published frequent articles on Metric Views, typically weekly.
I have made substantial contributions to many editions of the UKMA newsletter and provided our newsletter editor John Austin with plenty of material for the newsletters, even if not all of it is used. Some of it ends up in the newsletter. I am always on the lookout for noteworthy observations on weights and measures that could be used in future editions of the newsletter.
In the past, I have contributed various updates to the UKMA website. I produced the material for the Metric Supplies page and updated the media pages on the website. I pointed out various broken links on the UKMA and ThinkMetric websites, which were later fixed or replaced.
Over the years, I have contacted my MP and the Government on numerous occasions about weights and measures issues and made numerous Freedom of Information requests. Wherever possible, I have used the FOI responses as the basis for new Metric Views articles.
In November 2011, I produced the “Made in Britain: Not made to measure” PDF booklet, which is 80 pages long and can be downloaded from the UKMA website. It appears on the Press Articles page.
I have been writing articles for Metric Views for over 10 years and have been one of the top contributors to the blog. I have written one-third of all the articles that appear on the site at the time of writing. I am proud to be one of the leading voices of UKMA in promoting metrication in the UK.
In my first year as Secretary, I wrote several critical articles about the flawed imperial units consultation and the Retained EU Law Bill. The Government have still not published their analysis to the consultation and have abandoned plans to scrap most EU-derived laws, including weights and measures legislation, by the end of 2023. I am proud of the role that UKMA has played in resisting both retrograde policies.
After UKMA gave up the metricviews.org.uk domain, I spent several hours replacing all the metricviews.org.uk links in all the articles on the Metric Views website with metricviews.uk and ensured that all the internal links within the Metric Views website work.
UK Metric Association 