http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml
?xml=/news/2006/02/24/nmetric24.xml&sSheet
=/news/2006/02/24/ixhome.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4737940.stm
Yikes! The world must have gone mad. Never in my life would I find that I agree with GW Bush and disagree with Neil Kinnock, given that the former pretty much stands for everything I despise, and the latter is one of my heroes.
But, it happened. Luckily, only on single issues.
Bush, of course, is right to treat the proposed legislation banning a UAE company from taking over P&O (a British company) and therefore running a few American ports as silly. The members of Congress who have thought this up are at best hypocrites (given that they don't have any problems with Exxon owning, for example, Nigeria) and political chancers and at worst stupid racists.
Secondly, Neil's call for Britain to go completely and irrevocably metric is also silly. Speaking in both Metric and Imperial is the only area where people in Britain are in any way bilingual. We can easily handle both systems side by side, which is more than can be said for other stuff, like French. And there are things that just aren't the same if you buy them in metric; like a pint of beer or a pint of prawns.
I think that Kinnock is a hugely underated political figure of the last 50 years and the last great political orator that I can remember, but on this one he is being a little over-enthusiastic.
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