Finally the true meaning of Brexit is revealed: an extra 68ml of wine

December 27, 2023 2:06 pm(Updated 2:28 pm)

‘Our exit from the EU was all about moments just like this,’ minister for enterprise Kevin Hollinrake said, seemingly with a straight face (Photo: Martin Pope/Getty)

Today is the culmination of years of struggle. It is a moment of supreme national victory, after decades of persecution. People will finally be able to drink their wine in pints. And we can at last see the true meaning of all those years of Brexit misery.

The struggle began around the turn of the century, when a small group of traders were charged for using imperial rather than metric measures. The UK had adopted the metric system to fall into line with the EU over the course of 1995 to 1999. You could still display pounds and ounces, but they had to be less prominent than the metric figure. From such small discrepancies are national fates constructed.

There were a few court cases, including that of Steven Thoburn, a greengrocer from Sunderland, who took it all the way to the House of Lords following the sale of a bunch of bananas worth 34p. The right-wing tabloids worked themselves up into their standard state of hysteria and the “metric martyrs” were born.

Evidently this great searing injustice laboured on the minds of patriots for a quarter of a century. Other events passed. September 11th. The War on Terror. The Financial Crash. Austerity. But to be distracted by such things was to lose sense of what’s truly important. Imperial measurements: that was the true battle. That was where the fight for the soul of the country would take place. Measuring in pounds and ounces, Boris Johnson said, was an “ancient liberty”. In fact it originated in 1826, but it’s best not to get bogged down in these small details.

Finally, in 2016, Brexit allowed a redress of this historic injustice. Johnson’s government initiated a review of measurements in September 2021, along with a consultation. But the results were disappointing. Somehow, the national battle had been lost. The people of Great Britain had been so suffocated by the European yoke that they had come to embrace their slavery.

Some 81.1 per cent of respondents wanted the system to continue as it is. Some 17.6 per cent had been so psychologically conditioned by Brussels’ tyranny that they actually wanted to go further and install a fully metric system. Just 0.4 per cent wanted to go fully imperial.

“Ultimately,” the Government’s response to the consultation stated, “it was decided that the arguments against making any changes, including arguments concerning consumer confusion, increased costs for businesses, and barriers to international trade, taken together with the overwhelming response against the increased use of imperial measures, outweighed the arguments in favour.”

For a moment, everything seemed lost, but this morning the defenders of Britain’s ancient liberties secured a victory. They may have lost the war, but they can at least win a battle. As of 2024, pint-sized wine can be stocked on Britain’s shelves, the Department for Business and Trade has announced. “Our exit from the EU was all about moments just like this,” minister for enterprise Kevin Hollinrake said, seemingly with a straight face.

As it happens, we can already buy half bottles of wine at 375ml. We can also buy those funny mini bottles you get on the train at 200ml. And we can buy carafe-sized measurements at 500ml measures. We can also, if this is something which really matters to us, pour the contents of a wine bottle into a pint glass and drink that. It’s not a very good way of drinking wine, but it is an option, as an ancient liberty if you will, for any upstanding British citizen if they feel so inspired. The change today is to bring in a 568ml size bottle. So it is, in other words, the freedom of a 68ml increase from the carafe measurement, or a 182ml reduction from the full bottle measurement.

But of course even that is too generous. The great liberty of 68ml will forever be a dream, because wine makers are not going to plough investment into making a size measurement that there is no perceptible demand for at home and which cannot be sold overseas. The lack of demand can be seen very robustly in the responses to that consultation document.

In fact, that document reveals the nonsense of the entire thing – not just weights and measures, but the deranged political culture around them and the Brexit project in its totality. There never was a great swell of popular opinion around this issue, just like there was never a great swell of opinion around bendy bananas. There were just press campaigns, usually on flimsy evidence, which at most caused some jokey grumbling about Brussels in the pub. They were the tedious obsessions of a handful of ideologues. But somehow that project managed to suck us into a nation-engulfing experiment in sovereignty absolutism, the consequences of which we’re still living with today.

We know what the costs of Brexit are: pain for exporters, spasms in the labour market, fiendish complexity in the UK’s customs territory, economic pain, reduced international standing, and the introduction of US-style culture war to what was previously a fairly healthy transactional political climate. And now we know what the benefits are: the option of an extra 68ml measurement on wine, which no one will ever use. “Our exit from the EU was all about moments just like this,” Hollinrake said. He’s more right than he will ever know.