What's the 'Keep the Mile' campaign all about?
The British government has announced plans to spend well over £1 billion of your money converting all British road and speed limit signs from miles and yards or miles per hour to kilometres and metres. Signs in feet and inches like bridge heights and road widths will be converted to metres. Our campaign is strongly opposed to this plan.

Why is the government planning this?
Because it is co-operating with the European Union's agenda to make Britain 100% metric – in other words, to completely remove the use of British weights and measures by the British people. In 1980, an EU Directive said that all EU countries must go metric. Britain was, however, allowed (!) to keep - for a while - certain British units like the pint of beer and milk - and miles, yards, feet and inches on British roads.

How can you stop the government going ahead with these plans?
In short, by trying to make clear to the government that the British people will not accept this plan. Here's some keys reasons why we hope you will join our campaign:

The cost. Why spend over £1 billion converting Britain's estimated 4 million road signs to metric when we have urgent needs in the health, education and social services?

It will remove part of our culture. Generations of Britons over the centuries have used British weights and measures, and it's never held us back. We have a good and familiar system which is more 'human' and 'natural' than the entirely artificial metric system

The British public has never been asked to go metric, nor voted for it.

The British do not want to go metric. Many surveys show strong preference for British units, even amongst younger people. In a survey carried out by ICM this April, only 4% of British people normally thought of distances in kilometres while 86% of those interviewed wanted to keep miles and yards on signposts against only 8% preferring kilometres and metres. The proportions were exactly the same for people aged 18-24.

Is the government preparing for this change already?
Yes. In the following ways:
- The use of metres rather than yards in the 'Highway Code'
- Starting to put metric heights on bridge height and road width signs - with metric more prominent than feet and inches.
- Starting to use road and pedestrian signs in metres. A vigorous campaign by Active Resistance to Metrication (ARM) has led to over 1,500 of these signs cross the Britain being put back into English. Most of them are illegal anyway under the Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions 1994 - ask us for more details
- Placing white posts at 100 metre intervals on motorways and major dual carriageways and marking up bridges and orange telephone kiosks along these routes in kilometres
- Ordering signs along canals to be in metric.