IN the time-warp toffee shop in County Durham's Beamish Museum's re-creation of a pre-First World War mining village, staff have been raided by trading standards officers and banned from selling sweets in traditional quarter-pound bags and forced to sell them in metric measures instead.

I can only conclude that these guardians of the consumers' welfare do not have better things to do if the failure of a reproduction British confectionery shop to sell its wares in Napoleonic measures warrants so much attention.

They even issued threats of a £5,000 maximum fine if humbugs and cinder toffee are purveyed in ounces as they were in the 1913 period that the shop purposely sets out to recall.

"Unfortunately, we have got no choice, but to change to metric," sighs shop assistant Celia Glover.

What says it all, surely, is that phrase "no choice," illustrating this country's craven kowtow to Brussels and the compliant eagerness of Jobsworth trading standards officers to do the bidding of the EU bureaucrats hell-bent on bossing this county about and selling its heritage down the river.

Two or four ounces of humbugs may be no great matter in the business of Britain's always leaning-over-backwards relationship with Europe, but when will democracy prevail and our politicians realise that we don't want kilos, litres, grammes, Celsius, metres and all the rest because they are literally foreign to the majority of people in this country?

As I've said before, I look forward to our first anti-metric martyr shopkeeper being fined for offering consumers the choice they want and going to jail for refusal to pay.

We will then see the UK politicians now slavishly marching to the EU goose-step paying the price as imperial tons of backlash fall on their heads for selling away our people and their heritage in these confusing and unwanted alien units.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.