If there’s one thing most libertarians in this country love to whinge about, it’s the control exerted by Brussels over the lives of British people. Undoubtedly, the European Commission’s (confirmation of its) decision to allow traders to continue to use non-metric units - including the Imperial system - is a great victory for liberty.

I don’t like the Imperial system. It’s unwieldy and unpractical, uneconomical and unscientific, and leads to all sorts of confusion, inaccuracy, and cost. The result is that I rarely think in terms of any non-metric units for any reason: pounds are the things in your wallet, and feet are the things you keep your shoes on. To be honest, I’m quite relived I don’t know what a shaftment is.

However, if someone else wants to buy, sell, think, and exist within an unwieldy and unpractical Imperial bubble, that’s their loss, and their associated confusion, inaccuracy, and cost. The idea that it’s the responsibility of the state - national or international - to tell us how to use numbers is just a smidgeon on the authoritarian side. Effectively, it means that the state’s role is now to discourage bad maths and to promote the good stuff.

We’ve had people convicted for disobeying an EU law on this issue, so it’s only a matter of time before we have people imprisoned for not knowing their times tables or forgetting that dividing by zero gives an undefined result. Maybe we’ll get mathematicians clogging up the country’s prison cells for failing to prove the Hodge conjecture. Naughty them.

This debate touches the heart of the raison d’être of the European Union. It may well be necessary for the EU to create and maintain a single European market. However, it can’t do so at the expense of individual liberty.

Instead of banning people from using minority systems, they should ban countries from doing exactly the same thing. The single European market ought to mean not that one must use metres everywhere, but rather that one must be allowed to use metres, feet, or Smoots. Provided, of course, that the vendor agrees. The result would be that, instead of having an EU that libertarians decry, we’d have an EU of which we can all be truly proud.

That’s never going to happen, is it?

One thing that all but the most ardently statist apologist can agree is that the past ten years have been a disaster for civil liberties, as one human activity has been criminalised each and every day. However, they haven’t been unmitigated. OK, so more liberal drinking laws hardly make up for mandatory biometric ID cards and an explosion in tracking of us by CCTV cameras, but it’s something worth celebrating. It’s a step in the right direction, even if ten are being taken back at the same time.

Indicative of this contrarian policy stance is the Gambling Act 2005, which came into force at midnight last night. It consolidates statutory laws against gamblers, built up haphazardly since 1845, removes various limits on pay-outs (so-called ’super-casinos’ being the pin-up boys of the new system) and liberalises some of the most stringent regulations against advertising to be found in any industry. That’s the good part.

The bad part is the centralisation inherent to the Act. It outlaws gambling on small premises: supposedly in the name of protecting children, but actually for more the nefarious reason of overseeing and taxing gambling. Take-aways and minicab offices can no longer host the small pay-out fruit machines that made spending time waiting around in them tolerable. Moreover, even larger and more secure premises will be subjected to oversight from the new Gambling Commission.

The question is: why do we need a Gambling Commission at all? Gambling is simply a form of entertainment, to be engaged in freely at the cost of one’s own money. The moralising crusaders might as well ban football, which is far more addictive and costs far more money (although my experience on both counts may be biased by being a season ticket holder at the most attractive and expensive club in the world).

The Salvation Army decries the ‘normalisation’ of gambling, but, actually, the opposite is true, as it brings gambling under stricter and stricter control of the government. No human activity, as simple as gambling and engaged in by two consenting parties, should be regulated as near to eradication as gambling is (the state’s own National Lottery excluded, of course!). To bring normality would be a sweet relief from 162 years of criminalisation.

Sadly, we don’t have normality, and, as is the case with most reliefs under New Labour, this one is not so sweet. Internet gambling fled this country to be rid of over-regulation, yet the government insists that it can pile on more bureaucracy to solve the problem that some people may want different things to the Salvation Army. Each step forward under New Labour has been accompanied by ten backwards, and, sadly, despite the hysteria from the traditionalists, the same is true of the Gambling Act.