Hello All
Hello
No, none of that - just me here. Right, over in the land of the politibrits we were talking about the Metric Martyrs (remember them?) and I said I was trying to find a way for them to become a terrorist organisation and it not be stupid. *Spoiler alert* I couldn't - there's no way to do that. Why would people who want to keep using pounds and ounces start blowing up buildings? They wouldn't, would they.
BUT - they could still kill Blair. A pathetic, forlorn Blair. A Blair for whom everything that could go wrong did go wrong. All at once. And without his Pre-Iraq Teflon media ability to shrug it off.
Read on, friends - read on. And for all you non-Brits, yes these were all real things, I've just slightly jigged the time a bit.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Metric Martyrs formed in the late 1990s as a reaction against European Union legislation requiring all weights and measurements in the EU to be carried out in Metric, alongside any existing local weights and measurements. The Labour Government in 1998 (1) chose to enforce the directive by allowing sales in metric only, explicitly banning the use of imperial measurements for the first time in British history. This was long before the EU deadline of 2000, and was seen along with Blair’s musings about joining the Euro as part of a strongly pro-Europe agenda. Cynics have suggested that this was a case of pursuing a deliberately unpopular but essentially unimportant agenda, to move the more harmful job loss figures following Labour’s ill-fated minimum wage introduction (2), but members of Blair’s inner circle insist he passionately believed in the European project.
Original isolated acts of protest were picked up by the Daily Mail, scattered in between the depressing coverage of the Northern Irish rejection of the Good Friday agreement (3) and following upswing in the troubles, which had seemed to close to resolution before a string of attacks on the Ulster Constabulary.
Using a throwaway comment by the spokesman for Trading Standards, who dismissively remarked that market stall traders ‘could martyr themselves if they wanted to, but the legislation will stand’, the Mail dubbed the group “The Metric Martyrs”. In the course of attending an interview with the Mail, various regional protestors facing prosecution met for the first time in mid 1999 and officially created The Metric Martyrs. Upon returning home they recruited many more traders to their cause, attracted by both a genuinely held belief in using traditional British measurements and the attendant publicity the group was gathering.
Public sympathy was overwhelmingly with the Martyrs, who benefited from campaigns in their defence from the Daily Mail, the Express and the Daily Telegraph (4). Indeed, such was the excitement that it was one of the few topics capable of moving the string of British losses over the skies of Kosovo (5) off the front page. With their legal fees thus covered, the Martyrs challenged each decision against them through the courts until leave to appeal was finally denied by the Privy Council in June 2000.
By this stage the traders martyrs were 15,000 strong across the UK, and with £5 monthly membership dues and the remaining money from Newspaper campaigns impressively well-funded. A speculative appeal to the European Court was mooted, but rejected by a majority of the Martyr’s board as confusing their strong anti-EU message. The group instead decided to simply make the law unenforceable. The minutes of the August 2000 meeting indicate the original plan was impressive in both scope and simplicity – traders would declare their various indoor markets or outdoor areas “metric-free zones”, reasoning that local authorities and police could not in reality arrest thousands of market traders each day (6). The plan was approved unanimously by the 12 regional delegates and taken back to the counties and shires to be implemented. By September there were an estimated 400 ‘metric-free zones’ across the UK, with more to come.
It is possible that the Labour government may have relaxed the ban on Imperial measurements in the face of such determined opposition and overwhelming public support, were it not for the impact of the ongoing fuel strikes, also occurring in September 2000. Driven by protests at the rate of taxation on petrol as, highlighted by Michael Portillo’s (7) resurgent Conservative Party at their summer conference, what began as isolated ‘boycott the pump’ days to draw attention to the issue rapidly spread to haulage drivers blockading refineries and distribution stations across the country. By 13th September thousands of petrol stations across Britain had run dry and the Government, suspecting collusion on the part of distributors also keen to see tax levels reduced, began to apply pressure. Some deliveries commenced on the 14th with police escorts, but by the 15th the drivers of the fuel lorries had joined the protests and the protests intensified (8). Deliveries were permitted to depots used by emergency services but the rest of the country ground to a hault. By 17th numbers on the roads were down to 20% of normal levels and the Government’s approval ratings in the polls had hit record lows.
This was compounded by both an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, first confirmed in August 2000 (9) and what appeared to be becoming an increasing quagmire in Sierra Leone as mission creep in the face of an aggressive guerrilla campaign had led to Blair committing 7,500 British troops (10).
The bleak situation the Government found itself in was satirised mercilessly by the BBC, with an exchange on Have I Got News For You between Angus Deayton, Ian Hislop and Danny Baker becoming the de rigueur clip on retrospective programmes to capture the mood in 2000.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Angus Deayton: Ian's team, what went wrong for Tony Blair this week?
<Audience laughter>
Ian Hislop: Right, hang on...
<pulls out enormous tome and drops it heavily on the desk - Audience laughter>
Danny Baker: Let’s see then…latest job figures?
AD: Nope, not that.
IH: <Theatrically running his finger down the page> More bad news from Sierra Leone?
AD: Not that either, I’m afraid.
DB: More jets lost over Kosovo?
AD: No…I’m beginning to wonder whether this question is quite fair…
IH: Trouble in Northern Ireland?
AD: No…keep going, you’ll get there…
IH: The farmers, foot and mouth spreading in Yorkshire?
AD: No, come on…
DB: Have we got the energy for this, given the – oh!
DB & IH [Triumphant]: Fuel strikes!!
<Audience laughter and cheers>
AD [Deadpan]: ...No
<Danny Baker Collapses in a heap, audience laugh>
AD: I’ll just tell you, shall I? Actually it could have been any of those, but the answer on the card is the metric martyrs again.
IH & DB: Oh come on!
<audience laughter and applause>
Paul Merton: He's like King Midas's idiot brother, isn't he? Everything he touches turns to shit.
<Wild audience cheering and laughter>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 25th September Blair ordered the army to begin fuel deliveries (11). This they successfully did, at a cost. Peter Smith at Milford Haven slipped through the army cordon and ran in front of the gates as they opened, attempting to block the articulated lorries in a Tiananmen Square type move. He was run over and killed instantly.
Whether Sgt. Michaels saw Mr Smith and carried on or was momentarily distracted has been the subject of much speculation, a court martial, a police investigation and featured in two lengthy inquiries. The end result was yet more front page misery for Tony Blair.
His speech in the immediate aftermath was catastrophically misjudged, displaying a sudden cackhandedness with the media after his years in opposition.
“Were we to yield to that pressure it would run counter to every democratic principle this country believes in, and what is more, if the government was to decide its policy on taxes in response to such behaviour, the credibility of economic policy vital to any country would be severely damaged and I will simply not allow that to happen” (12)
To many this appeared to be a squalid justifying exercise after a man had lost his life. This was made worse by Princess Diana (13) attending Mr Smith’s funeral while Blair stayed away.
When a private conversation in which Tony Blair poured venomous scorn on Diana’s attempt to “play ‘the People’s Princess’” was leaked to the Mail on Sunday the last of his spell over the British people was broken in an instant - his approval ratings sank, never again rising above 40% (14)
In October local authorities began to prosecute both individual stallholders and landlords of ‘metric-free zone’ trading sites, making pains to point out it was under direct orders from a Whitehall keen to be seen to restore order and have the law of the land obeyed. This proved as divisive as it was intended to be – the landlords, when it wasn’t the local council themselves, were in no mood to be fined for some sentimental protest and started attempting to enforce the law themselves, sometimes getting staff to tear down prices listed in imperial units.
Soon some stallholders started quietly putting small metric measurements alongside the imperial units, which pleased nobody and earned the wrath of the Metric Martyr loyalists.
At the indoor Grainger Market in Newcastle a riot broke out when inspectors from the council were thrown out by traders and attempted to re-enter with police assistance. Doors were barricaded and batons were drawn, until traders and police were exchanging blows. In Cambridge traders in Market Square simply walked into the adjacent Guildhall, up the stairs and into the Council Chamber refusing to move. Similar scenes, if less dramatic, were occurring across the country.
After almost three years of solidly negative headlines and Michael Portillo’s Conservatives registering a 15 point lead in some polls (15) the mood in the Labour Party had turned poisonous. Foot and Mouth continued to spread across the country devastating the farming industry so soon after the BSE crisis. The IRA were warning of a renewed mainland bombing campaign and the “jobs tax” of the minimum wage was still driving up youth unemployment. When faced with all these problems, Blair began once again calling for Britain to join the Euro.
The PLP had had enough. Using the pretext of a heart murmur Blair suffered at the height of the fuel protests (16) Gordon Brown made his move. Blair was to stand down before the 2001 general election citing ill-health, a face-saving exercise for him and, it was hoped, a government saving move for the Party.
After standing down in the 2001 election Tony Blair faded from view, emerging only to embarrass his party by calling for Britain to involve itself in American adventurism overseas following the foiled ‘9/11’ attacks (17) – calls greeted with a bemused shake of the head by Gordon Brown and a country scarred by the interminable conflict in Sierra Leone.
By 2003 the name “Tony Blair” was a metaphor for immense hope and crushing disappointment. The Guardian defined “A Tony Blair” as ‘a style-over-substance hype merchant whose apparent gifts are quickly revealed to be illusory’. In the early days of his leadership, as incredible as it seems today given his achievements (18), Charles Kennedy frequently had to refute media claims he was ‘simply a Lib Dem Tony Blair’.
The grim postscript for the Metric Martyrs is of course well known. With Labour back in government albeit with a reduced majority of 95 the momentum for the movement petered away and relaxing the rules slipped off the legislative agenda. But the sore remained.
Blair visited Newcastle on the 20th March 2003 (19) to investigate setting up a legal practice far away from the glare of the London-centric media. On his way back to Central Station, apparently on a whim, Blair visited the Grainger Market, the site of such violence three years earlier. At the time there were no CCTV cameras in the building, but eye-witnesses describe the scene thus.
It being Thursday afternoon the market was quiet and Blair initially moved around without incident. Gradually his presence was noticed and a few jeers rang out. He kept his head down and turned right down the main aisle – this proved to be a mistake. Some of the original Metric Martyrs still had stalls there, including Steve Thoburn, the very first to face prosecution.
They began to pelt Mr Blair with rotten fruit. He sped up as more jeers rang out and more was thrown at him, eventually breaking into a run for the door. A well-travelled witness said he’d seen nothing like the rain of foodstuff other than at La Tomatina. As he jogged past, a butcher threw a bucket of blood and offal over Mr Blair, which knocked his stride off-balance. A well-aimed apple hit him on the back of the head, and as his weight shifted forward he slipped on a banana skin on the floor.
He careened backward, splitting his head open on the hard concrete. The indignity continued for some time before those present noticed Mr Blair was no longer moving. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Newcastle General Hospital at 2:15pm.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I know. I know. I'm probably Blair's biggest fan but once I started putting a few troubles in for him I suddenly realised how a few things here and there could have nixed him early doors. OK, for those who are interested the list of PODs.
1) A year early, but they did do this OTL.
2) The Tories voted against the minimum wage saying it would destroy jobs. Here it did.
3) Didn't feel good about this - also OTL it passed in a landslide so just brush over this one.
4) It gets a bigger reaction because papers are looking for a Good British story, because...
5) Just a Blair-screw here, OTL NATO didn't lose a single jet.
6) Things never got this organised
7) Were you up for Portillo?! ...yeah, he kept his seat somehow.
8) OTL this didn't happen and fuel kept getting delivered.
9) Six months early, just to add to Blair's woes
10) Another Blair-screw. OTL 1,200 troops went in and put everything right in doublequick time. Generally thought of as adding to Blair's humanitarian interventionism complex. Here he had a rather different time.
11) Didn't have to do it OTL, but it was considered.
12) An OTL speech about the fuel strikes. Change a few things and I sounds way authoritarian.
13) Portillo didn't lose his seat, so the POD is before the crash. Also, I couldn't resist...
14) Yep, I took this from him. OTL 'the People's Princess' was the high watermark of Blair's honeymoon and the media's love-in with him. Here it's his nadir.
15) Hague did have a lead over Blair during the Fuel Strike
16) This happened in 2003 OTL, bit of Iraq stress getting to him. Happens early here.
17) Diana survives and 9/11 never happens. What a time to be alive.
18) We all love Charlie Kennedy, here he apparently does better than OTL. Another plus.
19) 20th March 2003. Bit heavy handed maybe but there we go.
Hello
No, none of that - just me here. Right, over in the land of the politibrits we were talking about the Metric Martyrs (remember them?) and I said I was trying to find a way for them to become a terrorist organisation and it not be stupid. *Spoiler alert* I couldn't - there's no way to do that. Why would people who want to keep using pounds and ounces start blowing up buildings? They wouldn't, would they.
BUT - they could still kill Blair. A pathetic, forlorn Blair. A Blair for whom everything that could go wrong did go wrong. All at once. And without his Pre-Iraq Teflon media ability to shrug it off.
Read on, friends - read on. And for all you non-Brits, yes these were all real things, I've just slightly jigged the time a bit.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Metric Martyrs formed in the late 1990s as a reaction against European Union legislation requiring all weights and measurements in the EU to be carried out in Metric, alongside any existing local weights and measurements. The Labour Government in 1998 (1) chose to enforce the directive by allowing sales in metric only, explicitly banning the use of imperial measurements for the first time in British history. This was long before the EU deadline of 2000, and was seen along with Blair’s musings about joining the Euro as part of a strongly pro-Europe agenda. Cynics have suggested that this was a case of pursuing a deliberately unpopular but essentially unimportant agenda, to move the more harmful job loss figures following Labour’s ill-fated minimum wage introduction (2), but members of Blair’s inner circle insist he passionately believed in the European project.
Original isolated acts of protest were picked up by the Daily Mail, scattered in between the depressing coverage of the Northern Irish rejection of the Good Friday agreement (3) and following upswing in the troubles, which had seemed to close to resolution before a string of attacks on the Ulster Constabulary.
Using a throwaway comment by the spokesman for Trading Standards, who dismissively remarked that market stall traders ‘could martyr themselves if they wanted to, but the legislation will stand’, the Mail dubbed the group “The Metric Martyrs”. In the course of attending an interview with the Mail, various regional protestors facing prosecution met for the first time in mid 1999 and officially created The Metric Martyrs. Upon returning home they recruited many more traders to their cause, attracted by both a genuinely held belief in using traditional British measurements and the attendant publicity the group was gathering.
Public sympathy was overwhelmingly with the Martyrs, who benefited from campaigns in their defence from the Daily Mail, the Express and the Daily Telegraph (4). Indeed, such was the excitement that it was one of the few topics capable of moving the string of British losses over the skies of Kosovo (5) off the front page. With their legal fees thus covered, the Martyrs challenged each decision against them through the courts until leave to appeal was finally denied by the Privy Council in June 2000.
By this stage the traders martyrs were 15,000 strong across the UK, and with £5 monthly membership dues and the remaining money from Newspaper campaigns impressively well-funded. A speculative appeal to the European Court was mooted, but rejected by a majority of the Martyr’s board as confusing their strong anti-EU message. The group instead decided to simply make the law unenforceable. The minutes of the August 2000 meeting indicate the original plan was impressive in both scope and simplicity – traders would declare their various indoor markets or outdoor areas “metric-free zones”, reasoning that local authorities and police could not in reality arrest thousands of market traders each day (6). The plan was approved unanimously by the 12 regional delegates and taken back to the counties and shires to be implemented. By September there were an estimated 400 ‘metric-free zones’ across the UK, with more to come.
It is possible that the Labour government may have relaxed the ban on Imperial measurements in the face of such determined opposition and overwhelming public support, were it not for the impact of the ongoing fuel strikes, also occurring in September 2000. Driven by protests at the rate of taxation on petrol as, highlighted by Michael Portillo’s (7) resurgent Conservative Party at their summer conference, what began as isolated ‘boycott the pump’ days to draw attention to the issue rapidly spread to haulage drivers blockading refineries and distribution stations across the country. By 13th September thousands of petrol stations across Britain had run dry and the Government, suspecting collusion on the part of distributors also keen to see tax levels reduced, began to apply pressure. Some deliveries commenced on the 14th with police escorts, but by the 15th the drivers of the fuel lorries had joined the protests and the protests intensified (8). Deliveries were permitted to depots used by emergency services but the rest of the country ground to a hault. By 17th numbers on the roads were down to 20% of normal levels and the Government’s approval ratings in the polls had hit record lows.
This was compounded by both an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, first confirmed in August 2000 (9) and what appeared to be becoming an increasing quagmire in Sierra Leone as mission creep in the face of an aggressive guerrilla campaign had led to Blair committing 7,500 British troops (10).
The bleak situation the Government found itself in was satirised mercilessly by the BBC, with an exchange on Have I Got News For You between Angus Deayton, Ian Hislop and Danny Baker becoming the de rigueur clip on retrospective programmes to capture the mood in 2000.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Angus Deayton: Ian's team, what went wrong for Tony Blair this week?
<Audience laughter>
Ian Hislop: Right, hang on...
<pulls out enormous tome and drops it heavily on the desk - Audience laughter>
Danny Baker: Let’s see then…latest job figures?
AD: Nope, not that.
IH: <Theatrically running his finger down the page> More bad news from Sierra Leone?
AD: Not that either, I’m afraid.
DB: More jets lost over Kosovo?
AD: No…I’m beginning to wonder whether this question is quite fair…
IH: Trouble in Northern Ireland?
AD: No…keep going, you’ll get there…
IH: The farmers, foot and mouth spreading in Yorkshire?
AD: No, come on…
DB: Have we got the energy for this, given the – oh!
DB & IH [Triumphant]: Fuel strikes!!
<Audience laughter and cheers>
AD [Deadpan]: ...No
<Danny Baker Collapses in a heap, audience laugh>
AD: I’ll just tell you, shall I? Actually it could have been any of those, but the answer on the card is the metric martyrs again.
IH & DB: Oh come on!
<audience laughter and applause>
Paul Merton: He's like King Midas's idiot brother, isn't he? Everything he touches turns to shit.
<Wild audience cheering and laughter>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 25th September Blair ordered the army to begin fuel deliveries (11). This they successfully did, at a cost. Peter Smith at Milford Haven slipped through the army cordon and ran in front of the gates as they opened, attempting to block the articulated lorries in a Tiananmen Square type move. He was run over and killed instantly.
Whether Sgt. Michaels saw Mr Smith and carried on or was momentarily distracted has been the subject of much speculation, a court martial, a police investigation and featured in two lengthy inquiries. The end result was yet more front page misery for Tony Blair.
His speech in the immediate aftermath was catastrophically misjudged, displaying a sudden cackhandedness with the media after his years in opposition.
“Were we to yield to that pressure it would run counter to every democratic principle this country believes in, and what is more, if the government was to decide its policy on taxes in response to such behaviour, the credibility of economic policy vital to any country would be severely damaged and I will simply not allow that to happen” (12)
To many this appeared to be a squalid justifying exercise after a man had lost his life. This was made worse by Princess Diana (13) attending Mr Smith’s funeral while Blair stayed away.
When a private conversation in which Tony Blair poured venomous scorn on Diana’s attempt to “play ‘the People’s Princess’” was leaked to the Mail on Sunday the last of his spell over the British people was broken in an instant - his approval ratings sank, never again rising above 40% (14)
In October local authorities began to prosecute both individual stallholders and landlords of ‘metric-free zone’ trading sites, making pains to point out it was under direct orders from a Whitehall keen to be seen to restore order and have the law of the land obeyed. This proved as divisive as it was intended to be – the landlords, when it wasn’t the local council themselves, were in no mood to be fined for some sentimental protest and started attempting to enforce the law themselves, sometimes getting staff to tear down prices listed in imperial units.
Soon some stallholders started quietly putting small metric measurements alongside the imperial units, which pleased nobody and earned the wrath of the Metric Martyr loyalists.
At the indoor Grainger Market in Newcastle a riot broke out when inspectors from the council were thrown out by traders and attempted to re-enter with police assistance. Doors were barricaded and batons were drawn, until traders and police were exchanging blows. In Cambridge traders in Market Square simply walked into the adjacent Guildhall, up the stairs and into the Council Chamber refusing to move. Similar scenes, if less dramatic, were occurring across the country.
After almost three years of solidly negative headlines and Michael Portillo’s Conservatives registering a 15 point lead in some polls (15) the mood in the Labour Party had turned poisonous. Foot and Mouth continued to spread across the country devastating the farming industry so soon after the BSE crisis. The IRA were warning of a renewed mainland bombing campaign and the “jobs tax” of the minimum wage was still driving up youth unemployment. When faced with all these problems, Blair began once again calling for Britain to join the Euro.
The PLP had had enough. Using the pretext of a heart murmur Blair suffered at the height of the fuel protests (16) Gordon Brown made his move. Blair was to stand down before the 2001 general election citing ill-health, a face-saving exercise for him and, it was hoped, a government saving move for the Party.
After standing down in the 2001 election Tony Blair faded from view, emerging only to embarrass his party by calling for Britain to involve itself in American adventurism overseas following the foiled ‘9/11’ attacks (17) – calls greeted with a bemused shake of the head by Gordon Brown and a country scarred by the interminable conflict in Sierra Leone.
By 2003 the name “Tony Blair” was a metaphor for immense hope and crushing disappointment. The Guardian defined “A Tony Blair” as ‘a style-over-substance hype merchant whose apparent gifts are quickly revealed to be illusory’. In the early days of his leadership, as incredible as it seems today given his achievements (18), Charles Kennedy frequently had to refute media claims he was ‘simply a Lib Dem Tony Blair’.
The grim postscript for the Metric Martyrs is of course well known. With Labour back in government albeit with a reduced majority of 95 the momentum for the movement petered away and relaxing the rules slipped off the legislative agenda. But the sore remained.
Blair visited Newcastle on the 20th March 2003 (19) to investigate setting up a legal practice far away from the glare of the London-centric media. On his way back to Central Station, apparently on a whim, Blair visited the Grainger Market, the site of such violence three years earlier. At the time there were no CCTV cameras in the building, but eye-witnesses describe the scene thus.
It being Thursday afternoon the market was quiet and Blair initially moved around without incident. Gradually his presence was noticed and a few jeers rang out. He kept his head down and turned right down the main aisle – this proved to be a mistake. Some of the original Metric Martyrs still had stalls there, including Steve Thoburn, the very first to face prosecution.
They began to pelt Mr Blair with rotten fruit. He sped up as more jeers rang out and more was thrown at him, eventually breaking into a run for the door. A well-travelled witness said he’d seen nothing like the rain of foodstuff other than at La Tomatina. As he jogged past, a butcher threw a bucket of blood and offal over Mr Blair, which knocked his stride off-balance. A well-aimed apple hit him on the back of the head, and as his weight shifted forward he slipped on a banana skin on the floor.
He careened backward, splitting his head open on the hard concrete. The indignity continued for some time before those present noticed Mr Blair was no longer moving. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Newcastle General Hospital at 2:15pm.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I know. I know. I'm probably Blair's biggest fan but once I started putting a few troubles in for him I suddenly realised how a few things here and there could have nixed him early doors. OK, for those who are interested the list of PODs.
1) A year early, but they did do this OTL.
2) The Tories voted against the minimum wage saying it would destroy jobs. Here it did.
3) Didn't feel good about this - also OTL it passed in a landslide so just brush over this one.
4) It gets a bigger reaction because papers are looking for a Good British story, because...
5) Just a Blair-screw here, OTL NATO didn't lose a single jet.
6) Things never got this organised
7) Were you up for Portillo?! ...yeah, he kept his seat somehow.
8) OTL this didn't happen and fuel kept getting delivered.
9) Six months early, just to add to Blair's woes
10) Another Blair-screw. OTL 1,200 troops went in and put everything right in doublequick time. Generally thought of as adding to Blair's humanitarian interventionism complex. Here he had a rather different time.
11) Didn't have to do it OTL, but it was considered.
12) An OTL speech about the fuel strikes. Change a few things and I sounds way authoritarian.
13) Portillo didn't lose his seat, so the POD is before the crash. Also, I couldn't resist...
14) Yep, I took this from him. OTL 'the People's Princess' was the high watermark of Blair's honeymoon and the media's love-in with him. Here it's his nadir.
15) Hague did have a lead over Blair during the Fuel Strike
16) This happened in 2003 OTL, bit of Iraq stress getting to him. Happens early here.
17) Diana survives and 9/11 never happens. What a time to be alive.
18) We all love Charlie Kennedy, here he apparently does better than OTL. Another plus.
19) 20th March 2003. Bit heavy handed maybe but there we go.
