Sept. 11 (Bloomberg) -- Britons and the Irish can still walk a mile to the pub for a pint of beer instead of trudging 1.6 kilometers for 50 centiliters of the sudsy stuff, European Union regulators ruled.

In a belated victory for Britain's anti-metric campaigners, the European Commission dropped plans to force the U.K. and Ireland to replace Imperial measures such as pints, yards, feet and inches with the metric system by 2009.

Today's decision is a posthumous vindication for Steven Thoburn, an English grocer dubbed the ``metric martyr'' when he was convicted in 2001 for selling bananas by the pound. Thoburn died of a heart attack at the age of 39 in 2004 after his appeal was rejected.

``Finally, someone has exercised an ounce of common sense,'' Neil Herron, head of the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund, said in a telephone interview from Sunderland, England.

Brussels regulators have long sought to persuade the British public that they aren't seeking to outlaw U.K. traditions, and have set up a Web site devoted to knocking down ``Euromyths'' fed by the U.K. media.

The inches-to-centimeters law wasn't a myth. It was passed by EU governments in 1979 and scheduled to be fully phased in by 2009. Britain put the law on its books and the city council of Sunderland, in northern England, seized Thoburn's un-metric scales in 2000.

Three traders in other parts of Britain faced charges for crimes such as selling mackerel, Brussels sprouts and pumpkins by the pound.

Traditions `Honored'

Today's EU metric climbdown, triggered by a public-opinion survey, ``honors the culture and traditions of Great Britain and Ireland,'' Industry Commissioner Guenter Verheugen said in a statement.

The change of heart comes as Prime Minister Gordon Brown seeks to overcome the British public's wariness of the EU and to defeat calls for a British referendum on a planned overhaul of the bloc's governing treaties.

Use of Imperial measures in Britain and Ireland and the metric system in the rest of the 27-nation bloc isn't a barrier to intra-EU trade, the commission, the EU's executive agency, said. It said Ireland already uses kilometers for highway signs.

Thoburn's conviction remains on the books and his defenders are considering how to proceed with a petition for a royal pardon, which has attracted 20,000 signatures. The U.K. anti- miles law also remains in force and now needs to be revised by Parliament, Herron said.

``The convictions of the metric martyrs stick out like a festering sore on the backside of British justice,'' Herron said.

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Last Updated: September 11, 2007 09:10 EDT