Five market traders who have won fame as the "metric martyrs" in defence of their cherished imperial weights today lost a high court battle for the legal right to trade in pounds and ounces.
Lord Justice Laws, sitting with Mr Justice Crane, rejected their claim that domestic law provided a loophole shielding them from European Union directives requiring goods to be sold in metric units.
The traders were charged after the government accepted European directives making it a criminal offence to weigh and sell goods only in imperial measures.
Lawyers said their plight was a test case since it was the first legal challenge to the sovereignty of European law over British law.
Lawyers acting for the traders had claimed that making it "a criminal offence to sell a pound of bananas in order to please Brussels" would cause a "deep constitutional crisis" here.
They said that the men were allowed under the 1985 Weights and Measures Act to continue using imperial measures, even though the UK had signed up to the 1972 European Communities Act and was thereafter subject to European directives.
A spokesman for the traders, Neil Herron, said that today's ruling marked "the death of democracy". He said the traders would continue their fight.
Mr Herron said the court's decision showed that an act of the UK parliament could be overruled by a "mere directive" from "an entity, a gathering of unelected bureaucrats over which we have no democratic control".
The defendants were fighting convictions and court orders against them after they defied weights and measures inspectors.
One of them, a greengrocer from Hackney, Colin Hunt, was given a 12-month conditional discharge in June last year for pricing pumpkins, sweet potato, cassava and other vegetables by the pound, and ordered to pay £4,500 costs.
A fishmonger from Camelford, Cornwall, John Dove, was ordered to pay court costs for selling mackerel at £1.50 a pound. Another Camelford man, Julian Harman, was ordered to pay costs for selling Brussels sprouts at 39p a pound.
Steven Thoburn from Sunderland was last April given a 12-month conditional discharge for using two sets of imperial scales that did not bear an official stamp to sell bananas by the pound.
The stamp had been obliterated by a trading standards officer on a previous visit because the scales only measured pounds and ounces.
A street trader, Peter Collins of Sutton, Surrey, had his trading licence revoked for using imperial scales.
Michael Shrimpton, the men's lawyer, said that they were "ordinary men without means or higher education but whose patriotism and courage puts ministers to shame".
They won backing for their anti-metric battle from celebrities including the singer Elaine Paige, the actor Edward Fox, the comedian John Cleese and Lord Tebbit, the former chairman of the Conservative party.