A group of market traders who have become known as the Metric Martyrs this morning lost their High Court battle for the legal right to trade in pounds and ounces.

Lord Justice Laws, sitting with Mr Justice Crane, this morning rejected their claim that domestic law provided a loophole which meant European Union directives requiring goods to be sold in metric units did not apply in England and Wales.

Among them was Sunderland trader Steven Thoburn who was convicted in April of using scales without an official stamp which he used to sell bananas by the pound Lawyers for the five had warned during a three-day hearing last November that making it "a criminal offence to sell a pound of bananas in order to please Brussels" threatened to cause a "deep constitutional crisis".

They received backing for their anti-metric battle from celebrities including singer Elaine Paige, actor Edward Fox, comedian John Cleese and Lord Tebbit.

Neil Herron, the Sunderland trader who backed Steven Thoburn and became a spokesman for the five traders, said defeat today meant "the death of democracy" but pledged that the fight would continue.

Mr Herron said it 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 defeat highlighted "in no uncertain terms how a nation and its peoples had been betrayed by the political elite".