Moving the Clocks Forward

There is new impetus to bring the U.K. into European time, which would mean permanently one hour ahead of GMT and two hours in summer. This has been the case twice in my lifetime; once during  WWII, when it was known as double summer time and once in the early seventies, when the experiment was known as British Standard Time. The wartime arrangement was with good reason, reducing the need for blackout. The BST idea was predicated on the current argument about longer days.

After the war, because of public opinion, we went back to GMT. The same thing happened after two or three years in the seventies. It sounds a clever idea, but in the end people do not like going to work and taking the children to school in the dark for most of the winter. Neither do they see advantage in daylight after eleven p.m. in the summer, or  even midnight in Scotland. Additionally there becomes a longer gap with the America. Business links have to get started one hour later, leaving only two hours of our office day left. Of course everyone works longer hours nowadays, though to what effect is far from certain.

Anyway it will be interesting to see what current consultations produce as a policy. Let us hope we are spared a referendum.