British Silly Time

Did you perchance unintentionally sleep late or get an hour behind time this Easter Sunday morning?   If so, you will probably be one of hundreds of thousands of others who likely also forgot to advance their timepieces and did much the same – all as a result of the UK’s curious official bi-annual clock-changing ritual called British Summer Time.

It happens twice a year.  We all change our clocks, timers and watches by one hour back and forth.  In the spring, we ‘add an hour’, and go onto what is called British Summer Time, while in the autumn, we do the reverse, and return to Greenwich Mean Time (the natural standardised meridian time zone for the longitude of Britain and Ireland). 

Even in these days of automatic digital/analogue clocks linked to time signals, ‘changing the clock’ still necessitates altering a vast number of clocks both public and private (there are thousands of public ones with several hundreds in palaces. museums, town halls, etc alone) with attendant waste of time and resources (and in some cases risk of damage to fragile timepieces). It causes people to miss appointments, buses, trains and sleep, and represents an additional unnecessary and interfering imposition in our daily lives. It is an empty, silly gesture, designed solely to please the naive and simplistic minded, as well as, of course, the ever-conformist complying and unifying agenda of the globalist control mindset.

The passions communicated by advocates of Summer Time, especially when it is allied (completely artificially) to the, otherwise, very worthy, cause of road safety, epitomise for me the inherently illogical and unrealistic assumptions made with all such artificial civil time shift arrangements and exposes the many problems, both direct and consequential, caused by trying to promote them.  Indeed, one could justifiably label BST as British Silly Time, for all the real, as opposed to predicted, safety or social value that it possesses.

Clock-changing refers to the artificial concept of ‘saving hours of daylight’ and was reputedly advocated by William Willett, a London builder, who lived in Petts Wood, Kent. He believed that the population’s health and happiness could be improved (an early form of nanny state?!) by putting forward the clocks by twenty minutes every Sunday in April and doing the opposite in September. His idea was not taken up for that specific reason, but in 1911 a ‘Daylight Saving Bill’ was introduced. Upon the outbreak of World War One, the British Government apparently considered it prudent to economise, and to promote greater war work efficiency in using daylight hours by reducing the use of artificial (evening) lighting. And so, in 1916, ‘Summer Time’ was introduced. Even though many countries abandoned this spurious civil time after that war, a few eventually decided that it was a good idea and some began to keep it throughout the year.

Ever since that first introduction of the whole flawed concept of ‘daylight saving’ measures (an obvious and illogical misnomer if ever there was!), our national media seems to have been periodically and predictably plagued with recurring attempts to revive the subject of maintaining and extending it. Unfortunately most such ‘debate’ or campaign pressure is often ill-informed, unconsidered and invariably promoted by a few single-issue pressure groups and specialist-agenda zealots, rather than by the broad spectrum of the wider electorate.

Detached, dispassionate consideration of the whole topic brings to mind a close amusing analogy with the old joke about the silly man lying under a blanket, who, because he finds it too short to cover his body, cuts a piece off the bottom and sews it on the top and then wonders why it still doesn’t fit! Moving the blanket up or down or cutting and sewing only produces the same effect, disclosing the same underlying cause – he needs a longer blanket.

So it is with all artificial civil time-shifts. It’s impossible to ‘save’ daylight by altering the time shown by a clock; there’s only one infallible way to be assured of ‘getting a longer blanket’, or rather, more average daylight length – by emigrating to somewhere nearer the Equator, where the daytime is more even in length throughout the seasons of the year (even altering the Earth’s speed of rotation wouldn’t improve on that)!  And taking a time zone shift to extremes would result in day and night being out of synchronisation.

Anyone with even the most modest understanding of astronomy and a similar grasp of geography should be aware that to try to ‘shift’ time zones – for that is all that ‘clock changing’ really is – is a physical nonsense, and any attempts to ‘improve safety’ or, indeed, achieve any other kind of civil or social engineering by such means are doomed to failure, whilst massively inconveniencing everyone for the fixations of a minority.

Apart from well-meaning but misguided claims of road safety promotion in the UK, the real drive to time shift undoubtedly comes from the progressive, Europhile and globalist movement, who seem determined to have us all marching to Central European Time (CET). This is a time zone that is fine for Germany and its immediate neighbours, lying across or near the 10-15°East longitude zone, but not for the UK (nor for those countries south or north of it). It is significant that Portugal, another EU member State, which lies south-west of the UK and which bravely experimented with continuous CET during 1966–1976 and 1992–1996, reverted to its closest mean meridian time of GMT.  At its lower latitude, the much-vaunted ‘advantages’ of CET and Summer Time would surely have recommended themselves to the populace – yet clearly they have not!  Spain to its east, used GMT, until the politics of the Franco era in 1940, as did France from 1911 to 1940; both use summer time.  Iceland, which is also on GMT, does not.

Furthermore, regional UK views vary – a very different attitude emerges the further north one takes public soundings. This is hardly surprising, given the disadvantages of time shifts that accrue increasingly severe at higher latitudes. The greatest initial opposition to The EEC/EU also came from there. With the more recent resurgence of regionalism and nationalism within The UK – especially in northerly Scotland, perhaps the safety ‘reformers’ (mostly signatories to pro-CET petitions) in England ought to think a little more carefully about what they hope to achieve by such action.

The EEC/EU seems almost alone in the contemporary world in this peculiar obsession for uniformity in everything that does not need it (and often, ironically, none for that which does!). Interestingly, the largest geographical, political and economic communities in this world, namely China, India, the former USSR, the USA and Australasia, do not have single standardised time zones based on one central meridian – they remain in many separate time zones, because they know that, across large continents, it is impractical and disruptive to do otherwise.

An experiment in continuous ‘Summer Time’ was conducted in the UK in 1968-71, when we all endured a year’s continuous ‘British Standard Time’ (GMT+ 1hr). The results were quite predictable; it was a flop – and inconclusive and ineffectual as far as public safety was concerned, for instead of getting dark evenings all winter, we had equally dark mornings instead. The latter proved to be almost as dangerous and certainly as inconvenient as the former.

Analysis of accident data during the experiment seemingly indicated that, while there had been an increase in casualties in the morning, there had been a slightly greater decrease in casualties in the evening. But most people, especially those working and living further north in northern Britain, Northern Ireland and Scotland, found ‘permanent summer time’ most unsatisfactory, with inconveniently dark mornings (the winter sunrise did not occur until 10:00 or even later for much of the year) and the experiment was wisely dropped.

Some BST advocates claim “broad public agreement for continuous Summer Time” Hardly – 40-45% at best, according to most figures. Reported public opinion is unreliable, because, as with most important issues affecting private and public convenience and safety, there is often a lack of wide democratic consultation by our elected representatives in central government. Many citizens of this country are not properly informed of the scientific facts or are not interested and therefore are not in a position to produce an informed opinion.

There was even lack of public consultation in the Government’s 1989 Green Paper on the subject: “Summer Time – a consultation document”! A letter of enquiry on the subject to The Home Office elicited the significant admission that “the Department did not overtly publicise the Green Paper”! Instead, only “selected (how?) special interest groups, local authorities and Government Departments” (presumably those likely to be in favour of CET, as with compulsory illegal metrification!) were “approached” for “a preliminary survey”. How can we trust such blatant secrecy and lack of balance?

Despite all the COD statistics produced on the subject, it remains clear that the introduction of BST or CET by another name (or Berliner Zeit, as Peter Hitchens once appositely termed it), is a red herring (no pun intended) issue of doubtful public safety value and unproven.

A strong grass-roots movement now exists for the abolition of BST entirely, again favouring all year round our native meridian GMT.  It typically states a lack of sufficient practical gains from the adjustment of time keeping, mooting instead that empirical and judicious localised changing of school and/or business hours to suit individual and specific needs would effect the same benefit(s) without disrupting a social and scientific standard and causing endless disruptive and costly clock-changing.  The effort expended on pursuing BST would be far better channelled into more effective safety-specific targets, such as improved public transport, reduced travel/ telematics, pollution and speed reduction and flexibly-rostered working and educational hours, where the interests of road safety would be more directly and usefully served.

Perhaps the most obvious feature of any civil ‘summertime’ is that it is totally unnecessary! In the dark days of winter, no amount of ‘summertime’ will lighten the dark evenings, whilst, in real summer, nature already provides extended evening (and) morning illumination.

It would be far better to leave civil time here at its natural UK mean time, GMT, throughout the year, as, until just over a century ago, it had been, with local minor, variance (mean solar time) since time immemorial. This would let the seasons again bring their own natural changing light levels and allow people to adjust their individual lives to suit their particular needs, rather than having to monkey about twice a year with millions of clocks and timers, etc. Indeed GMT itself superseded true local time within this country only when the railways were built and a national standard was needed for time-tabling purposes; otherwise we should all still keep our own local meridian time. There is no equivalent pressing contemporary need.

We hear a lot these days about ‘freedom’ and ‘the right to choose’. I claim the individual’s freedom to live my life in a broadly ‘neutral’ state, with special interest groups and individuals learning to take their own medicine quietly by themselves without trying to ram it down everyone else’s throats at the same time.

Over recent years, we’ve had all sorts of ‘-ations’ imposed on us: harmonisation, centralisation/ de-centralisation, immigration, decimalisation, metrification, privatisation; and periodically we’re even faced with time standardisation ! Have we not had enough of these continual, highly disruptive changes to our lifestyle and culture? It’s time instead for some well-deserved consolid-ation – and rest!”

Paul R is a former property surveyor.

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