Plan to bring UK clocks forward

[Grig]

That will completely mess up timezones. The timezone lines, won't be lines anyway but swiggly things with governments changing it for the hell of it. Time is treated as a useless thing, might as well shift a few days back to make me feel younger (OK, maybe not so radical, but you get my point).

I personally would prefer longer evenings due to my routine, but it will cause a few problems. So mixed feelings on it.

[Jordy]

Well BST was only introduced in 1972 and I think the UK survived before that I think it's a good idea just to put them forward and leave them there. Advantages apparently include, less carbon emissions, more tourism and less accidents as there would be lighter evenings all year around. I don't think it has anything to do with the EU.

Rare opportunity to whole heartedly agree with Catzsy! I completely agree, I don't think there's any historical significance in clocks. Greenwich observatory will forever be the "home of time" regardless of this and I think you'd struggle to say BST is part of our national heritage

Whatever strategy gives us the most daylight possible is best in my opinion, daylight is more valuable in the evening than the morning. People are just commuting etc in the morning, sport for instance can be played in the evening with better daylight hours. There's clearly economic advantages to this (Tourism mainly) and from a safety angle too, it's often been said that road safety accidents would be reduced as statistics prove more accidents happen after daylight. In this case the alternative really is better and just for the hassle of changing our clocks once every 6 months (very little at all).

[Technologic]

The world isn't going to end just because we move an hour, this isnt dr who

[FlyingJesus]

Whatever strategy gives us the most daylight possible is best in my opinion, daylight is more valuable in the evening than the morning.

It's bad for you to get up when it's dark appaz, affects mood and stress levels or something

[AgnesIO]

Why do they have to change everything? Can't we just keep the same time we have used for god knows how many years.

We only had that for the war though. We have no need for it now.

The dark evenings in the winter are ****. I would love to stop the useless time change thing

[-:Undertaker:-]

I don't see the argument about 'more daylight' - if you want more daylight then wake up earlier and so on? there's still the same amount of light regardless. Why don't the people who run this contry concentrate on more pressing issues rather than spend all this time (and most likely money) on a debate about time which in the end makes little difference, as you still have the same amount of light/dark as you did before.

[GommeInc]

I don't see the argument about 'more daylight' - if you want more daylight then wake up earlier and so on? there's still the same amount of light regardless. Why don't the people who run this contry concentrate on more pressing issues rather than spend all this time (and most likely money) on a debate about time which in the end makes little difference, as you still have the same amount of light/dark as you did before.

Not forgetting it's happened a few times, and is near enough immediately reverted because it doesn't change anything. Apparently the response to "school children will have to leave in the dark" in Scotland is "change the school hours to one hour later" which doesn't make much sense, but hey ho

[alexxxxx]

This is ridiculous, we are not near Berlin therefore we do not have the same time as them. You cannot change the times, it would be like California switching to the same time zone as Washington D.C. which is on the other side of the country - and we should be happy with our time zone, from what I know GMT is where time was rolled out across the world as the international standard (I may be wrong, time experts can correct me if so).

Call me sinister or even paranoid, but why this sudden desire to make us match the rest of Europe? I wonder.

Well your example isn't really correct. CA to Washington DC is 2.8k miles whilst London to Berlin is only 680 miles... so relatively it is much closer. and if you look on a map almost all of the UK falls above France and Spain, all GMT+1. Portugal however is GMT. Whether or not you call our 'time-zone' correct or not is personal preference, however there are economic benefits to being on the same time-zone as CET supposedly due to the cross-over of office opening times being near-perfect. Our Stock Market opens at 8am whilst the rest of Europe opens at 9am, we do this so they run the same. It would be interesting to see if it has any damaging problems with the east coast of the US.

I personally think that we should move to +1 as i prefer lighter evenings, there is nothing more depressing than coming home in the dark, but of course that is only my opinion.

[-:Undertaker:-]

Well your example isn't really correct. CA to Washington DC is 2.8k miles whilst London to Berlin is only 680 miles... so relatively it is much closer. and if you look on a map almost all of the UK falls above France and Spain, all GMT+1. Portugal however is GMT. Whether or not you call our 'time-zone' correct or not is personal preference, however there are economic benefits to being on the same time-zone as CET supposedly due to the cross-over of office opening times being near-perfect. Our Stock Market opens at 8am whilst the rest of Europe opens at 9am, we do this so they run the same. It would be interesting to see if it has any damaging problems with the east coast of the US.

I personally think that we should move to +1 as i prefer lighter evenings, there is nothing more depressing than coming home in the dark, but of course that is only my opinion.

It is much closer yes, but Berlin is still a long long way away from London. Once you have these 'super time zones' then surely they could end up merging which is completely stupid as the Earth is a rounded shape, therefore the more layers of time you have the more measured and evened out it is - hence why we've managed with the present system for a long time without any reasons to change.

Why does London not have the same time as Berlin? because it is not near Berlin.

A good article if anybody is interested;

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co....rlin-time.html

Sooner than you think, we could all be living our lives on Berlin Time, an hour ahead of GMT in winter and two hours ahead of GMT in summer. Such time is fine for that great and historic city, you might say. But Berlin is 580 miles and 15 degrees of longitude east of Greenwich, which means that the sun rises and sets there an hour earlier than it does in England. The German capital, quite reasonably, does not fix its clocks to the time in Kiev or Minsk. Nor does it seem to suffer greatly by refusing to do so. So why should it be thought sensible for us to live as if we were far further east than we are?

And especially why should the people of the North of England and Scotland do so, when it will mean black darkness till around ten o’clock in the morning in the winter months?

According to Rebecca Harris, a chirpy, enthusiastic young Tory MP, this is a price worth paying for the many sparkling advantages of living our lives in step with Berliners. She believes that later, lighter afternoons in winter – and even later ones in summer – will make the roads safer, make old people less lonely, reduce crime, save energy and boost business. She has all kinds of studies that appear to prove this, and is supported by a mass of pressure groups that agree with her.

My own impression is that many of these claims are pretty much guesswork. Shifting the clocks about changes less than you might think. The amount of actual daylight remains the same. It is just available at different times of day. There was an experiment between 1968 and 1971, when we stayed on Summer Time all the year round – and lower road casualties for this period are often cited as an argument for the change. But the same years saw the introduction of roadside breath tests and the 70mph speed limit, so it is hard to claim that lighter evenings and darker mornings are solely responsible – or even to be sure that they are responsible at all.

[alexxxxx]

It is much closer yes, but Berlin is still a long long way away from London. Once you have these 'super time zones' then surely they could end up merging which is completely stupid as the Earth is a rounded shape, therefore the more layers of time you have the more measured and evened out it is - hence why we've managed with the present system for a long time without any reasons to change.

Why does London not have the same time as Berlin? because it is not near Berlin.

A good article if anybody is interested;

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co....rlin-time.html

To your first point, unlikely really isn't it? And even if it did, locally businesses and people would change their practices. In Scandinavia businesses and schools close earlier at different times of the year. I'm not sure how relevant that column is. The sun sets at different times in belfast to london - it doesn't mean it changes it at all.. Reykjavík isn't 'near london' but it is in the same time zone.