Should We Go To Eu Time?

[ToraToraTora]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15490249

[Fitzer]

Unfortunately that's from 2011 so no change as yet :-(

[LazyGun]

Seems like a good idea to me. Trading an hour of daylight in the early morning for an extra hour of daylight in the evening strikes me as a good trade. And I have never understood why the Scots do not have their own timezone anyway.

Is there some new developments on this though? As far as I am aware, they have not progressed this much past the idea of having a trial for it, back in 2011.

[ToraToraTora]

No nothing new on the subject, I was keen to find out what people think, I think it would be a good thing myself, I'd much rather have a lighter evening.

[LazyGun]

@3T Same here. I really do not know why there appears to be so much resistance to trialling it again.

[KARL]

Since, whatever the clock says, daylight is only for so long in any given 24 hours, I don't see the point of changing the settings in spring and autumn. Why not just leave the clock at single yearlong setting ? Personally. I don't mind whether daylight starts or ends at an early or late hour - I will make use of it as and when it suits me.

[heathfield]

Hoary old subject. It's been tried, disadvantages (in Scotland particularly) were shown to outweigh the advantages, so it was dropped. Why make history repeat itself? For goodness sake, let it rest in peace

[Fitzer]

It has been mentioned that should Scotland gain independence then England & Wales wouldn't need to consider them in considering a clock change and so it might be more likely.

[New Judge]

Perhaps a more relevant question would be to ask why it is that the BBC have seen fit to provide a link under today's "Most popular" section (which in the main is for current news and features) to an article dated October 2011 and for which, as far as I know, there are no new announcements or developments.

[LazyGun]

@Heathfield
"Hoary old subject. It's been tried, disadvantages (in Scotland particularly) were shown to outweigh the advantages, so it was dropped. Why make history repeat itself? For goodness sake, let it rest in peace"

Circumstances change. Societies change. The last trial of it was over 40 years ago so why not have another trial? The overall casualty figures actually marginally favoured a move to a GMT+1 standard, but there were some confounding factors in there that complicated making a proper assessment, notably the new drink-driving laws that had just been introduced.

[Gromit]

I would prefer we stick to one clock all year round without moving time backward and forward one hour. Central European time would acheive that and give us more lightness in winter early evening, so I would support it.

The other option would be to keep GMT all year round and do away with British Summer Time (BST).

BST was introduced during WWI to give more daylight time in the evening for farmers to harvest. Mechanical harvesters now have floodlights, so the problem no longer exists.

Doing away with BST and adopting GMT or CET would make the transition into longer and short days more gradual and natural. Instead of that awful jolt in October when we are suddenly pitched into early evening darkness, that would happen naturally.

[Old_Geezer]

No, we should still leave things as they are. Well until all clocks are auto correction radio ones, then we can set sunrise at the same time all year and simply learn to cope with the changing number of daylight hours. Maybe with one change of sunrise time over the summer period to avoid bright midnights.

[Old_Geezer]

It's Tora encouraging millions of ABers to click there Judge.

[ludwig]

// I would prefer we stick to one clock all year round without moving time backward and forward one hour //

Me too.

[naomi24]

^^ Ditto.

[emmie]

as long as we can have longer daylight in the evenings, i hate the miserable 4pm darkness, get up in the dark, go out, come back in the dark

[baza]

why not leave the clocks alone on Greenwich mean time, all this 1 hr forward 1 hr back does not alter the actual hours of daylight.

[mushroom25]

the british standard time experiment in the 60s claimed a marked decrease in road deaths in the evenings, this was attributed to the extra hour of late daylight. however, the researchers failed to factor in concurrent changes to drink drive legislation which probably had more of an effect, and would have exposed the increase in deaths of schoolchildren during the dark mornings (it didn't get light until nearly 9am). Whilst keeping the same hours as Europe will help business, in practical terms all countries west of the rhine ought really be one hour behind those countries east of the rhine.

[Hopkirk]

Rospa are covinced it would be worth doing

http://www.rospa.com/roadsafety/adviceandinformation/general/british-summertime-factsheet.aspx

[redman41]

It would be far more logical if we stuck to GMT all Year.
World is split into Time Zones, plus or minus GMT depending whether you are travelling East or West

[Hymie]

No chance whatsoever, once the Daily Mail reminds its readers that we would be adopting 'Berlin' time.