Time to reconsider British Summer Time

Happy 99th birthday, BST!

Being confused as to whether your clock should spring forwards or fall backwards is nothing new, but why do it at all?

Last weekend saw the clocks go forward by an hour, depriving us of one forty-eighth of our weekend, and ensuring a sizeable percentage of the UK’s oven clocks are now wrong for the next six months.

We’ve been fiddling about with our time in a non-Doctor Who kind of way for almost a century, and since 1995 have agreed that, along with straight bananas, all of Europe does exactly the same thing at the same point. You say tom-AY-toes, I say Central European Summer Time.

When William Willet suggested the complex idea of moving the clocks forward by 80 minutes in 20 minute Sunday increments during April, he was presumably unaware that his impending demise would mean he never got to see the benefits of extra light in the evenings. Much of this would probably have been lost resetting all the clocks though, so what we finally got was a 60 minute jump forward on the 21st of May 1916.

During the Second World War, clocks weren’t put back at the end of Summer Time 1940, but still advanced the following year, leading to five years of British Double Summer Time, and a nasty shock in the Autumn of ’45, when 2 hours extra sleep also meant it got dark startlingly early.

The late ‘50s saw an inquiry showing a slight preference for sticking with GMT+1 for good, and was followed by an experiment trying just that between 1968 and 1971.

During this period, the often-cited increase in casualties in the morning was greatly outnumbered by the lesser-mentioned decrease of evening incidents. Winning argument, right? Sadly not – drink-driving legislation was introduced during the same period, muddying the results.

There are even campaigns suggesting that we stick with BST for good, but go forward another hour in the spring and back in the autumn – the complicatedly-titled Single/Double Summer Time. Proponents argue that the reduction in accidents would be accompanied by huge energy savings and a corresponding reduction in CO2 emissions.

Concerns are voiced by some outdoor workers, and lots of our Scots/Northern Irish chums, who rightly point out that winter sunrises at 10am probably aren’t great, although many of the National Farmers Union’s members aren’t unhappy with the idea of permanent BST.

Another suggestion is to just stay on GMT, and shift business and school hours instead. Arguments also exist for Scotland and Northern Ireland to do whatever they fancy, whilst England and Wales tiddle about with their clocks separately.

I happen to like the lighter evenings a lot, but should we play Timelords, or is all this clocking about just a waste of time?

I suspect the only reason we still have the clocks go forward in Spring is to ensure we have an extra hour of daylight in which to look out of the window and complain about how terrible the weather is.

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 3rd of April 2015. You can view the edited version the paper used on their website here where it was retitled as "Time to think again on BST".

A particularly hard edit took place this week, with around 10% of my submitted words being cut. The whole section about Willet dying before BST was introduced went, along with the NFU line, and the 'clocking about' joke.

(More CD singles... currently The Braids, and their version of Bohemian Rhapsody.)

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