Setting the Clocks Free

Saturday, 24th October 2009

Hardy Perennial Watch: Daylight Savings Time Edition. Yup, some things are certain and among them is the fuss over the ending of British Summer Time tonight. For years the North has handily Defeated the South but I suspect that, just as Dave Cameron's southern chums may be about to supplant Gordon Brown's North Britons, so too will the South, er, rise again and eventually prevail in the Great Clock Battle of Britain.

The case for change - that is, for not changing the clocks - is not a bad one even if it has always been defeated by the Scottish lobby. (No surprise there, eh, Spectator readers?) The Times makes that case here and it is persuasive.

If southern England wants to extend British Summer Time through the winter then that seems fine to me. There's no reason why Scotland and England must be in the same time zone. In practical terms Scotland there'd be little real difficulty in adjusting to the new arrangements. Plenty of countries manage to cope with different time zones.

No, the difficulty is psychological, not practical. Wouldn't seperate winter time zones underline the extent to which Scotland has become a semi-detached member of the Union? Perhaps it would. But if the Union was supple enough to accomodate seperate legal systems within a unitary state I think it can probably survive Scotland and England being in different time zones for a few months each year.

But let's go further: if, say, Cornwall or Wales or Norfolk want their own local time zones then let them set their own clocks. That's localism one may believe in...

Filed under: England (128 more articles) , Localism (59 more articles) , Scotland (499 more articles) , Time (2 more articles) , Unionism (50 more articles)

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Cuffleyburgers

October 24th, 2009 9:40am Report this comment

No dammit, it's Greenwich Mean Time, not Leith mean time, I refuse to make this change.

What utter nonsense.

EC

October 24th, 2009 10:55am Report this comment

Since the majority of Scots and, indeed, the majority of professional Scotchmen don't actually live in Scotland then where's the problem Alex?

MattF

October 24th, 2009 10:55am Report this comment

You should be wary of letting localities decide whether or not to have 'summer' time. The Paradigm Case for the bad things that can happen is Indiana-- the state's unofficial motto is "Nobody here knows what time it is." There was even a TV series, "Eerie Indiana" based on the premise that underlying reason for Indiana's problem was a fault in the space-time continuum.

Noa Zrk

October 24th, 2009 11:28am Report this comment

Yep, lets maintain British Summer time in England. Scotland can do what it wants.

MattF

October 24th, 2009 2:32pm Report this comment

For the record, to show that I'm not just making stuff up, "What time is it in Indiana?"

Andrew Scadding

October 24th, 2009 4:50pm Report this comment

Its not about north and south, its about east and west. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west so its dawn in Moscow before its dawn in London. The British Isles do not lie north-south, but nnw-sse. So its dawn in Orkney a long time after its dawn in Warsaw. There is absolutely no reason for Europe to be one time zone, and lost of reasons why it shouldn't be. The US isn't, neither is Russia. The whole fuss is ridiculous, brewed up by europhiles who like homogeneity for its own sake.

Anne Wotana Kaye

October 24th, 2009 6:15pm Report this comment

This isn't an easy one. What is the politically correct solution? What do the Greens and those concerned about Global Warmng think? Would an extra hour or two of sunshine reduce energy use, but conversely raise the dangers of skin cancer?

ndm

October 24th, 2009 7:13pm Report this comment

The double summer time experiment was much more inconvenient than statistics show. I read once that pedestrian fatalities fell - primary because parents took extraordinary care to dress their Jacks and Jills like beacons to avoid harm.

There are, in fact, a whole host of little inconveniences arising from having multiple time zones in one country. As a former resident of Washington DC, Alex Massie might not have noticed how much of American life is timed for the East Coast.
Until a few years ago, for example, you couldn't trade stocks after 1pm in California and even now that counts as after-hours trading - because New York workers don't like working after 5PM. As is so much "live" tv, the PBS Newshour is shown with a three hour tape delay in California.

I am surprised that a party describing itself as Conservative would contemplate such an anti-Conservative move - which seems to me to bring much pain and little benefit. I suspect it has more to do with better aligning with local time their weekends in Chiantishire.