Derbyshire is about to plunge into darkness. Hurrah

I’ve much respect for the Matlock ­Mercury: our part of the Derbyshire dales would be the poorer without this lively and conscientious local paper. And were it not for the Mercury’s useful report I’d never even have learned about the county council’s plan. But I do take issue with the headline. ‘Big switch-off to hit Dales villages’ turns good news into bad; and most of us won’t see this as bad news.

The idea is to switch off street lighting in the county, where appropriate, first in villages and then in parts of towns, between the hours of midnight and 5.30 a.m. For most people this will be no inconvenience, and for many it will be a blessed relief. Progressively over the last century we have been engaged across the British Isles in an ugly, expensive and futile attempt to abolish the night. I’ve raged against this in the Spectator; now, at last, a local authority seems to agree.

I have never understood the British appetite for street lighting. Much of it, I suspect, dates from Victorian days of dingy back alleys, foggy street corners and the fear of rascals leaping at us from the shadows. In an era when battery-powered flashlight torches did not exist and there was no way you could light up your porch or front-step at the flick of a switch, I suppose there was comfort to be had from a measure of permanent illumination in city streets. There is no doubt, too, that along busy roads or urban thoroughfares with constant traffic, and in certain lonely precincts where the ill-intentioned might lurk, outdoor lighting provides safety and reassurance. Wherever there’s a genuine need for cctv there’s a need for lighting too; and accident records will pinpoint for us the highways where night-time illumination will make a difference.

But you can concede all that, and make a big map of our entire island with every such area indicated — and still fail to justify the thousands of square miles, and tens of thousands of miles of often empty road verges, into which we are tipping vast quantities of expensive and carbon-creating electricity through all the lonely hours before dawn, succeeding only and magnificently in illuminating the undersides of clouds.