Excellent post, robby.
Exactly one hour behind continental (Western) Europe - the the dates that summer time starts and ends are set by the European Union.
There have been various proposals to bring UK time into line with Europe (CET) ie GMT + 1 in winter and GMT + 2 in summer. As well as being convenient for businesses dealing with our major trading partners it is supported by all the safety charities who believe the lighter evenings would save several hundred lives a year - there is always a surge in road traffic deaths when the clocks go back in October.
There have been a couple of goes to get a bill through Parliament to legislate for this but it is never supported by the Government and the bills run out of time. The Labour Government won’t support it as there is great opposition from Scotland and the north of England (both traditionally Labour supporting areas) where it is claimed the dark mornings - in the north of Scotland the sun would not rise till after 10 - would spell disaster and the end of civilisation as we know it (I exaggerate a bit :dubious: ).
Personally I’m all for it. I hate it this time of year when I suddenly lose an hour of daylight at a time when I am not at work in the evenings. I don’t care whether it gets light 8 o’clock or 9 o’clock - either way I end up getting up and going to work in the dark.
Robby makes the point that kids would end up going to school in the dark in winter but in much of the UK they do anyway - it does not really get light even in the south of England until going on 9 - and, with the present arrangement, it is dark again my the time they are heading home. All the research suggests that any increase in accidents in the morning would be more than offset by a reduction in the evening when people, particularly kids, are out and about - not just travelling to and from work/school.
Thanks!
Because the UK is so much farther north than the continental U.S., the days are even shorter in winter (when compared to the continental U.S.), so there is no really good solution.
Actually BST all year round is what is usually proposed - I’ve never heard anyone suggest we go two hours ahead of GMT in the summer.
And yet year-round BST was introduced by a Labour Government in 1968 and abandoned by a Conservative Government in 1971.
Central European Time Bill (1994)
Lighter Evenings (Experiment) Bill (2006)
I think there have been other attempts but these are the two I found quickly - both looking for GMT + 2 in summer.
True enough, but that was when the Conservatives actually won seats in Scotland!
Leap seconds and leap years are two different issues. Leap seconds compensate for irregularities in the Earth’s rotation rate. Leap years compensate for the fractional day in the solar year.
Some people have proposed eliminating the leap second, mostly on the grounds that it causes more problems than it solves. This view is very dependent on how you use time in your profession. For traditional uses like navigation, it’s important that UTC (coordinated universal time) be kept in sync with solar time. Other people just want a uniform and constant time scale, which already exists in the form of TAI (atomic time). GPS has its own time scale, which has a variable offset from UTC. The current correction factor is broadcast by the GPS network. Civil time is currently based on UTC.
On a slight hijack, I have always wondered why Daylight Saving Time in not symmetric around the Winter Solstice. This year, we turned back the clocks 7 weeks prior to the Winter solstice, while we will set the clock ahead on March 8, 2009, which is 11 weeks after the Winter Solstice. It used to be even worse before the new law was passed.
My guess it has something to do with “meteorological winter” (December, January, February) where our most wintry weather tends to occur in these threes months rather than the “real” winter season of Dec 21 - Mar 21.
But IMO, Daylight Saving time should be defined by the sun’s position in the sky, not temperatures.
I hate Daylight Saving Time. I hate the hassle of having to switch the clocks (both the physical kind, and the one in my head) twice a year.
I’ve suggested for a long time that we should just split the difference and then be done with it. In other words, Congress passes a law that, next Spring, instead of setting the clocks ahead one hour, we set them ahead 30 minutes and from then on keep that time year round.