NO to Berlin Time

Mornin, I have just been reading that we could soon be living our lives on Berlin Time, an hour ahead of GMT in winter and two hours ahead of GMT in summer. MPs are voting to abolish this on December 3. Apparently it will mean that in the North of England it will mean black darkness until around 10 in the morning :speechless-smiley-0

I doubt it. [url]Scotland has been trying to get Double Summertime for years, and there's been no progress[/url]. And as we all know - things are trialled in Scotland for a year or so before they are passed on to England. IDouble Summertime won't be introduced, in Scotland or in England. After all - it'd fade the curtains.

Ava x

Double Summertime won't be introduced, in Scotland or in England. After all - it'd fade the curtains.

😀

Whatever the clock says, you can go to bed when you want, and as long as you're at work on time, get up when you want. For those of us who are self-emplyed, that might be just fine.

Except it's all an illusion because Europe can't make us all reset our body-clocks. We could develop have a British social habit in response - the Spanish have their siesta, we could just begin our working day at 11 - it would become a feature of our unique British identity!

Road-workers could start their drills at 9am instead of 7am, which would be nice for reverybody. Already many shops open 10-6, so if that became 12-8, would anybody mind?

And as for the farmers, who go to bed at 11 and get up at 430, what's the difference if it's the same, but they happen to call it 12 and 530 - the cows and chickens don't know the clocks have changed, do they?

Well just in case Ava, this is supposed to be going through on 3rd December:(

The article I read by Peter Hitchens had no advertising on page :rolleyes:

We had an experiment a while back when we stayed on BST. It made the evenings a whole lot lighter and less depressing !:)

That's great Tyagi, I do this all year round - I run my life as much by my body-clock as possible. The clock is to coordinate interactions with others, not to dictate how our lives should be.

In winter I don't start work until 11am, but to make up for it I am available until 8pm if called-upon - I am no less available. That said, much of my work is seasonal, so there is generally less to do in winter anyway, and this allows me to pursue other interests.

I very much doubt such a change to the clocks would be accepted. The world works using timezones that are offsets of GMT. In the UK, WE ARE the baseline that the rest of the world sets its clocks to. Changing our own timezone (which would also require all countries inbetween i.e. France and a few others to do the same) would not only meet much opposition, but would break the majority of IT systems and cost an absolute fortune to sort out. Politicians can be stupid, but not that stupid.

It sounds like it's just a media/journalistic hype thing to create a story out of nothing.... let me go see....

... ah, the only mention of it I can find is in the Daily Mail. A good reliable honest and non sh!t stirring newspaper. Well, then we should believe it. 😉

Somehow I can't see it happening.

All Love and Reiki Hugs

Hi Giles, it's possible we underestimate the ambition of the Franco-German project, to control everything European from Strasbourg etc. It has been said by many that we would never allow this to happen here. Yet the increasing specification of everything is part of geering us up for change, because Napoleonic Law doesn't allow for anything that isn't described. Given enough determination in Brussels, and enough time, who knows what circumstances could be engineered.

Hi this is the article I read by Peter Hitchens...

15 November 2010 10:18 AM

Don’t let them force you to live your life on Berlin Time

Sooner than you think, we could all be living our lives on Berlin Time, an hour ahead of GMT in winter and two hours ahead of GMT in summer.

Such time is fine for that great and historic city, you might say. But Berlin is 580 miles and 15 degrees of longitude east of Greenwich, which means that the sun rises and sets there an hour earlier than it does in England.

The German capital, quite reasonably, does not fix its clocks to the time in Kiev or Minsk. Nor does it seem to suffer greatly by refusing to do so. So why should it be thought sensible for us to live as if we were far further east than we are?

And especially why should the people of the North of England and Scotland do so, when it will mean black darkness till around ten o’clock in the morning in the winter months?

According to Rebecca Harris, a chirpy, enthusiastic young Tory MP, this is a price worth paying for the many sparkling advantages of living our lives in step with Berliners. She believes that later, lighter afternoons in winter – and even later ones in summer – will make the roads safer, make old people less lonely, reduce crime, save energy and boost business.

She has all kinds of studies that appear to prove this, and is supported by a mass of pressure groups that agree with her.

My own impression is that many of these claims are pretty much guesswork. Shifting the clocks about changes less than you might think. The amount of actual daylight remains the same. It is just available at different times of day.

There was an experiment between 1968 and 1971, when we stayed on Summer Time all the year round – and lower road casualties for this period are often cited as an argument for the change. But the same years saw the introduction of roadside breath tests and the 70mph speed limit, so it is hard to claim that lighter evenings and darker mornings are solely responsible – or even to be sure that they are responsible at all.

Evenings are more dangerous than mornings on the roads, especially in these days of cheap alcohol and all-day opening, and of sparse police patrols, because drivers have had more time to drink too much. Light and dark make little difference to that.

But Mrs Harris’s well-supported Bill is well on its way anyway, unlike several similar efforts on the subject over the past dozen years. These all ended in defeat, as did the 1968-71 experiment.

But this one is different. An active and busy lobby seems to have got behind this measure, as any careful student of the media will have spotted. How did all those breezy, uncritical articles come to be written? How did the Prime Minister find the time to imply his own support?

It goes before Parliament on Friday, December 3, and if passed it will trigger the first steps towards this momentous change, possibly separating us for ever from the Greenwich Mean Time which we invented.

We have done this before – but only in the desperate days of wartime, when it was necessary to keep munitions workers at their benches, and farm labourers out in the fields, as long as possible.

But do we really need it now? In fact, might it not be a positive disadvantage to many, and not just those living in the North or Scotland? It is all very well for businessmen who wish to telephone colleagues in Frankfurt, Paris or Rome, though a one-hour difference is really not that hard to manage. But shoving us an hour eastwards would narrow the window in which we can speak to the US, especially to the increasingly crucial West Coast, which would be nine or even ten hours behind us.

In any case, clocks and times are not arbitrary. They measure the objective passage of time, which is governed by the rotation of the Earth. We do not have the power to change this.

Anyone who does much flying knows the unsettling effect even of a small shift in time on the human frame. This is because our clocks are out of synchronisation with our surroundings. What is being proposed is that this should now be our fate for ever. When our clocks say it is noon, or midnight, they will always be lying. For the summer months, they will be lying twice as hard.

Why Berlin time, anyway? This is the question nobody likes to discuss. Why are Sweden, Germany, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Sicily, and everyone else on the Berlin time line, not required to experience the alleged benefits being offered by Rebecca Harris and her friends? It is hard to understand why – if it is so good for us – it is not good for them.

But it is easy to see that since 1893, when Kaiser Wilhelm II’s arrogant and expansionist new German Empire adopted Mitteleuropaische Zeit (Central European Time to you), German power has been forcing its ideas of time on the rest of the Continent. First in 1914, and with redoubled force after 1940, the conquered nations of the Continent were instructed rather sharply to shift their clocks forward to suit the needs of German soldiers and German railways and German business.

A map of the present Central European Time Zone looks disturbingly like a map of a certain best-forgotten empire of 70 years ago. Would it really be silly to suspect that the neatness and standardisation fanatics of Brussels and Frankfurt, who have abolished almost every border in Europe, devised the European arrest warrant and the Euro passport and the European number plate and the European flag – and imposed a single currency on almost every state – would not also like a single time zone?

But wouldn’t it also be fatal to their desire if people in Britain recognised that this was what was going on? Are the smiley, optimistic ‘daylight-saving’ lobby perhaps useful idiots in someone else’s campaign? Rebecca Harris emphatically says that this is not so. But then, if it were, would she know?

Anyone in Britain who wants to live by Berlin time is welcome to do so, just as they are welcome to breakfast on bratwurst. There are good arguments, too, for schools and offices in some parts of the country to open earlier and close earlier in the dark months from November to February.

But that is quite different from our whole country being permanently shifted on to foreign time.

It is not too late to stop Mrs Harris’s curious Bill if enough MPs – more responsive to the public than they once were since their recent embarrassments – can be persuaded by public protest to vote against it.

If we are foolish enough to hurry down this path, it is by no means certain that we shall ever be allowed back if we decide we do not like it. Once we have fallen in, who would be surprised by a quiet Brussels Directive making the change permanent, whatever Parliament does? Now is the time to save our own time.

This is the article that I read...
15 November 2010 10:18 AM

Don’t let them force you to live your life on Berlin Time

Sooner than you think, we could all be living our lives on Berlin Time, an hour ahead of GMT in winter and two hours ahead of GMT in summer.

Such time is fine for that great and historic city, you might say. But Berlin is 580 miles and 15 degrees of longitude east of Greenwich, which means that the sun rises and sets there an hour earlier than it does in England.

The German capital, quite reasonably, does not fix its clocks to the time in Kiev or Minsk. Nor does it seem to suffer greatly by refusing to do so. So why should it be thought sensible for us to live as if we were far further east than we are?

And especially why should the people of the North of England and Scotland do so, when it will mean black darkness till around ten o’clock in the morning in the winter months?

According to Rebecca Harris, a chirpy, enthusiastic young Tory MP, this is a price worth paying for the many sparkling advantages of living our lives in step with Berliners. She believes that later, lighter afternoons in winter – and even later ones in summer – will make the roads safer, make old people less lonely, reduce crime, save energy and boost business.

She has all kinds of studies that appear to prove this, and is supported by a mass of pressure groups that agree with her.

My own impression is that many of these claims are pretty much guesswork. Shifting the clocks about changes less than you might think. The amount of actual daylight remains the same. It is just available at different times of day.

There was an experiment between 1968 and 1971, when we stayed on Summer Time all the year round – and lower road casualties for this period are often cited as an argument for the change. But the same years saw the introduction of roadside breath tests and the 70mph speed limit, so it is hard to claim that lighter evenings and darker mornings are solely responsible – or even to be sure that they are responsible at all.

Evenings are more dangerous than mornings on the roads, especially in these days of cheap alcohol and all-day opening, and of sparse police patrols, because drivers have had more time to drink too much. Light and dark make little difference to that.

But Mrs Harris’s well-supported Bill is well on its way anyway, unlike several similar efforts on the subject over the past dozen years. These all ended in defeat, as did the 1968-71 experiment.

But this one is different. An active and busy lobby seems to have got behind this measure, as any careful student of the media will have spotted. How did all those breezy, uncritical articles come to be written? How did the Prime Minister find the time to imply his own support?

It goes before Parliament on Friday, December 3, and if passed it will trigger the first steps towards this momentous change, possibly separating us for ever from the Greenwich Mean Time which we invented.

We have done this before – but only in the desperate days of wartime, when it was necessary to keep munitions workers at their benches, and farm labourers out in the fields, as long as possible.

But do we really need it now? In fact, might it not be a positive disadvantage to many, and not just those living in the North or Scotland? It is all very well for businessmen who wish to telephone colleagues in Frankfurt, Paris or Rome, though a one-hour difference is really not that hard to manage. But shoving us an hour eastwards would narrow the window in which we can speak to the US, especially to the increasingly crucial West Coast, which would be nine or even ten hours behind us.

In any case, clocks and times are not arbitrary. They measure the objective passage of time, which is governed by the rotation of the Earth. We do not have the power to change this.

Anyone who does much flying knows the unsettling effect even of a small shift in time on the human frame. This is because our clocks are out of synchronisation with our surroundings. What is being proposed is that this should now be our fate for ever. When our clocks say it is noon, or midnight, they will always be lying. For the summer months, they will be lying twice as hard.

Why Berlin time, anyway? This is the question nobody likes to discuss. Why are Sweden, Germany, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Sicily, and everyone else on the Berlin time line, not required to experience the alleged benefits being offered by Rebecca Harris and her friends? It is hard to understand why – if it is so good for us – it is not good for them.

But it is easy to see that since 1893, when Kaiser Wilhelm II’s arrogant and expansionist new German Empire adopted Mitteleuropaische Zeit (Central European Time to you), German power has been forcing its ideas of time on the rest of the Continent. First in 1914, and with redoubled force after 1940, the conquered nations of the Continent were instructed rather sharply to shift their clocks forward to suit the needs of German soldiers and German railways and German business.

A map of the present Central European Time Zone looks disturbingly like a map of a certain best-forgotten empire of 70 years ago. Would it really be silly to suspect that the neatness and standardisation fanatics of Brussels and Frankfurt, who have abolished almost every border in Europe, devised the European arrest warrant and the Euro passport and the European number plate and the European flag – and imposed a single currency on almost every state – would not also like a single time zone?

But wouldn’t it also be fatal to their desire if people in Britain recognised that this was what was going on? Are the smiley, optimistic ‘daylight-saving’ lobby perhaps useful idiots in someone else’s campaign? Rebecca Harris emphatically says that this is not so. But then, if it were, would she know?

Anyone in Britain who wants to live by Berlin time is welcome to do so, just as they are welcome to breakfast on bratwurst. There are good arguments, too, for schools and offices in some parts of the country to open earlier and close earlier in the dark months from November to February.

But that is quite different from our whole country being permanently shifted on to foreign time.

It is not too late to stop Mrs Harris’s curious Bill if enough MPs – more responsive to the public than they once were since their recent embarrassments – can be persuaded by public protest to vote against it.

If we are foolish enough to hurry down this path, it is by no means certain that we shall ever be allowed back if we decide we do not like it. Once we have fallen in, who would be surprised by a quiet Brussels Directive making the change permanent, whatever Parliament does? Now is the time to save our own time.

You didn't give a link for the article, Jeannie, but I found it by googling.
It's from[url] Peter Hitchens' blog in the Mail on Sunday website.[/url]

God, how I deplore all this worry mongering. As a race, we are remarkably adaptable; if change comes we adapt. And the tone of the piece is so laughably anti-German I'm surprised that anyone should give credence to it. Peter Hitchens entry on Wikipedia makes interesting reading.
Anyway, Jeannie, remember it hasn't happened yet. My advice would be not to worry about it until it does. And maybe not even then.

Yes, good old Peter, can always rely on him for a 'perspective'.

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I don't care whether its Berlin time or GMT or whatever, but could we please stick to one clock throughout the year and not change clocks forwards and backwards every spring and summer. Its so disorienting.

Kaif

I don't care whether its Berlin time or GMT or whatever, but could we please stick to one clock throughout the year and not change clocks forwards and backwards every spring and summer. Its so disorienting.

Kaif

I couldn't agree more, it's a complete pain. 🙁