Let’s stop messing with the clocks!

The whole concept of adjusting the clocks with the seasons, “Daylight Saving” as the Americans call it, seems increasingly ludicrous the more that one thinks about it. In the UK, it is called British Summer Time and is abbreviated to BST; I call it British Silly Time.

The expensive consequences for computer systems, airlines, railways and many other systems and organisations having to mess about with times and schedules are completely unnecessary. And I have lost count of the number of times I have heard of people missing calls or online meetings due to misinterpretations of time zones and distortions in the name of “daylight saving”.

One would have thought that people who spend the most time involved with nature would find it the most ludicrous and that among those would be farmers. However, it seems that this is not the case as there is a discussion about introducing permanent BST or even “double BST” on the NFU website.

The news article is titled “Should we change the clocks?”. My answer is a simple “no”. In case the answer is unclear, I mean “no”! That is “do not change the clocks”! That is “leave the clocks alone”! That is “stop messing with the clocks”! In the UK that means “leave the clocks on GMT, the correct time”!

Does no one else understand this? Well, thankfully, many people do. For example, the whole of the aviation industry uses Zulu time (UTC) worldwide. Let’s be clear what that means. When pilots get a weather reports from any airport in the world (whether it is Heathrow or Los Angeles airport), the times are in Zulu time which is UTC/GMT. Yes everyone uses UTC.

The really funny part is that the NFU news article even states “analysts have claimed an extra hour’s daylight could be worth £3.5 billion a year to the economy”. This is the ultimate fallacy.

Let us be clear about something, in case you had not noticed: THERE IS NO EXTRA DAYLIGHT!! Where, on earth, did farmers get the idea that there is?!