Friday 28 October 2011

Saving Time

GMT is, for these Islands, proper time, with the sun at its height at noon. The amount of daylight has always varied from one end of the Kingdom to the other, but we have managed to get by. BST does no harm, I suppose. But any further deviation would be disastrous, as indeed it was when it was briefly tried. Nowhere should and must have Greenwich Mean Time more than Greenwich.

Our oldest ally, Portugal, uses the same time as us. For some reason, Gibraltar does not. But Saint Helena has GMT all year. There was once a very brief attempt at something called Saint Helena Island Time. It rapidly and rightly became known by its acronym, before it was rapidly and rightly abandoned.

Working people need daylight when they have to go to work in the morning, not in order to prolong their outdoor recreational activities in the late afternoon or the evening. But who asked them? America's so-called Daylight Saving Time has been extended so many times that "normal" time now operates for only four months of the year, and even that is under threat. Golf and garden parties must always take priority.

1 comment:

  1. The push towards more and more "Daylight Savings Time" in the US is exactly as you described, though no one in the media of course says so over here. Its basically to ensure that working people and students go to work and school in the dark, so executives can fit in another round of golf. I suppose they could have just shifted normal working hours to an 8 to 4 schedule, but that would have been too straightforward (actually this may be happening anyway). But this is consistent with the trend towards greater inequality in other areas.

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